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.     

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’.     

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.).     

Reading and Writing the Passions in Duchenne de Boulogne's Mécanisme de la physionomie humaine

This paper examines Duchenne de Boulogne's Mécanisme de la physionomie humaine (1862) as a limit case between Foucauldian epistemes of signification. Electrically inducing ‘expression’ in his subject's face, Duchenne, a neuro-physiologist, claimed to have discovered the true ‘orthography’ of the passions. He photographed and published his experiments to offer the art world a positivist corrective to the historically ‘arbitrary’ representation of emotion. The narrative accompanying the photographs provides the basis for this analysis which focuses on how Duchenne used the image/text idea of an ’orthography‘ to shape his technologically mediated expressions with a Renaissance and Classical poetics of resemblance and representation. Making an analogy with linguistic ‘units’, Duchenne located a scene of writing under the facial flesh where action was ‘transfigured’ into passion. The Classical debate on the origin of language and the Renaissance physiognomic tradition inspired his discourse, which failed to grasp the modernity of his technologically mediated passions.     

The Russian avant-garde painting palette: Documentary and physicochemical codification of organic colorants

In the present article an attempt is made to elucidate the organic colorants commonly encountered in the Russian avant-garde painting palette by a combined art historical, documentary and physicochemical investigation, and to examine the influence of environmental factors on the chromatic profile originally sought by the artist. The overall approach based on written sources is confirmed by measurements on relevant paintings. The documentary research deals with the influences of Orthodox iconography, folkloric art, and occidental modernist tendencies on the Russian avant-garde palette, and studies the effects of contradictory historical processes in the chromatic profile of individual paintings. In the experimental section a series of colorants are investigated concerning the effects of accelerated ageing on experimental painting tables, prepared as watercolor and gouache layers on paper ground. The resulting samples are subjected to colorimetric and spectroscopic measurements, and analogous analytical procedures are applied on samples taken from selected paintings. A systematic comparative study of all data permits evaluation of the materials used in terms of their stability towards extrinsic factors, and proposal of degradation routes in order to assist museum curators and conservators in every concrete case related to the broad spectrum of pigments examined.     

The Dangerous Individual('s) Dog: Race,Criminality and the ‘Pit Bull’

Abstract

Though it is generally acknowledged that there is a relationship between racist discourse and the figure of the non-human animal, this relationship is almost always assumed to be analogical: oppressed groups are compared with or treated as non-human animals. But the recent dogfighting case against NFL Quarterback Michael Vick and the attendant suspicion of ‘pit bulls’ suggests that racism today has a more complex relationship with (certain types of) animals than the analogy would capture. An analysis of this discourse both calls for and revises Foucault's notion of ‘the dangerous individual’ as an explanatory concept for contemporary racism. The concomitant revulsion toward both dogfighting and ‘pit bulls’ suggests an expression of fear of a perceived threat to normative whiteness, insofar as these ‘dangerous’ dogs are figured as carriers of the contagion of racial abnormality.     

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.     

Ontological violence: Catherine Malabou on plasticity,performativity, and writing the feminine

ABSTRACT

Catherine Malabou's opinion of non-essentialist models of gender identity and art is unambiguous: in her words, they are ‘catastrophic’ to women and to artists (Malabou [2014]. ‘Sujet: Femme'. de(s)générations des féminismes 21, 29-38: 135). What, then, are the implications of Malabou's hallmark concept of ‘plasticity’ on theories of performativity? Has plasticity come to supplant performativity, just as Malabou believes that it has come to supplant Derridean writing? Or if, as Malabou suggests, philosophical concepts are inherently plastic, may we maintain that performativity was always already plastic? In the following article, I read Malabou's work on writing alongside her work on the feminine in order to question how plasticity and performativity might be examined together to theorise the ways in which the discursive and the material interact in the production of subjectivities. By highlighting the performativity at play within Malabou's own writing about the end of writing, I propose that her work challenges her claim that literature cannot deconstruct philosophy. In response to Malabou's anti-essentialist plastic theory of the essence of woman, I underline the parallels between performativity and plasticity and suggest that the two concepts overlap in their mutual configuration of identity and form as mutable and transformable.     

The ‘secret code’ of honour – on political enjoyment and the excrescence of fantasy*

Fantasies and especially excessive or ‘phantascistic’ fantasies, as they are referred to here, have the power to suppress within political communities, consciously and unconsciously alike, inner antagonisms in times of crisis. More precisely, they help to blur aporias within the ideological structures of a community through the evocation of a sensus communis (Kant) that establishes the community anew, similar to an act of religious conversion. Their impact on the space of reasons is analysed in this article as one that does not take part in the game of giving and asking for reasons, but operates in the background of communal reason via an emotionally and clandestine ‘code’ of what it means to be ‘We?…?– We who we are’. Next to theoretical elaborations of how and why these phantascistic fantasies are produced, the theory will be further explained through a series of exemplifications demonstrating the way that it has played out across a long history of conflict in the Middle East and a shorter history of contemporary politics in the United States. Through all of this, the aim is to illustrate how very concrete excessive fantasies have an impact on a body politic's form of enjoyment.     

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?     

The impact of the <Emphasis Type="Italic">Droit de Suite</Emphasis> in the UK: an empirical analysis

The Droit de Suite, known in the UK as Artists’ Resale Rights, provides an artist with the inalienable right to receive a royalty based on the resale price of an original work of art. This paper provides an empirical analysis of actual changes in the UK auction market for art that is newly subject to the Droit de Suite (DDS) because of a change in law. All changes are measured relative to changes for art not subject to the DDS and relative to changes in the auction markets for art in countries where there has been no change in law. We do a difference-in-difference analysis, differencing price growth and sales growth across market segments and across countries over the period 1993–2007. Our results suggest that the introduction of the DDS has not had a consistent negative impact on the UK art auction market during the period of study.     

Representing creative labour and identity in Singaporean graphic novels: Sonny Liew and Troy Chin

ABSTRACT

This essay analyses two Singaporean graphic novels which represent the motivations and processes of creating and marketing cartoons, Sonny Liew's The Art of Charlie Chan Hock Chye (2015), a retrospective of the life and work of a fictional artist, and Troy Chin's ongoing autobiographical series, The Resident Tourist (begun in 2007). The analysis focuses on how Liew and Chin represent creative work and its relationship to Singaporean identity, focusing on how each negotiates one of the central contradictions of the creative industries in Singapore, the problem of how creativity can be conceptualised and practised within a society in which, for decades, pragmatism has been systematically valued and imagination devalued. There are three main ways in which both Liew and Chin construct, in very different ways, new creative worker and Singaporean identities which resonate with readers around the post-industrial world. The first is through subtle challenges to the Western, individualised ‘genius’ model of the creative worker. The second is through the creation of modes of address that encompass both Singaporean and non-Singaporean readers, and make all readers complicit in the project of constructing Singaporean identity. Third, both Liew and Chin reimagine the relationship between Singaporean and creative worker identities through simultaneously using and subverting the idea of national allegory.     

Islands of Detroit: Affect,Nostalgia and Whiteness

Abstract

‘Islands of Detroit’ explores the possibilities for an ‘everyday, oppositional whiteness’, a thoughtful randomness, as a corrective to ‘reactionary’ and ‘evasive’ forms of whiteness which often embed themselves in populist media sites for nostalgia. Drawing on the theoretical work of Svetlana Boym, Uday Singh Mehta and Roland Barthes, this essay looks in particular at a coffee table book, The Way it Was (2004 Bulanda, G., ed. 2004. The Way It Was: Glimpses of Detroit’s History from the Pages of Hour Detroit Magazine, Royal Oak, MI: Momentum.  [Google Scholar]), and its generic sentimentalism, to understand how certain white visual representations of Detroit affectively generate nostalgia, which can in turn conceal pasts and racial tensions. Looking at the history of Detroit (with particular attention on how the two infamous race riots are and are not negotiated), Islands examines visual images of the city – as opposed to the city itself – through the discursive lenses of nostalgia, modernity and affect, while positing that the histories and identities of Detroit remain irreducible to the images which attempt to capture them.     

Raman mapping analysis of pigments from Proas Iluminadas by Quinquela Martín

The painting Proas Iluminadas (Illuminated Bows) by Benito Quinquela Martín is studied by Raman spectroscopy in order to analyse the technique and the pigments employed by the artist: ultramarine blue, carbon black, cadmium-sulphure based compounds for the hue of yellow, orange and red; also zinc white, barium yellow, massicot yellow and viridian were observed. The importance of using different excitation laser lines in the analysis of mixtures of pigments is highlighted. The Raman mapping analysis of cross section samples shows the way the artist composed the ground layer: a lead white stratum over a calcite one. It also allows distinguishing between a mixture of components and strata superposition, both presenting the same appearance under an optical microscope. This paper provides information about the materials and techniques used in a period of Argentine art not studied before from this point of view.     

The Cost of Critique: In(ter)vention and Ethical Violence in Kristeva and Benjamin

In this essay we argue that there is an important but frequently overlooked link between Walter Benjamin’s and Julia Kristeva’s attempts to explore new modes of critical practice. What connects Benjamin and Kristeva, in our account, is a vital concern with the cost of critique, that is, with the question whether critical agency in its most productive modes is inherently related to certain forms of ethical violence. We aim to show that, once we read them together, these authors’ pivotal contribution consists of offering an alternative model of critique animated by an ethos of in(ter)-vention, which is keyed to techniques of criticism that are both disruptive and innovative. Ethical violence here refers to a strategic displacement of moral self-perception, which undercuts people’s aspirations toward maintaining a morally robust character in the face of political adversity and social injustice. To illustrate the stakes of such displacement, we turn to the figure of the ‘anti-journalist’ Karl Kraus whose in(ter)ventions display integrity in action rather than integrity of character. Specifically, under the rubric of ethical violence, we propose a dynamic interpretation of Kraus’ performance in terms of polemical witnessing, which combines the corrosive aspects of Benjamin’s ‘destructive character’ with the constructive aspects contained in Kristeva’s notions of ‘sharing singularity’ and ‘intimate revolt’.     

The palette of the Macchia Italian artist Giovanni Fattori in the second half of the xixth century

Giovanni Fattori (Livorno 1825–Firenze 1908) is the most representative artist of the Macchiaioli's current, an early group of Italian plein-air artists, whose work anticipates, in the xixth century, that of their younger contemporaries, the French Impressionists. The study, performed by a multidisciplinary team made up of scientists and conservators, presents the results of the scientific characterization carried out on a group of 10 paintings made by Fattori between 1854 and 1893 and shows the way he used complex mixtures of a large variety of traditional and synthetic pigments, ranging from lead white, found pure and also extended with calcium carbonate, natural barite and gypsum to zinc white, from red ochre to cinnabar and vermilion, from yellow ochre and Naples yellow to chrome yellow, cadmium yellow and zinc yellow, combined with many other ones reported in details. This paper highlights the evolution of his painting technique during a time of great technological and social innovations and puts forward some hypothesis on his awareness about manufactured pigments, i.e. tube paints recently introduced into the artists’ circles. The wide range of pigments and their different quality among the same synthetic products suggest that the artist used all the available materials, and that picking out the pigments he retained the early xixth century artists techniques, such as the use of mineral earths and Prussian blue, similarly to his contemporary Italian artists Federico Zandomeneghi and Telemaco Signorini, but he also experimented new and peculiar pigment mixtures in the making of “colored darks” and an innovative use of the grounds in the final composition, that are also distinctive features of the French Impressionists. This work is aimed at contributing to overcome the lack of a comprehensive overview on the widespread historical and scientific data collected up to now on the Italian paintings in the xixth century, which has been severely underestimated with respect to previous art movements.     

Cool governance: Japan’s ubiquitous society,surveillance, and creative industries

ABSTRACT

The rapid reform of the Akihabara district of Tokyo during the first decade of the twenty-first century, in conjunction with the Japanese government’s policy on the global promotion of Cool Japan, has been envisioned under the Japanese government’s new direction of becoming a ‘ubiquitous society’. From the postwar period when Akihabara became the techno-gadgetry hub of Tokyo, into the twenty-first century where it transforms itself into the Mecca of anime and video games, Akihabara has become the embodiment of national hope and technological future. Noticeably, what also implemented alongside this advance of techno-future is a new form of governance and surveillance. After Katō Tomohiro’s murderous rampage in Akihabara in 2008, numerous CCTVs have been installed to secure the neighbourhood from crime and news of this solution became a spectacle in international media. This form of ubiquitous techno-governance integrated as part of everyday life had already been imagined in anime such as Dennō Koiru (Coil A Circle of Children), which broadcast on Japan’s national broadcast station NHK in 2007. In light of the concerted effort of the Japanese government’s promotion of anime to the global consumers seamlessly integrating the urban developmental project of Akihabara, the production of Dennō Koiru at that historical juncture presents a pertinent foreshadowing of Japan’s ‘society of control’. This article will examine the notion of ubiquitous society and surveillance in Dennō Koiru and situate its production against the backdrop of Japan’s growing techno-governance vis-à-vis its creative industries in the twenty-first century.     

李克昌艺惊画坛

著名画家李克昌是当今画坛杰出的艺术家。我最初拜读李克昌的油画、国画和内画,就被其涉足之广和造诣之高而震惊,被其驾驭反差跨度如此大的画种之超凡功力所折服,真可谓：“内（内画）外（油画和国画）兼功得心,三管齐下应手。”而今年9月,在久负盛名的北京艺术殿堂荣宝斋举办他的美术作品展上,我又欣赏到他的雕塑和书法,原来不仅是“三管齐下”,简直是“五子登科”,（其实他还有美学研究）,更为其成就之大而倾倒。     

Markets of Islam: performative charity and the Muslim middle classes in Turkey

ABSTRACT

This article examines the ways in which middle class Muslims in Turkey talk about Islamic ‘community’ and analyses these discourses in relation to the phenomenon of market Islam. The evidence is drawn from the author’s ethnographic fieldwork with donors, managers, and volunteers of a government friendly Islamic NGO, the Light House (Deniz Feneri Sosyal Yard?mla?ma ve Dayan??ma Derne?i) in 2009–2010, followed by subsequent trips in 2013 and 2015. I argue that Islamic charity is not merely a calculative economic behaviour or a reflection of deep-seated religious values, but rather a performative site of market Islam. In seeking to reconcile a faith-based understanding of charity with diverse interpretations of the neoliberal economy, I show that middle-class Muslims adhered to two discourses of ‘community’: whereas donors saw charitable giving as a market-enhancing mechanism, NGO managers defined their charitable work as part of an Islamic project focused on economic redistribution. Although they conceptualized the relationship between faith and markets in divergent ways, both discourses of market Islam posit ‘community’ as an intrinsic component of governing the poor in Turkey.     

Neoliberal values & queer/disability in Margarita with a Straw

ABSTRACT

Margarita with a Straw is an Indian movie about a queer/disabled woman exploring her sexuality. The article uses textual analysis with a discursive formation approach to analyze how the protagonist’s queer/disabled identity is constituted vis-à-vis intimate partnerships alongside the promotion of neoliberal values. One relationship with an able-bodied white man takes place within a caregiving dynamic that challenges her independence. The other relationship with a disabled South Asian woman creates an interdependence that bifurcates their identities as disabled-and-queer. The article argues that the promotion of neoliberal values in the context of queer/disability is about independence from dependence on sociopolitical systems.