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.     

People-based marketing and the cultural economies of attribution metrics

This article examines People-Based Marketing (PBM) to theorize the cultural economies of attribution metrics. Through an analysis of marketing discourses, acquisition patterns, and marketing collaborations, it examines how platform capitalism is increasingly directed towards developing cross-device identity standards that consolidate performance metrics across digital markets. PBM extends the processes of platform capitalization across media properties, and the ways that claims of value and relevance are imbricated with the metricization of behavioral change in digital markets. The imperative of PBM to standardize techniques of identification and to make media increasingly measurable across markets has been a catalyst for new forms of data resolutions through strategic acquisitions and identity resolution consortiums. Moreover, emerging regulatory changes such as GDPR may in effect further reinforce trends towards the consolidation of data management and analytics platforms necessary to resolve identity across markets.     

Differential economies and a decreasing share of artistic personnel costs

Journal of Cultural Economics -     

Mapping the intermediate: lived technologies of money and value

ABSTRACT

As financial transactions are increasingly digitized, old and new kinds of intermediaries are only expanding in importance. Intermediaries, mediators and brokers sit at critical junctures and operate between diverse financial arenas and pathways. We argue that mapping the intermediate entails identifying how different kinds of actors—human and non-human, objects and interfaces, institutions and practices—delimit or reify but also stitch together and overcome spatial and temporal differences in people's financial lives, while taking on varying burdens of risk. Mapping the intermediate is both an empirical and methodological exercise. Empirically, it requires following the agents and traders, brokers and material objects that facilitate transactions and add, extract, or re-work different kinds of value. Methodologically, intermediaries and the intermediate are not only the objects of analysis but act as analytical tools in their own right, making the process and politics of transactions visible and tangible. Attending to the intermediate in our inquiries around money, currency and new digital financial technologies, thereby, offers new directions for grounding finance in politics and history and better connecting micro and macro and local and global economic processes.     

Something new: value and change in finance*

ABSTRACT

Ethnographic and social scientific accounts of the financiers that buy and sell companies for profit often homogenize the players in these social dramas, relying on blunt, totalizing definitions of culture or overly deterministic articulations of habitus. This article, drawing on a two-year study of private equity investors, offers an alternative analytic frame for making sense of how private equity people buy and sell companies. It explores the ways in which private equity people make arguments persuading one another and the larger public that an investment is worth making. Important to these arguments are not only substantive content, the evidence that investors marshal to support a thesis, but also reflective evaluation of what counts as good evidence, meta-commentary. It is in these split levels of analysis that we can appreciate the cultural diversity within finance, Wall Street, and investment banking. I will also suggest that understanding how investors are arguing substantively as well as meta-pragmatically begins to outline a useful theory of culture change within the world of investment banking.     

Of times before tomorrow: contingency and the life of machines

ABSTRACT

In Before Tomorrow: Epigenesis and Rationality (2014), Catherine Malabou argues that the current schism between innate a priori and a posteriori manufacture is symptomatic of our failure thus far to think the figure of epigenesis. Based primarily on a close reading of Kant's Critique of Pure Reason, Malabou maintains that epigenesis configures a possible line of flight beyond both the rigid prior accord of preformation and the magical inorganicism of generatio aequivoca, thereby transforming the principle of reason itself in making available for the first time the generative force proper to thought. In this paper, I aim to further clarify the process of temporal articulation by focusing on the alleged inseparability that Malabou seeks to establish between epigenetic temporality, the biological process to which it refers, and the future of the living being. To this end, I will be guided by three questions: first, why is it that only life possesses the capacity to manufacture within itself the future revelation of prior meaning? Second, on what basis can epigenesis be distinguished from automatism? And third, what exactly is the ‘newly figural’ element of life that for Malabou transforms both the principle of reason and the entire system of critique?     

Digital householding: calculating and moralizing domestic life through homemade spreadsheets

ABSTRACT

Based on ethnographic fieldwork among young heterosexual middle-class couples living together in Warsaw and its suburbs, this article explores the role of their homemade accounting and budgeting spreadsheets in the manufacture of domestic economic life. We argue that such digital forms actively intervene in the representation, constitution, shaping, and performing of their respective households as calculative agencies and moralized domains. We present and analyse a case study of five couple's householding with software, and based on that analysis call for an extension of the current interest in the generative role of financial devices from markets to households.     

Making news of value: exploiting dissonances in economic journalism

This article explores the multiple modes of valuation that pervade newsmaking in economic journalism. It does so by exploring the different ways in which journalists at Valor Econômico, the leading economic newspaper in Brazil, compete and cooperate in the production of news. Valor is a paradigmatic case for discussing valuation practices in newsmaking since its institutional promise is to produce news of value. How, if at all, do Valor journalists embrace the promise of producing news that generates value? Elaborating on Stark’s (2009. The sense of dissonance. Accounts of worth in economic life. Princeton University Press) idea of dissonance, it is contended that different orders of worth collide and cooperate within Valor newsroom. Moreover, journalists engage in a variety of valuation practices through which these orders of worth are shaped, defined, and refined, reflecting different understandings of economy and society, and different conceptions of what journalism is good for. I argue that Valor’s direction intentionally fosters a plural space of value dissonance in order to improve the quality of news reporting. I emphasise, however, that these dissonances are only productive against a larger background of consonance about what actually there is to disagree about. The article is based on a seven-month ethnography of Valor’s newsroom in São Paulo between 2013 and 2015.     

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.     

Uncertain hog futures: life,death, and arbitrage on the factory farm

ABSTRACT

Between 2013 and 2014, PED virus (PEDv) swept through American pig farms, killing millions of animals and causing a market panic that drove the prices of both physical pork and lean hog futures to all-time highs. However, a divergence between pricing in financial markets and on-farm realities allowed some producers to reap record profits via a unique form of biological arbitrage. This arbitrage was novel in that it allowed for an underlier (pigs) to be used to profit from fluctuations in the price of a derivative (lean hog futures). This article explores the case of PEDv to examine the entanglements and divergences between ‘real’ and ‘abstract’ values in financialized industries, paying particular attention to the schisms between the imaginaries and practices of actors in the financial and tangibly productive links of the agricultural value chain. To do so, it examines the historical co-constitution of American agriculture and the financial sector, and shows how in the contemporary moment these two ever-more-intertwined sectors are nonetheless marked by important differences. It argues that the nature of agricultural production can confound the expectations of finance, and highlights the fact that financialization entails contextually-specific practices that can lead to uneven and unexpected market outcomes.     

托起生命的太阳——一位37岁的博士生导师的创业事迹

张耀洲,男,1964年出生于江苏沭阳的一个农民家庭,中学毕业后考入苏州蚕桑专科学校,1986年考入中国农科院攻读硕士学位,1989年考入中科院上海生化所攻读分子生物学,获博士学位后,拜浙江农业大学校长、浙江省副省长李德葆教授为师,完成博士后研究工作,现任浙江大学生物化学研究所所长、博士生导师、教授,又是宁波医药控股集团董事长、总经理兼浙江中奇生物药业股份有限公司的董事长。     

The psychic life of governmentality

This paper presents a framework for understanding the psychic life of governmentality. It builds upon analyses of power developed by Slavoj ?i?ek and Judith Butler to suggest the psychic dimensions of sovereignty and discipline, respectively, and uses Freud’s notion of the uncanny to develop an understanding of the psychic aspect of government. In so doing, it suggests that subjects’ complicity in their subjectivation cannot be understood as being purely the effect of their positioning within discourse. Rather, their complicity has an affective dimension. Where a regime of power is able to incite that dimension, it has an increased capacity to become totalising in its effects. The example of the psychology‐derived self‐help movement – as a mode of liberal governance – is used to demonstrate this point.     

China Looks Abroad: Changing Directions In International Science

This essay describes China’s participation in international science organizations during the past two decades. It argues that, whilst progress has been made, serious problems remain. It concludes that increased attention to communication and exchange, and the creation of a favourable international image in science and technology are important priorities for China.

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