Middle East and other futurisms: imaginary temporalities in contemporary art and visual culture

This article focuses on recent contemporary art of Gulf Futurism and Arab Futurism with a specific geographical focus on the Near and Middle East. Still only occasionally addressed and analysed in contemporary academic discussions, these art discourses and practices can be understood as particular forms of counterfuturisms and cultural politics of imaginary times; they continue the earlier work of Afrofuturism in using an aesthetic repertoire to complicate normalised notions of time and technology but in an alternative geopolitical context. Some of the analysed works such as Larissa Sansour’s films outline political questions about territories and architectures of control but these are also other contexts that address how experience of time is being infrastructured in material media culture. The article analyses these post-colonial artistic practices in dialogue with contemporary theoretical debate about cultural politics of time including the discourses about cancellation of future (Berardi) as well as the idea of counterfuturisms as a form of audiovisual practice.     

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.     

Politics,Paradoxes and Pragmatics of Happiness

European leaders and the popular media have shown a new-found interest in happiness as a socio-political value and goal. A growing body of research attempts to identify the conditions under which humans experience the highest levels of happiness, life-satisfaction or subjective well-being. This essay examines what makes a contemporary science and politics of happiness possible by taking a critical look at such efforts to define, measure and promote happiness, while seeking out a range of diverging, often paradoxical, cultural discourses of happiness. The essay covers the following themes: happiness is attainable; happiness is lost; happiness is obligatory; happiness is impossible; and, happiness is inauthentic. The essay critically examines political uses of the word happiness, disrupting received opinions about this contested term.     

The Philippine–American War and the American Debates about the Necessity and Legality of the “Water Cure,” 1901–1903

Abstract

This essay provides a critical genealogical study of the “water cure” controversies that took place during the Philippine–American War. The author extends the work of Foucault and Agamben to argue that a biopolitical review of this controversy illustrates how many of the legal and cultural arguments used to legitimate the water cure have resurfaced in contemporary debates about waterboarding and enhanced interrogations techniques. The essay also illustrates how anti-imperialists and other critics of Theodore Roosevelt's administration tried to use these water-cure debates as discursive vehicles for complaining about the systematic abuse of Filipinos during the Philippine “Insurrection.”     

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.     

Building Political Economic Literacy in an Unexpected Place

How important is it for journalism, media, public relations and communication studies students more generally to acquire literacy in political economy? How possible is it for this to happen while maintaining now established specialized communication, journalism, media, public relations degrees or at least professional strands within communication degrees? A recent media campaign in Australia over a proposed mining tax throws into relief communication professionals' need for literacy in the orientations and positions of political economy. A recently implemented course gives some indicators of what can be achieved in this area. The article is thus about the spread and purchase of a culturally informed political economy rather than knotty questions within it. The article, first, sets out in brief key aspects of the media campaign in question and one journalist's reflection on the challenges it posed. It discusses what might be involved in equipping students with how to meet those challenges, placing this in the wider context of a course that introduces communication students to a non-reductionist, interdisciplinary political economy.     

Mediating the Ethics of Technology: Hollywood and Movie Piracy

This essay invites readers to re‐examine the cultural meaning of movie piracy in the context of Hollywood's global domination of world cinema. It focuses on VCD piracy in Asia. This popular low‐end technology interrogates and deconstructs the technological fetishism that dominates contemporary Hollywood productions. This essay asks whether and how movie piracy can be theorised to yield a more productive understanding of technology as people's corporeal experience of the material world in a socially constructed political economy.     

The war of the words: The rhetoric of ‘Operation Iraqi Freedom’ (an informal survey)

The political, military and media rhetoric of the March–April 2003 invasion of Iraq is interpreted as a phenomenon of power in relation to an understanding of culture as a site of denegation. Patterns of tautology, euphemism and equivocation are identified and their rhetorical appeal analysed in terms of the denegational structure of each of these figures. The essay is thus governed by an understanding of figuration as instrumental, not ornamental; it shows how rhetoric can be studied as a cultural phenomenon and argues by example that a pragmatics of troping is crucial to such a study.     

A genealogical reading of security: power,politics and resistance

This article assesses French philosopher Frédéric Gros’ contribution to the analysis of security and suggests ways in which it can help us analyse and critique it. By organising security around distinct, historically defined clusters of meaning, Gros gives us a sense of how deeply embedded security is in the constitution of the self, in totalising theological and political projects and in the foundation and maintenance of the modern political order. Indirectly, Gros’ hypotheses can provide us with the critical resources to respond to and resist the various embodiments of security. Whilst resistance to contemporary modes of risk-management can take the form of aesthetic disruptions and agonistic self-definition, resistance to more traditional forms of security requires the mobilisation of bodies and juridical resources. Building on but also departing from Gros’ genealogy, the article contends that these forms of resistance have to be combined and simultaneous if we are to disrupt security’s multiple power effects.     

Navigating with the Stars: Critical Qualitative Methodological Constellations for Critical Intercultural Communication Research

This collaborative essay seeks to chart new methodological pathways for intercultural scholars with a specific focus on Critical Race Theory and Decolonizing and Indigenous Research Methodologies; Activist/Engaged Methodologies; and Performative Methodologies. Each section begins from our own researcher subjectivity, then outlines the constellation within the development of Critical Intercultural Communication (CIC); identifies the constellation's methodological commitments, thematics, and concerns; highlights key exemplars; and raises key questions. At the end of the essay, we explore through a dialogic performance the larger implications that these methodological constellations hold for CIC as a field.     

Neoliberalism and Natural Disaster

A substantial recent literature has examined insurance as a mechanism for economizing uncertain but potentially catastrophic events. Less attention has been paid to how insurantial techniques for economizing catastrophe have been deployed as political technologies. Focusing on discussions of US flood policy in the 1960s, the present article examines how insurance was used to forge new articulations and accommodations between political government and processes of rationalization. On the one hand, insurance provided a technical solution to problems that had long confronted US policy-makers: How to reduce losses from floods? How to fully compensate individuals who suffered losses? On the other hand, insurance was a device for reshaping the aims and objects of government, and for reframing questions that are more frequently situated at the level of political philosophy: What are the respective responsibilities of individual citizens and government in providing security? What tradeoffs must be made between the provision of security and economic rationality? What values are relevant in orienting public policy? In examining these issues, the article raises questions about standard narratives about the changing relations among risk, responsibility, and security in recent decades, particularly as they relate to neoliberalism.     

The Jolt of the New: Making Video Art in Arnhem Land

This essay describes the ways that an indigenous aesthetics of the new informs emerging forms of digitally-driven creativity in Aboriginal north Australia. Central is the media art project Christmas Birrimbirr (Christmas Spirit), which began as an ethnographic experiment with digital media and ritual aesthetics. Taken up by Yolngu collaborators as something new and exciting, the project explores uses of video art and more supposedly traditional media to produce ritual in a gallery setting. The imagistic dynamics of the project gave rise to dream visions and ritual innovation resulting in the production of a Christmas unlike anything previously seen in Arnhem Land, or for that matter, anywhere else. The aim of thinking through the idea of newness itself is to get closer to a sense of what the project leader, Paul Gurrumuruwuy, means when he says about our media work: ‘When you make gamununggu (ochre painted sacred design) yuta (new), you make it talk’.     

COOLING OUT THE MARKS

Why has the financial crisis not led to more radical public contestation and political reforms? In investigating the muted response to the crisis so far, the paper highlights the significance of ideological fantasy for appreciating the interpenetration of economy and society. We interpret this muted response to the crisis in terms of a ‘cooling out’ process (Goffman) underpinned by a restorative fantasmatic narrative. The ‘enjoyment’ derived from scapegoating individual bankers has narrowed the debate and stifled political imagination and mobilization. By investigating a range of media and policy responses to the meltdown, we conclude that the pre-credit crunch ideology of ‘no more boom and bust’ has been replaced by an equally ideological narrative that promises a re-normalization of processes of financialization. This allows for the preservation of key elements of neo-liberal capitalism as well as the marginalization of alternative projects. The paper shows how, exemplified by the establishment and operation of United Kingdom Financial Investments Ltd, the post-crisis ideology continues to shield financial markets from public scrutiny and intervention.     

Unsustainable Growth,Hyper-Competition,and Worth in Life Science Research: Narrowing Evaluative Repertoires in Doctoral and Postdoctoral Scientists’ Work and Lives

There is a crisis of valuation practices in the current academic life sciences, triggered by unsustainable growth and “hyper-competition.” Quantitative metrics in evaluating researchers are seen as replacing deeper considerations of the quality and novelty of work, as well as substantive care for the societal implications of research. Junior researchers are frequently mentioned as those most strongly affected by these dynamics. However, their own perceptions of these issues are much less frequently considered. This paper aims at contributing to a better understanding of the interplay between how research is valued and how young researchers learn to live, work and produce knowledge within academia. We thus analyze how PhD students and postdocs in the Austrian life sciences ascribe worth to people, objects and practices as they talk about their own present and future lives in research. We draw on literature from the field of valuation studies and its interest in how actors refer to different forms of valuation to account for their actions. We explore how young researchers are socialized into different valuation practices in different stages of their growing into science. Introducing the concept of “regimes of valuation” we show that PhD students relate to a wider evaluative repertoire while postdocs base their decisions on one dominant regime of valuing research. In conclusion, we discuss the implications of these findings for the epistemic and social development of the life sciences, and for other scientific fields.     

Swarm Intelligence: Rethinking the Multitude from within the Transversal Commons

Abstract

Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri argue that contemporary political and economic struggle entails reappropriating the monster as a potent image of multitudinous insurgency against Empire. This essay critically appraises the status of the monstrous in Hardt and Negri's work by bringing the field of critical animal studies into dialogue with Hardt and Negri in order to demonstrate how their conceptualisation of the monstrous nature of the multitude is not monstrous enough. While gesturing toward a posthumanist understanding of the multitude as a monstrous and unformed flesh of resistance and transformation, Hardt and Negri provide no clear discussion of the role of nonhuman animals within the multitude. Instead, nonhuman animals are reduced to mere allegories for the swarm intelligence of a decisively human multitude. The monstrous nature of the multitude remains mired within an anthropocentric speciesism that does not recognise the linguistic, cognitive and material resources that nonhuman animals may bring to the development of a swarm intelligence capable of overcoming the domination of nature inherent in Empire.     

Dreamings beyond ‘opportunity’: the collaborative economics of an aboriginal heritage trail

This article presents the Lurujarri Heritage Trail, an Indigenous tourism experience in Northwest Australia as exemplary for a world different from the teleological-minded futurism of neoliberal market economics. Drawing on long-term ethnographic fieldwork undertaken between 2011 and 2015, it first outlines how in 1987 the Trail was established at the very margins of the Australian economy. Through its emphasis on the here and now that is grounded in a collaboration of people and land and acknowledges diverse worldviews and ontological differences, the Trail today offers its participants a means to experience Indigenous culture as different from Western politics and development policies. As a result, its allegedly marginal Dreaming (Bugarrigarra) leads beyond the pursuit of economic opportunity and in doing so enabled the defeat of large-scale industrialisation in the region.     

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.     

BROADENING THE HORIZONS OF ECONOMY

From corporations to occupied factories, a growing number of widely accessible books and documentary films have emerged to represent an array of economic concerns and the groups gathered around them. Viewed as a new form of political association, these representations offer a lens to contemporary social change. This article draws on theories of performativity to explore the ways in which such diversely constituted assemblies might transform the economy. Representation has a number of different meanings; it relates to how economic concerns are discursively represented and thereby made real while also referring to the political representation of different groups gathered around that concern. Putting these two senses of representation together, this article examines the temporal and spatial composition of two alternative economic representations, the documentary films The Take and Les Glaneurs et la Glaneuse [The Gleaners and I]. Through The Take I explore the way in which alternative economies are performatively brought into being. I argue that The Gleaners and I illustrates how one might go about representing and reassembling the geography of economy through the idea of the periperformative. Together these films offer a way of broadening economy that has implications for the performative potential of research more generally.     

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?     

Commemorative places,political spaces: Virginia Indians,the Jamestown Quadricentennial,and the quest for sovereignty

ABSTRACT

This essay examines the cross-cultural communication strategies deployed by a coalition of indigenous tribes in Virginia to leverage the Quadricentennial commemoration of the founding at Jamestown in support of their sovereignty campaign. The tensions between Jamestown’s mythos as the “birthplace of democracy” and the natives’ historical and contemporary lived experiences, combined with the national and international attention focused on the events, constructed the 400th anniversary “celebrations” as a compelling location for social action. The coalition employed intercultural communicative practices—particularly cross-cultural dialogue and negotiation—as means of mobilizing these tensions to renegotiate their relationship with the federal government, illustrating the intersection of intercultural communication, memory, and identity.