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This essay serves as the introduction to the special issue titled, ‘The social life of corruption in Latin America’. The six authors featured in this special issue of Culture, Theory and Critique exhibit a range of scholarship around questions of corruption and anti-corruption in the region. All have been involved in long-term ethnographically based research projects in particular locations in Latin America, including Brazil (three contributions), Peru (one contribution), Colombia (one contribution) and Ecuador (one contribution). In this special issue, these engaged regional scholars turn their attention to the theme of corruption in ‘parts known’, that is, within sites where they have already established deep connections. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper extends the notion of film tourism in the context of Thailand from the focus on destination marketing to affective connections between film locations and fans. Combining frameworks from fan studies particularly the notion of pilgrimage, and a conceptual way of linking play with space in game and architectural studies, the paper examines playful practices at film locations and associated spaces mediated by digital photography, video and online story-telling associated with the Thai genre films called nang rak, which emerged in the early 2000s–2010s. The examination of play practices highlights the imaginative, performative and mediated plays by film fans, which created play movements in space or 'kinesis' at the film locations making them become cultural playgrounds for identity negotiations and the sites for expressing desires for affective cities. The paper also invites further consideration on fan pilgrimage in relation to changes with political climate, tourism development and vernacular cultural sites. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The paper critically examines connections of play in interactive and immersive spaces that comment on climate and environmental crisis. The analysis of a playful museum space with a focus on the responses of the audience members emphasises how this type of environment brings play and playfulness to the foreground while engaging with a topic that can be abstract, perplexing and formidable to comprehend and digest in its magnitude. The conception of play and manifestations of playfulness are analysed through the qualitative data from an on-site audience research conducted at the High Arctic installation at the National Maritime Museum, London. Interactive and immersive practices shift our attention to play with the somatic sense (Paterson, M. 2007. The senses of touch. Oxford & New York: Berg), movements and sensations. The multi-sensory and spatial elements blur the boundaries and challenge the perception of play and playfulness for adult audiences. How can these mediated spaces expand or reinforce our understanding of play? Play is a rich metaphor that uncovers a network of relationships that is often overlooked. The paper discusses how these spatial, embodied practices and modes of engagement extend and provoke our conceptions of play when considering the immediate, yet distant threat of climate change. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper seeks to explore the evolving form of art manifestos in the contemporary cultural economy by bringing perspectives of those cultural producers who cannot speak up in the conventional form of a manifesto. I examine this issue by using the case of European Biennial Manifesta 10, held in Saint Petersburg in 2014. As the organisers of Manifesta 10 confessed publicly, the political conditions for bringing Manifesta to Russia could not be worse. The recent approval of the anti-gay law and the midst of the Ukrainian crisis including the annexation of Crimea put the Biennale into a very vulnerable position. Despite severe calls for boycott, Manifesta opened for the public view with no theme or a clear statement. Although Manifesta 10 did not produce a single declaration that could be clearly identified as a manifesto, König and the Biennale team made a series of alternative tactical visual and written statements for different audiences. By using the author's interpretation, the following paper aims to reconstruct this fragmented polyphonic manifesto produced by cultural workers, artists and visitors of the 2014 Manifesta Biennale. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper aims to establish how ecological thinking, or the idea of interconnectedness among all beings, from the Indigenous onto-epistemic view in Kim Scott's Benang: From the Heart warrants a poetics of being and identity as fluid, floating, permeable, or leaking, never rigid or definitive. It builds on the idea of the mesh and the aesthetics of uncanny and how this view attunes to the Indigenous openness for kinship with, companionship of, intimacy and becoming with other beings. Such a view thus enacts Harley, the main protagonist, as regenerating his effaced Aboriginal identity through entanglements and becoming with all beings, humans and nonhumans, or Country at large, in both the latter's material and spiritual aspects. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines science centre displays incorporating robotic technologies to provoke reflection on social robotics. Drawing on research in post-phenomenology and science and technology studies, it considers how exhibits in Born or Built? about robotic emotion undermine its framing narrative of human-robot convergence. Comparing these science centre exhibits to social robotics demonstrations draws attention to how the exhibits move away from convincing audiences about the truth or merits of these technologies to instead convey their difference and open-endedness. While there are limited popular narratives and images to invoke in exploring these ideas, relationships can be drawn between the displays and historical automata and contemporary robotic artwork, practices that frequently seek to promote reflection on robotic otherness, appearance and relationality. Representing robots with robotics points towards the relevance of style to conceptualising robotic diversity and materiality. Style in this sense is not simply an embellishment or surface addition to content, but a material expression inseparable from what is communicated and relative to technological, cultural and social milieus. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper traces the recent trend in interdisciplinary Science and Technology Studies (STS), especially those of the Black feminist tradition, to make an argument for how its critical scholarship on data, science and knowledge production can be interpreted as manifesto-istic texts advocating for anti-essentialist solidarities. Dorothy E. Roberts' work demonstrates how debunking essentialist categories backed by the foundationalist veneer of science must be situated at the heart of anti-racist and anti-ablest politics of co-liberation. Ruha Benjamin's work, meanwhile, not only analyses the technologies/knowledge production practices designed to maintain the status quo, but projects a new vision of 'retooling' science as a means of reimagining justice in the rapidly shifting technological climate of the twenty-first century. Sylvia Wynter and Katherine McKittrick discuss human subjects often trapped in between orthodox discourses, who must then strive to reimagine/redefine their collective future through intersubjective creativity. What remains, in the end, are embodied narratives that escape reductionist logic through their welcoming of new perspectives, experiences and innovations—all of which are constantly being renewed through the arrival of new generations and diasporic traversements of ideas. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper explores Donna Haraway's manifesto writing, focusing on the ethical prescription of how to relate with human and nonhuman others. Haraway prescribes a compass, however broad, about how the human species should connect with nonhumans, foregrounding unexpected kinships, multispecies flourishing, mutuality and the ability to respond to significant others. I call this an ethics of 'plural relating', a relating that regards potential partnerships with all existence on earth, irrespectively of their biological and cognitive status, from insects to dogs and bacteria to pigeons. I argue that while useful for opening affective bridges with nonhuman others, plural relating may end up advancing a loose and problematic figure of bonding that mirrors neoliberal 'fluid' relationalities. By discussing my own ethnographic research on an 'invasive species' and paying attention to the intensity of bonding and the agency of bonding parts, I hold that plural relating runs the danger of obscuring processes of social antagonism and reproducing structures of domination. I argue that the question should not just be how we relate with beneficial or harmful animal others but a more overall one: how do we relate with those others who share the same desire for changing or abolishing repressive institutions in a socio-economic context that favours partial relating? For this end, stronger figures of bonding, such as the comrade, have to be embraced. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

New materialism posits a non-anthropocentric ontology which gives rise to expanding the definition of the ethical subject and ethical relation. According to Karen Barad, who is one of the most prominent researchers in the field, ethicality exceeds the human domain and enfolds the whole of existence. Her project of ethico-onto-epistemology grounds ethics in ontology, perceiving it not as a product of a 'social contract', but one of the properties of matter, a phenomenon emerging from meaningful 'intra-actions' between entities. This paper explores the possibility of viewing Barad's ethical project in the context of conventional understanding of ethics. It also considers the practicality of the philosopher's theory. Particular attention is given to the question of how the concepts of individual freedom and responsibility, which appear to be some of the fundamental notions of 'traditional' ethics, can be reconciled with Barad's new materialistic notions of intra-activity, mattering and split agency which question the idea of radical individualism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article explores the ontogenesis of software (code) and law and how they are entangled and in-form bodies and urban space. Herein, I investigate how this process of in-forming creates ruptures, differences in the otherwise smooth experience of the urban. These remain largely invisible but surface when interruptions in the everyday use of technologies affect urbanites. These interruptions might be data breaches, frauds, invasive phishing emails and the likes. Information and affect play a key role as posthuman elements in the ontogenesis. Ruptures, differences may also open up lines of flight and resistance that highlight differences rather than conceal them. Taking an ontogenetic and new materialist perspective, this paper contributes to strengthening the theoretical dialogue between law, the science of space (geography) and philosophies of technology. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper is a systems theoretic examination of Eugen Rosenstock-Huessy's 'cross of reality', a structure that fuses a spatial dyad of inner-outer and a temporal dyad of past-future into a space–time tetrad. This structure is compatible not only with the 'human-centered' point of view that Rosenstock-Huessy favours, but also with the 'world-centered' point of view inherent in science. The structure, based in his analysis of speech, is applied by him to a wide variety of individual and collective human phenomena, including language, religion, and social critique. To appropriate terminology used by physicists, the cross of reality could be viewed as Rosenstock-Huessy's 'theory of everything', a framework for the social sciences and humanities that can be used to model entities, events and processes. The cross diagrams some basic notions of systems theory. Rosenstock-Huessy's critique of science is partially shared by systems thought, and the goal he posited for sociology of understanding and alleviating human suffering can gain support from systems ideas and methods. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Bringing together scholarship on settler-colonialism, film theory and sound studies, this paper is an attempt to grapple with the problem of settler-colonial time. Building on the work of Patrick Wolfe, Samera Esmeir and Mark Rifkin, I argue that settler-colonialism presents immediate and important complications for thinking about historiography, time and cinematic time as well. Because as a structure of social development, settler-colonialism unfolds amorphously without very often taking the shape of singular events, acts or actors, it presents challenges for what we might call a prosecutional or event-centric discourse about violence. In this paper, I explore Chion's theory of 'phantom sound', which holds – I think – great promise for cinematically dealing with settler-colonial time. Alongside this, I offer a close-reading of Mohanad Yaqubi's 2015 documentary Off Frame AKA Revolution until Victory as a unique deployment of phantom sound and a confrontation with settler-colonialism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article introduces various topics presented in the journal including surrealism, philosophical work dealing with art, and anti-representationalism in contemporary art.

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. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This is the first academic paper to critically introduce and document the 30-year screen career of Pauline Chan, Australia’s highest profile Chinese film director, television actress and media producer. Sydney-based, Vietnam-born, Hong Kong-educated and US-trained, Chan has directed six films, starred in 14 and produced four television series and films. Despite her prolific career, there has been no sustained research on her profile and repertoire. This paper evaluates the evolution of Chan’s career using the diaspora ‘advantage’ as a new approach. Characterised by mobility rather than culturalism, the term refers to the benefits brought by and skills of diaspora groups that have allowed them to flourish as transnational actors able to leverage resources in both their countries of origin and settlement. It begins by elaborating how Chan’s diaspora advantage has allowed her to challenge welfare multiculturalism and extend aesthetic multiculturalism. It further documents her transition from a multicultural filmmaker to a cultural intermediary by leveraging her diasporic advantage across the film sectors in China and Australia, and opening up new industrial routes outside of the confines of policy. Using interdisciplinary methods to screen biography that include interviews with the filmmaker, film archival research, critical cultural policy studies, and studies in Asian Australian cinema and political economy, this paper argues that the new approach of the diaspora advantage turns the deficit associated with the diaspora into a dividend that has the potential to rethink the imaginary between Asia and Australia. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Building on ethnographic research conducted in the Ecuadorian Amazon, this paper seeks to reframe the industrial contamination problem. From critiques of neoliberalism to Marxist-oriented environment theories, industrial contamination is understood as asecondary effectof a larger problem of the capitalist system. There are at least four, often overlapping, ways of understanding the pervasiveness of the problem,via: (1) cost-benefit analyses, which determine it to be cheaper to remediate environmental damages than prevent them; (2) weak regulation, which shapes those cost-benefit analyses; (3) the externalisation of certain costs onto third (usually marginalised) parties; and (4) contradictions inherent to capital accumulation which promote the destruction of the very environmental conditions that capital depends on. Curiously, even where contamination is conceptualised as an inherent and necessary feature of capitalism, it appears as collateral damage, as the ‘unintentional by-product’ of something-other, rather than a ‘conscious imposition of “power over”’ a particular group of people (De Angelis, M. 2004. ‘Separating the Doing and the Deed: Capital and the Continuous Character of Enclosures’.Historical Materialism12:2, 57–87). This is curious because small farmers and indigenous people affected by a devastating oil-related disaster in Ecuador describe contamination otherwise – as a kind of targeted, chemical warfare against those living ‘in the way of’ extractive operations. Dealing with the narrative gap between those lived experiences of contamination and the expert discourses about it, this paper introduces the concept of an ‘incentive to contaminate’. By critically expanding the prevailing theories, the concept turns greater attention to the productive work that contamination does for the oil industry, thus challenging socio-legal categories of intent that impede environmental justice. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Since the early 1900s, Warlpiri people living in the central desert region of Australia have experienced an intense process of adaption to the changing circumstances of postcolonial life. From the earliest days, their encounters with kardiya, non-Aboriginal people, have been mediated by diverse visual technologies that have, over time, become integral to the ways Warlpiri orient themselves to each other and their wider world. In this paper I trace the key elements of the complex visual environment that has emerged from this history of mediation. The central part of the paper considers events around the repatriation to Warlpiri communities in 2011 of a collection of drawings made in the 1950s by their forebears. In responses to a medium that once was new but now is old, several points of interest emerge, among them a clear sense of a hierarchy of value Warlpiri apply to modes of visual communication. In the context of the return of the drawings, the significance Warlpiri ascribe to other visual media comes to the fore. I consider some of the ways visual forms are deployed in support of public projections of cultural identity on the one hand and everyday modes of expression and address on the other. The paper's central argument is that contemporary Warlpiri attitudes to images – whether they be drawn, painted or broadcast – reveal the complex postcolonial workings of mimetic desire. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Between 1857 and 1921, the Port of New York's waterfront infrastructure was the target of jurisdictional extraterritorialisation that would remove its control from local hands within the nation state. I present a case study of this process to understand how infrastructural extraterritoriality functions as a state response to the central tension of infrastructure: fixity and flow. This tension is characterised by the need to ensure the material embeddedness in the everyday life of cities of the Port of New York's piers, wharves and slips, and the scale-jumping connectivity required to ensure the global networks of trade and transportation function appropriately. In this paper, I examine a case study of the Port of New York's efforts to re-territorialise jurisdiction over waterfront infrastructure as attempts to resolve this tension. I demonstrate how not only is this tension on-going, but that it requires the sort of extraterritorial governance that has become commonplace over infrastructure today. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper argues the built structure of Israeli military occupation in the West Bank is only part of the mechanism that serves to define territorial boundaries and restrict Palestinian movement. A more pervasive and debilitating process of boundary formation occurs through affect-laden performances that typically take place in border areas or sites of surveillance, where state actors and technologies police Palestinians. These performances serve to produce fear and shame: two affects that circulate and act as structuring agents preventing Palestinian movement and resistance. Thus, Israel extends its borders through socio-spatial-technical practices, deep into Palestinian spaces. The underlying evidence for this study originated out of critical performance ethnography and a drama workshop conducted with Palestinians, theorised in part through Sara Ahmed's notion of an 'affective economy' of emotions. Overall, this study re-orients the predominant view of occupied space in the West Bank as an oppressive architectural blockade, to that of an affective regime constituted by a set of relations that require repeatable performances to produce the effect of territory. This re-framing opens possibilities for re-thinking resistance to the occupation by suggesting Palestinians may disrupt or alter the circulation of affect in order to reclaim their space and curtail Israeli extraterritorial ambitions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Near the beginning of the COVID-19 outbreak, Franco 'Bifo' Berardi published three short meditations on the possible, not probable, outcome of the pandemic. Due to the sudden imposition of isolation and concrete needs, Berardi suggests that death has re-entered contemporary discourse. As a consequence, he speculates that the capitalist postponement of joy may be replaced by time as enjoyment. This text critically accompanies Berardi in imagining the possible outcome of the pandemic by suggesting that it is not death but mortality that offers a pivotal use of time and enjoyment. Mortality, as Hannah Arendt defines it, extends beyond the temporality of survivalist labour and into durable works that contribute to the construction of a human world. Here it is argued that this world and its work is held together by love, in a robust philosophical sense, that is embodied by amateur practice, primarily developed in relation to the work of Bernard Stiegler. Through the work of Stiegler, Donna Haraway and Byung-Chul Han, this paper argues that, masked by professionalism and marketing, amateurism lurks in the possible ruins of pre-COVID life, ready to emerge in the key areas identified by Berardi's texts. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines the lived experiences and ethical dilemmas of investors and staff in London's digital music startup culture. Startups often rely on what I term 'imagined metrics' to attract investment and to measure the efficacy of their technologies. However, this stands in stark contrast to the qualitative ways music is understood within these organisations and subsequently experienced via the technologies they build. Drawing on ethnographic observations alongside interview data, I suggest that these metrics have few true believers. Instead, critiques of imagined metrics and their susceptibility to exaggeration and misrepresentation are ubiquitous. This culture of scepticism is not incidental: it is a crucial pathway through which otherwise volatile startup culture is normalised. Investors, founders and staff often publicly acknowledge the unreliability of the numbers with which they work, even as metrics continue to underpin the decision-making process. Metrics thus do not require true belief to secure their effects. Yet, against this backdrop, processes of quantification increasingly shape digital music consumption. Resisting the classic equation of quantification with Weberian rationalisation, this study instead shows that metrics are imbued with emotions and interpretive narratives that extend well beyond the older trust in numbers (Porter [1995]. Trust in Numbers: The Pursuit of Objectivity in Science and Public Life. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, I argue that the Covid-19 pandemic has made it more evident that the question of survival plays a structural role in the politics of globalisation. Like a virus that feeds off living cells without producing new ones, globalisation builds on blurring the previously differentiated spaces of the state, the market, war, and nature. The pandemic has exacerbated the instability that results from this blurring of the political spaces of modernity. Amidst this instability, survival has become a prevailing and yet liminal condition for the appearance of politics itself. Rather than interpreting this condition as a biopolitical reduction of political life to mere life, as Giorgio Agamben or Roberto Esposito have done, my theorisation claims that global survival has produced a hyperpoliticization of all events and acts of social life. I illustrate these logics with the political centrality of life in the Black Lives Matter movement. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper reflects critically on challenges and opportunities associated with developing a theoretical framework for an interdisciplinary Framework Programme 6 research project funded by the European Commission in the area of digital ecosystems. The paper first provides a description of the interdisciplinary structure of the research agenda of the project and the areas of digital ecosystem research prioritised by each discipline. Second, it discusses the challenging questions of epistemology that arose in the context of theorising interdisciplinary research and provides a summary of how these were dealt with in order to outline a theoretical framework for digital ecosystems research by the end of the project. Finally, it discusses the lessons that can be extrapolated from the project experience, arguing that it is impossible to develop a unified interdisciplinary theoretical framework due to irreconcilable epistemological differences, yet it is possible and very worthwhile for those adhering to various disciplinary perspectives to collaborate towards the achievement of a practical joint endeavour. These lessons, which are considered valuable to the broader research community, are summarised in a model of the (im)possibility of interdisciplinarity. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This paper takes up García Linera's thought as a key attempt to rethink the order of politics in the age of global war; the so-called ‘communist horizon’ attempts to restore to the political an intelligible spatial and temporal orientation, and in García Linera's version, to do so in perpetuity. That is, ‘communism’ becomes the signifier proper to an ageless or eternal politics and thus comes to mean something quite different from what it has meant so far. Observing the metaphorical turn or return characteristic of the current communist tendency, the paper ultimately opens the current communism's own disavowed ‘speculative’ core and suggests that neocommunism is speculative leftism in self-negation. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The 2003 Mars Explorer Rovers (MER), Spirit and Opportunity were tele-robots operated by a complex collaborative process involving about 120 scientists and engineers. The scientists operating the Rovers experienced telepresence on Mars, raising questions about embodiment and the human capacity to transport itself across distance via data. This instance of telepresence is intriguing because it occurs in the absence of real-time interaction and sensory rich feedback, which are often deemed essential to telepresence. This paper argues that MER telepresence can be understood in terms of the open perceptual circuit, as developed by Aud Sissel Hoel and Annamaria Carusi from Merleau-Ponty's later writings. Remote operation employs a decentred body that is in an open perceptual circuit with its environment, interrelated with representations, data and tools. MER telepresence shows how Merleau-Ponty's thought about embodiment relationships extends beyond Don Ihde's account of the incorporation of tools as proxies into a body schema. Returning to the MER operators' experience enables the articulation of dimensions of telepresence that go beyond sensory rich, real time interaction, such as the embodied imagination, linguistic projection and cultural narratives. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

How important are animals to democracy? In this paper, I reconsider the role and the place of nonhuman animals in the constitution of democratic community by way of a return to Plato's Republic. While perhaps an unlikely choice of text, the horror and terror exhibited by Plato towards animals compels us to put into question two fundamental truisms: first, that philosophy and politics are uniquely human concerns and, second, that today in the West we already inhabit a democratic society. By turning towards the animal, a number of very different figures emerge that directly challenge the general conception of the Republic as epitomic text of political philosophy and beacon of ancient wisdom. These figures instead reveal the Republic as a blueprint for perpetual power, complete with instructions for forcing the masses into enduring servitude. Moreover, I argue that contemporary societal structures in the West typically accord with Plato's ancient blueprint, according to which every labouring body must be forcibly given to swallow the 'Guardian' of its own servitude. This Guardian has but one function: to safeguard the power, wealth and privilege of the minority ruling class against the instinct for democratic freedoms. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Global rates of type 2 diabetes have doubled since 1980. From a biomedical perspective, the most effective ways to manage type 2 diabetes is through prevention and behaviour change among 'at risk' populations. In the United States, public institutions, such as universities, have increasingly become involved in America's 'war on fat'. This ethnographic study of a campus-based diabetes-prevention programme tracks the links between neoliberalism and instructions for 'health'. It outlines the production of a 'prediabetic' population and changing notions of what constitute health risks. It describes how students come to interpret their bodies with respect to its capacity to be (re)productive. The paper argues that new conditions for higher education exhaust students in ways that ironically jeopardise their ability to be 'productive'. Health programming works to hold individual bodies accountable for the structural demands of contemporary overwork and exhaustion. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines how voluntary labour is being reconfigured in precarious labour markets. I argue that like an internship, volunteering is increasingly construed as a form of 'hope labour', premised on the logic of investment. Hope labour promises that exposure and experience will possibly lead to employment in the future. In workshops for job seekers, experts reproduce a neoliberal logic through which the self is imagined as a portfolio or a bundle of skills that indexes one's employability. These workshops present simple correlations between investments in one's portfolio and enhanced employability, which tend to unravel in practice. The un- and under-employed, particularly immigrants, face difficulties accessing volunteer opportunities that develop appropriate skills and networks. They also struggle to present volunteer work as valuable 'work experience' in resumes and LinkedIn profiles. These difficulties reveal the ways in which hope labour is structured by and reproduces social inequalities. Although volunteer positions do not necessarily lead to paid work, unpaid work is simultaneously about filling one's resume and chasing opportunity - prominent forms of neoliberal risk management in contingent and competitive labour markets. This labour creates potential affective and economic value, not only for individuals, but also for non-profit organisations and the state. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper is the first article in English of Rosenstock-Huessy'sFull Count of the Times, the second volume of hisSociology. The vastness and diversity of Rosenstock-Huessy's corpus, plus the associative manner of his writing, makes any systematic analysis of his work very difficult. Yet he explicitly stated in his Sociology that he did have a system. In this paper I clarify why his work is devoted to theFull Count of the Times. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This paper, based on textual analysis and interviews, offers a complementary perspective of scholarly studies of nation branding which focus on the state and corporate elites involved in such undertakings. It places grassroots initiatives in branding Taiwan through tourist souvenirs and other video and graphic materials against the larger background of cultural policies and official branding campaigns, and shows grassroots actors’ complex entanglement with official institutions, policies and discourses despite declared scepticism towards the latter and a low degree of direct collaboration. It compares official and grassroots messages and argues that the latter are more coherent; capture a local specificity and encourage a tourist gaze centred around the ‘human touch’ theme; distance themselves from China, the significant ‘other’ of Taiwanese nationalism; and markedly highlight an epistemological and representational strategy based on individual, sensorial experience, which may constitute a response to biased and untrustworthy state national narratives of the martial law era. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper is a composite of two oral presentations: a public lecture and a seminar paper, presented as an overview of my work. The following exposition follows this order: (1) the attempt to rethink the notion ofmimesis, not as imitation but as the production of difference; (2) as a parallel to this rethinking, the idea of what I have calledcontrol of the imaginary; (3) the question offiction. I hope to show that this initial group of three principles are interlaced, so that the second one – the idea ofcontrol– follows as a development of this rethinking ofmimesis; that the question offictioncomes from the idea ofcontrol of the imaginary. It will be out of our concern that the question of fictionality now threatens to give place to a further division, between internal or literary fiction and external fiction. This will allow us to consider: (4) the relationship between (internal or literary) fiction and poetry, in which will be shown – through the examination of two poems by Celan – a new form of mimesis that is not based on the description of a state, but on the emphasis on its processuality; and (5) the limits of (external) fiction, in which we find the idea of pan-fictionality, which creates both the values on which a society or a culture is grounded and the dominant discourses that legitimise the application of these values as a standard of verification, and this control. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Consumer capitalism has the perfunctory, if not proverbial, explanation that if only people work hard enough will they obtain what they deserve. For Gramsci, and others, this condition isn't about who is working ‘hard enough’, but rather ‘who is working’ (and what type of work!)? The fundamental problem with our class consciousness is that it is skewed: Culturally we believe that some people are more deserving than others. What does this have to do with social change? When we consider that global, consumer capitalism engulfs our everyday lives, we must be attune to its everyday impact and influence on our subjectivity. Relatedly, we should consider everyday ‘pockets of resistance’ – such as the surgical cleaner or the coffee house frequenter – who can contribute to what Gramsci refers to as the ‘war of position’ so that a more dedicated, organised, and significant cultural entity can develop and have power – known as the ‘war of maneuver’. In other words, Gramsci's ‘war of position’ might best be served by educators and everyday citizens who suggest that what we have could be better – a (re)framing of ‘common sense’, in Gramscian terms, into ‘good sense’. This paper will address not only the problem of how global capitalism is articulated into everyday discourse, but also how the common, cultural fabric of American life can attempt to combat it. While no universal struggle perhaps exists, currently, to tackle global capital, this paper will discuss how pockets of social movement resistance can collaborate to form a more unified ‘war of maneuver’ against the global, corporate hegemony of our times. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This paper interrogates the orthodoxies of cosmopolitanism via the example of an emerging commemorative network surrounding the Czech village of Lidice, drawing attention to a disjunction between idealised theories of memory and actual, instrumental memory practice. Razed by Nazi officials as an act of retaliation for the assassination of Reinhardt Heydrich in Prague, 1942, Lidice's male inhabitants – mainly miners and factory workers – were shot, and women and children deported. In a notable example of productive transnational identification, a group of coal miners in Stoke-on-Trent, England began a fundraising initiative which resulted in the construction of a new Lidice overlooking the former site (1947). Whilst the field-defining work of Daniel Levy and Natan Sznaider (2006) suggests that cosmopolitan memory-work avoids the homogenisation of Holocaust memories in the global sphere, I explore here the possibility that the complex motivations that guide such practices may undermine this premise. Accordingly the paper explores inscriptions of Lidice into local contexts via processes of de-territorialisation and re-territorialisation, focusing on its mobilisation in the 21st century in an examination the twinning of Lidice with Khojaly, Azerbaijan (February 2010) and with Stoke-on-Trent (underway). Campaigners in Stoke aim to inaugurate a new museum restore the town's ‘emotional bond’ with Lidice (Alan Gerrard 2010), whereas in Khojaly Lidice's memory is polemically aligned with the massacre of over 600 Azerbaijanis during the Nagorno-Karabakh conflict between ethnic Armenians and the Republic of Azerbaijan (1988–1992). The chapter considers the Lidice's twinning network as an example of cosmopolitan, supranational ‘glocalisation’ (Levy and Sznaider 2006). Whilst both cases rely on a sense of global-local solidarity rendered possible by the mobilisation of Holocaust memory, the motivations that ground them are significantly divergent; this essay assesses to what extent this may interfere with the potential of the twinning initiatives discussed to avoid a global homogenisation of Holocaust memory. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The turn towards transculturalism engenders a focus on modes of remembrance that conceptualise memory as dialogic and diverse rather than hierarchical and linear. However, this paper expresses concern that this apparent openness will lead to the presumption that all manifestations of ‘multidirectional’ or ‘cosmopolitan’ memory are ethically-oriented, according commemorative practice a transparency that is not always merited. Particularly disquieting are overly analogical memorial endeavours that suggest unproblematic equivalence between historical events, as exemplified by the reliance upon tropes inherited from Holocaust discourse in the public memorial culture of 9/11. This paper analyses the convergence of two pre-existing cultural discourses in the American public sphere after 9/11. The first relates to the ‘Americanization’ of the Holocaust in memorial culture from the early 1990s, which critics have suggested involves a transition from viewing the Holocaust as a historical event to reading it as an affirmative national parable. The second concerns the mobilisation of the Holocaust in support of U.S. military intervention in foreign policy rhetoric in the post-Cold War period. Analysing the intersection of these discourses with the narrative of American exceptionalism, I question whether the prevalence of Holocaust tropes in 9/11's memorial culture suggests a deliberate appropriation of its master narrative of loss. I argue that, in the decade since 9/11, other memorial constellations have been ignored in favour of less problematic acts of historical analogy. Ultimately, I call for greater attention to the potential consequences of applying analogical templates of remembrance without adequate self-reflexivity. I suggest that it is not always the most visible points of connection that offer the potential for ethical modes of remembrance, but the hidden histories, the forgotten memories, whose relationship to 9/11 opens the most important claims to attention. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Films made in and about cities offer a rich source of material for investigating projections of civic identity and citizenship and their relationship to the changing urban imaginary of the twentieth century. Focusing on a range of films made in and about a provincial city and collated by the ‘Mapping the City in Film’ project as part of research into the relationship between film, architecture, and urban space, this paper explores how textual and genre analysis can be complemented by the use of accurate mapping tools such as geographical information systems software (GIS). GIS creates a framework for an open ended multi-disciplinary, intermedial exploration of film and space in which location information can be mapped and visually organised. This enables, for example, an exploration of how various forms of place-making activity are projected at particular times by different cultures of film production and film-related practices. The paper argues that GIS visualisation methods in partnership with traditional film analysis and historical contextual information can begin to map an affective architecture of place. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This essay seeks to examine the theme of suffering and affliction in Blanchot with a view toward whether it provides an epiphany in the sense of a pathway to Blanchot's notion of the Outside and the experience of the ‘Impossible Relation’. The article takes its starting point from a previous suggestion made by Michael Purcell that Blanchot's impossible relation may constitute a prolegemonon for a Christian doctrine of grace. Fundamental to this thesis is the philosophical journey of selfhood from Heidegger through Levinas to Blanchot. For Heidegger the self is constituted by death as the possibility of impossibility, whereas for Levinas and Blanchot the self is constituted by the impossibility of possibility. Consequently, for Levinas and Blanchot, the self, strictly speaking, as self-constituted, is impossible. Thus the self is due to excess, surplus, infinity – all suggestive, argues Purcell, of the gratuity of grace. However, a feature of distinction between Levinas and Blanchot is that the latter contains no sense of a Judeo-Christian concept of God. There is, for Blanchot, no opening out onto divinity and whatever excess constitutes the selfhood is correlated to something that is not divine in any traditional Christian sense. The paper argues that affliction and suffering serve to point to the dispossession of the self and open up to an experience of a ‘relation without relation to the outside’. In Blanchot's Death Sentence it becomes possible to see some features of how this dispossession of the self unfolds in the events between J. and the narrator. The paper concludes by suggesting that suffering and affliction disclose to us the truth of the self as constituted by an-other. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Taking its cue from the rather strange book by the Protestant Minister Mumma Albert Camus and the Minister, which claims that shortly before he died Camus wished to be baptised, this paper reopens the case of Camus and Christianity. All Camus' public pronouncements on Christianity indicate he had more differences with Christians than common interests – although there had always been Christians who saw a fellow spirit in Camus, not least in his depiction of Christian fanatics. Moreover, Camus himself insisted upon the need for a pagan revival, and he tended to represent Christians, along with Marxists, as metaphysically obsessed with the future at the expense of life here and now. This paper argues that Camus' representation of paganism was more mythic than real, and that his writing is far more in keeping with what the Jewish philosopher Franz Rosenzweig, picking up on Schelling's term, called Johannine Christianity. Such a form of Christianity, whose founding father is Goethe, is a post-Protestant, ‘wall-less’, non-institutional, symbol-less faith in hope that remains true to the command to love the neighbour. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This paper investigates René Girard's contribution to the theological debate on the meaning of the cross. The first section sets the scene and formulates the problem of the cross. It does this by introducing the problems connected to the dominant interpretation of the cross, the so-called ‘Anselmian’ model, which understands the cross in terms of satisfaction and substitution. The second section explores the interpretation of the cross before Anselm. It examines the so-called Christus Victor motif. The merits and shortcomings of this motif are explored and the question is raised of whether Christus Victor can answer the problem of the cross for today's world. The final and largest section of this paper rehabilitates the Christus Victor motif with the help of Girard. In this way, the paper shows that Girard fits into contemporary theological debates and that he matters for theology because his anthropological insights contribute to solving intra-theological problems, like the problem of the cross. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

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 Zizek, 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. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The imagining of space has been an important topic in recent geographical studies. Especially in the geographical study of literature, 'literary geography', the manner of contesting the frames of 'fact' and 'fiction' has aroused more and more attention during recent years. Metafiction, consciousness of a text's own imaginativeness and the discourses behind it, has not yet been explicitly discussed in the field of literary geography, although some tangential approaches have been applied. The main purpose of this paper is to discuss how the metafictive reading of literature functions as an alternative way of approaching the imagining of space, offering an original 'methodological' viewpoint for perceiving space, culture and society. The specific focus is on how space becomes metafictive through literary 'means' such as divergent narrative and textual strategies, exceptional typographies and ironic writing. At the same time the paper considers how the metafictive continuum between the frames of 'fact' and 'fiction' may function as a tool for delving more deeply into the discursiveness of the human imagination. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Writing about images and the visual subordinates the visual. If the verbal and the visual are closely tied to each other, they also remain separate and unequal. A linguistic encounter with the 'primary artefact' of the visual image is by definition absent from writing, which we should know by now lives in absence. All writing about seeing is blind. This paper examines W. J. T. Mitchell's response to the situation and to his 'looking at seeing'. Language for Mitchell remains a largely transparent, unreflexive and unproblematised instrument with which he examines imagery and the visual, although he makes clear that language cannot reach all the way to the materiality of the image. The paper raises specific questions: Does language ever stand mute before an image? Does an image ever foreclose a linguistic response? How might such a foreclosure be said? In pursuing a fundamental ontology of images Mitchell has asked what they want, but are there another ways of speaking about an image that Mitchell has missed. Are there other taxonomies? Perhaps what they want is never to have to answer to us. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The idea the pictures want something evokes the belief that pictures are spirits, that they represent what J. G. Frazer called 'sympathetic magic'. The colonial response was to be suspicious of any such claim and regard it as a superstition held by the backward and the colonised, but dismissed by us advanced Westerners. This is the issue that W. J. T. Mitchell's most recent work plays with. This paper addresses these issues by explicitly taking up the question of drawing. Engaging with the writings of John Berger, and in response to the distinct lack of drawing by anthropologists, the paper asks what role does this sympathetic magic play when we actually make a picture. What can the act of drawing tell us about what pictures want? [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper argues that in the spring of 2008 a new political movement appeared in the United States, a movement not aware of itself until that moment. It was a movement grown among multiple publics that did not fit the pre-defined scripts of identity politics. It was a grass-roots initiative of citizens bearing witness to their collective responsibility in the eyes of a global public sphere that found its own visibility in and through the campaign of Barack Obama. The paper is primarily a discussion of this collective image of which the image of Obama is also part. The discussion of the collective image also includes some consideration of the new media forms that facilitate the free circulation of images, media that deterritorialise political control and democratise its distribution. Part I introduces this collective image, and was written just after the US Presidential nominating conventions. Part II was written while waiting for the results of the 2008 presidential election, and engages directly with Mitchell's argument regarding the lives of images. Part III, written after Obama's victory, considers what might be said by this event, and speculates on the political future of the empowering image. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper argues that central to the formation and orientation of politicised academic subjects is the notion of intervention. It examines the prevailing conceptions of intervention in the case of cultural studies, and argues that these prevailing notions of how academics and intellectuals can intervene politically rely on broadly Gramscian and post-Marxist theories. However, it argues that the way these theories have been assumed has led to a rather under-theorised faith in the political value of 'critique'. It proposes that this under-examined faith in the political power of critique is under-theoretical, broadly metaphysical, subject-centred and a regression from poststructuralist-informed theories of the political. By revisiting the implications of post-structuralist theories for academic work vis-à-vis intervention, the paper proposes that what is required is more thoroughgoing attention to the place and character of disciplinarity in the pragmatic mechanics of culture and society's discourses and hegemonies. It argues that the conditions of possibility for intervention are indissociable from the institutional and disciplinary character of (post)modernity. In other words, it argues, the academic 'condition' is one of unavoidably heterogeneous language games in a web of disciplinary differences, and in the face of (the constitutive character of) disciplinarity and disciplinary difference, what has arisen is disciplinary enclaving, mutual unintelligibility and disarticulation. In this situation, it often appears that the only possible form of ethical and political intervention is 'critique' - either within one's own discipline or 'publicly', journalistically. However, this paper argues that the interventional effectivity of any 'critique' is dubious at best. Instead it proposes a theory and practice of 'alterdisciplinarity'. Grounded in post-structuralism and deconstructive discourse theory, alterdisciplinary practice is that which seeks to alter other disciplinary discourses and their productions (knowledges) not by critiquing them but by intervening into the disciplinary spaces of their production and legitimation. Against the urgency of people dying in the streets, what in God's name is the point of cultural studies? (Stuart Hall) [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

There is not yet, and perhaps never could be, a clear canonical history that makes sense of Charles Sanders Peirce. In this sense, despite the best efforts of Peirce scholarship, Peirce is not 'an author'. A highly technical philosopher who worked on several fronts, he appears to espouse positions that the standard traditions of philosophical debate find difficult to hold together. Partly because of the fragmentary nature of his oeuvre, and partly because of the diversity of his interests, he is often appropriated into projects, these appropriations contributing further to the difficulty of telling a single sense-making story. In this paper, I sketch five stories: 1. Peirce as sui generis, the founder of pragmatism; 2. Peirce as not sui generis - the influences in his work and the conversations of the philosophers in which he participated; 3. Peirce as a philosopher of science, and hence, not compatible with projects in the human sciences and the humanities; 4. Peirce as he was appropriated into the human sciences and the humanities, in the form of semiology and following that, into Derrida's critique of semiology; 5. Peirce retrieved by neo-pragmatism as a weapon against 'French theory'. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper takes a meta-perspective on the theoretical grounding of cultural studies since the late 1970s. It suggests a realisation of the possibilities of both classic phenomenological thought for the field and cultural studies' continued connections to traditional cultural concepts such as Bildung and Kultur. Of particular importance are relations among cultural studies' semiotic-political and economic engagement with culture, phenomenological concepts of Umwelt and historical conceptions of Bildung and Kultur. While arguing that thinking through these relations provides an intellectual route forward for cultural studies, the paper recognises that such intellectual configurations also resonate with earlier models of cultural studies from the 1950s and '60s. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Arguing towards a theory of dromology, Paul Virilio engages at every turn with the consequences of acceleration on society - primarily the ever-increasing speed of information transmission - on society. This paper uses Virilio's theories, specifically his arguments surrounding the impact of acceleration on our experiences of space, to question the workings of agency between humans and technology. Looking specifically at video games and the practice of modding to make user-generated machinima, this paper suggests that a simple binary positioning of humans and techno-agents is an insufficient way to approach the relationships, patterns, effects and outcomes that emerge at the juncture of humans and 'their' technology. Instead, this paper suggests a model of agency that does not privilege a techno-agent, as in the case of Virilio, over a human agent and suggests that it is potentially more useful to consider agency as distributed between, among and across, an assemblage of both human and non-human actors. The aim of this paper is also to consider what anthropological enquiry, and by extension its methodologies, can contribute to a discussion of Virilio's work. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper seeks to explore the grand narratives that have been produced in the post 9/11 era in Europe by looking at the March 11, 2004 attacks in Madrid, and the July 7, 2005 attacks in London. The paper will posit that the random nature of the Madrid and London attacks, and the apparent lack of meaning behind the 'message' of these attacks, destabilises a fundamental and mythological narrative of the European project: that the 'new Europe' is somehow beyond politics and has entered into a Kantian 'perpetual peace'. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Although hacking is painted as destructive and anti‐social in the eyes of the mainstream media, many hackers seek to reclaim it and its meaning as a harmless if not socially beneficial activity. One strategy is to construct a boundary between legitimate hacking and the activities of the much maligned script kiddies, inspired by a ‘hacker ethic’. This hacker ethic springs directly from hacker practice and thus emerges from the visceral register, particularly that associated with pleasure. It is also engaged in a politics of becoming which attempts to extend ethical principles of equality and freedom to information environments and applications. This paper argues that the presence of the ‘other’ of hacking continues to contaminate hacking because of the ambiguous and contradictory nature of this ethic. It argues that the ambiguities inherent in the visceral source of hacking’s ethical orientation will continue to destabilise its legitimacy. Further, hacking cannot justify itself based on appeals to the virtues of hacking skill without contradicting its own moorings in the politics of becoming. To illustrate this argument, the paper looks at a case study of script kiddies and their involvement in distributed denial of service attacks against seven corporate websites in February 2000. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]