Public Culture recent issues

Call for Contributions

Wed, 07 Oct 2009 11:33:27 PDT

Editor's Letter

Lomnitz, C. — Wed, 07 Oct 2009 11:33:27 PDT

Remembering Benjamin from South of the Pyrenees: The Two-Gauge Problem

Valverde, M. — Wed, 07 Oct 2009 11:33:27 PDT

This essay is a personal reflection on the absence of the Spanish civil war refugees from the cultured public's collective memory of the place where Walter Benjamin died.

Phantom of the Forever War: Fazul Abdullah Muhammad and the Terrorist Imaginary

Prestholdt, J. — Wed, 07 Oct 2009 11:33:27 PDT

This essay addresses myths about al Qaeda operative Fazul Abdullah Muhammad and their implications for American foreign policy. The essay demonstrates how Fazul's legend mirrors broader genealogies of information that shape contemporary perceptions of terrorism. Fazul orchestrated two major al Qaeda attacks in Kenya, including the 1998 bombing of the U.S. Embassy, but he has also become the object of fantastic speculation—the product of a psychology of fear combined with a popular imagination saturated with the layered syntax of the entertainment industry's imagery. Fazul's myth reveals how, in declaring war on terrorism, we have likewise waged a shadow war against the projections of collective paranoia.

"We're Mexican Too": Publicity and Status at the International Line

Yeh, R. — Wed, 07 Oct 2009 11:33:28 PDT

A series of ethnographic examples, all related to a demonstration at the International Port of Entry connecting Tijuana, Mexico, to San Diego, California, show the importance for Tijuana's public sphere of the distinction between documented and undocumented status vis-à-vis the United States. They also show how Tijuana's documented public reproduces itself across a range of communicative genres and sites, from a newspaper poll, to face-to-face dialogue, to the local baseball stadium, to the port of entry itself.

Complexio Oppositorum: Notes on the Left in Neoliberal Italy

Muehlebach, A. — Wed, 07 Oct 2009 11:33:28 PDT

The contemporary situation is seldom best characterized as a battlefield with clearly drawn political dividing lines. In fact, neoliberalism is often better understood as a form to contain the oppositional—old leftist solidarity and new rightist utopias—and fold them into a single moral order: a complexio oppositorum, in Carl Schmitt's words.

Secular Populism and the Semiotics of the Crowd in Turkey

Tambar, K. — Wed, 07 Oct 2009 11:33:28 PDT

In much of the Muslim world, secularization has proceeded through the modernizing mechanisms of the region's various states. By contrast, social movements committed to the (re)introduction of religion into public and political life have frequently functioned through appeals to the popular will. Recent political events in Turkey present a dramatic contrast to this historically established antagonism between secularization and populist politics. In the spring of 2007 a series of mass demonstrations, rallied in the name of secularism and against the elected Islamist regime, were conducted in several of Turkey's major urban centers. The figure of the secularist crowd provides an image of secularism grounded not in the coercive apparatuses of the military and the modernizing bureaucracy but in an assertion of populism. This article explores the tentative formation of a secular populism. I argue that this particular conjuncture not only displays the persistent contradictions that subtend the relationship between secularism and populist politics but also reveals the tensions that sustain the field of democratic politics in Turkey.

Virtual Museums of Forbidden Memories: Hu Jie's Documentary Films on the Cultural Revolution

Li, J. — Wed, 07 Oct 2009 11:33:28 PDT

This essay explores the politics of remembering the Chinese Cultural Revolution through a study of two banned documentaries by Hu Jie that have circulated widely in cyberspace: Though I Am Gone (2006) and In Search of Lin Zhao's Soul (2004). Contextualizing them in discourses on the (still unrealized) Cultural Revolution Museum, I argue that these films manifest an intriguing tension between the traumatic past and the oblivious present, between the intimate confidentiality of interviews and their address of a larger public sphere, and between the courtroom-like "objectivity" of their photographic evidence and the passionate "subjectivity" of testimony.

The Park Pass: Peopling and Civilizing a New Old Beijing

Farquhar, J. — Wed, 07 Oct 2009 11:33:28 PDT

Many mundane practices of city life in public in Beijing converge on public parks. Focusing on the uses, significance, and powers of the annual park pass, an inexpensive identity card that gives residents free access to the city's well-known and historic parks, I demonstrate some ways in which the "routines and rituals" of state articulate in practice with both a spatial and a nationalist politics of the people. This is not a politics of rebellion or resistance; rather, it advances a compliant civilizational nationalism with deep roots in China's revolutionary twentieth century. It displays a particular sensitivity to the history of spaces in the city and to the forms of ownership and control to which such spaces can be subjected. To understand the daily enjoyments of ordinary city residents as a continuation of China's revolutionary century is to acknowledge the voices and the public activism of many whose forms of political communication are usually ignored, or even denounced as passive. But a more generous definition of the political, one that does not presume liberal democracy as its natural setting or emancipation as its aim, can show how even compliance and personal pleasures work on the dispositions of power in public.

From Consumer to Prosumer to Produser: Who Keeps Shifting My Paradigm? (We Do!)

Grinnell, C. K. — Wed, 07 Oct 2009 11:33:28 PDT

Less than ten years after going mainstream, the Web returns to its roots as a read/write tool while entering a new, more social and participatory phase (Web 2.0) where the consumer's role morphs into that of "produser."

On Target: Aura, Affect, and the Rhetoric of "Design Democracy"

Harold, C. — Wed, 07 Oct 2009 11:33:28 PDT

This article analyzes the Target Corporation as an example of the foregrounding of design in contemporary consumer culture. To understand the destiny of the manufactured object in an age of aesthetic capitalism, this article argues that the previous relationships among use value, exchange value, and sign value need to be reconfigured. A new dimension of the object is emerging, one that is best understood as combining aura and affect.

Books Received

Wed, 07 Oct 2009 11:33:28 PDT

Contributors

Wed, 07 Oct 2009 11:33:28 PDT

Call for Contributions

Tue, 26 May 2009 08:12:09 PDT

Editor's Letter

Lomnitz, C. — Tue, 26 May 2009 08:12:09 PDT

Hijacked by Realism

Jaguaribe, B. — Tue, 26 May 2009 08:12:09 PDT

This essay discusses the impact of realist aesthetics as a "pedagogy of the gaze" that addresses the pressing issues of urban violence in Brazil.

The Violence of the Real: A Conversation with Rogerio Reis

Jaguaribe, B. — Tue, 26 May 2009 08:12:09 PDT

This interview investigates how the photographer Rogério Reis created his photographic installation Microwave as a response to the urban violence of the drug trade in Rio de Janeiro. It explores also how Reis decided to make this aesthetic option, how the relation between the press and the drug dealers has changed over the past years, and how civil society attempts to respond to the violence of the city. Finally, the interview examines Reis's photographs of the carnival in Rio as a different kind of aesthetic rendering of the subjective and collective inventions of the self.

How to Read the Future: The Yield Curve, Affect, and Financial Prediction

Zaloom, C. — Tue, 26 May 2009 08:12:09 PDT

Financial prediction provokes intense affect. For bond traders, hedge fund managers, and economic planners, both statistical reasoning and affective discomfort surround professional judgments about the future. This article argues that contemporary financial knowledge is organized around the interplay of reason and affect. The history and contemporary use of the U.S. Treasury yield curve—a key economic indicator—point to this intractable problem of modern knowledge more generally. The devices that should create grounds for calculating future profits also open avenues of affect. Specifically, the reflexive character of financial devices provides fertile ground. As a forecasting tool, the yield curve's effectiveness is bound to its particular social content. Financial tools aggregate and objectify professionals' assessments about the economic future. Readers of the curve's shape must evaluate the rationality of the economic participants whose activities compose this reflexive device. Reading the financial future places affect at the center of calculation.

Microloans and Micronarratives: Sentiment for a Small World

Black, S. — Tue, 26 May 2009 08:12:09 PDT

This essay evaluates the contribution that sentimentality might make to cosmopolitan practices in contemporary life. In particular, it considers how the legacy of feminized sentimental fiction informs twenty-first-century rhetoric on the Internet. The essay examines how the person-to-person microlending Web site Kiva fosters attachments with distant others through the illusion of intimacy that reshapes the global into an emotionally manageable size. This sentimental promise of a small world is both what enables and what haunts a cosmopolitan sense of responsibility to others.

The Color of Pain

Irving, A. — Tue, 26 May 2009 08:12:09 PDT

By focusing on artworks made by persons confronting their own mortality, this essay explores the relation between the exterior, visible colors of art and the interior experiences of pain and imagination, as mediated through the process of artistic production by persons living with a sick or unstable body. As color always contains hidden shades that are wrapped up within personal biography, the imagination, and diverse existential circumstances, I argue that colors contained in these artworks can never be "pure," for they are too contaminated by disease, death, emotion, and imagination for the purposes of cognitive science and are too intertwined with a specific personal biography and bodily experience to offer a straightforward account of shared social and cultural practices.

Can There Be a Subaltern Middle Class? Notes on African American and Dalit History

Pandey, G. — Tue, 26 May 2009 08:12:09 PDT

Focusing on specific assemblages that have historically been seen as communities of lower-class and underclass individuals and families, this essay examines the history of members of these "communities" who come to inhabit not the positions of the down-and-out, where they allegedly belong, but those of the more comfortable, educated, professional middle classes. It asks what the history of the struggles of these subaltern middle classes tells us about the limits of the middle-class idea and about the conditions necessary for the consolidation of particular groups as middle-class, modern, and unmarked.

"It's Hard Out Here for a Pimp... with... a Whole Lot of Bitches Jumpin' Ship": Navigating Black Politics in the Wake of Katrina

Ralph, M. — Tue, 26 May 2009 08:12:09 PDT

If not quite in these words, some scholars and activists who have promoted a social movement based on the civil rights movement have implied that their project is undermined by "a whole lot of bitches jumpin' ship," while few bother to question whether and to what extent that movement provides the best strategy for liberation. Fewer still have solicited insight from populations that—instead of mere cowardice or sheer apathy—might possess a social critique that could provide the basis for a reinvigorated post–civil rights political project. In the spirit of developing the critical stance that might attend to this mission, this essay considers the relationship among oratory, textuality, and gendered authority by discussing how The Covenant with Black America is strategically deployed (though its contents are scarcely discussed) during the 2006 State of the Black Union political performance and exploring the spellbinding power of masculine leadership in Hustle and Flow, where the labor of an entire household is required to produce a male rapper as an icon of fame whose lyrical talent propels him into the spotlight. I consider these two episodes against the political backdrop of 2005–6, defined primarily by the tragic events of Hurricane Katrina, which intensified longing for a black leader who could quell the crisis. Revisiting this event helps me track efforts to recuperate a male leader that conform to popular ideas about how social movements proceed but which ignore the need for different perspectives in any political project that will succeed in undoing persistent inequalities—and that refuse to question whether and to what extent civil rights frontiership provides the default strategy for a political project designed to empower African Americans and other oppressed constituencies.

The Wrench and the Ratchet: Cultural Mediation in a Contemporary Liberation Struggle

Seigneurie, K. — Tue, 26 May 2009 08:12:09 PDT

This essay examines the cultural politics of the Lebanese Independence Uprising of spring 2005. I argue that representations produced during the uprising reveal a rhetoric of resistance to the kind of military coercion and legitimating discourses that mark contemporary history, not just in the Arab world. Using concepts drawn from Jacques Rancière's work on discursive regimes, I show how the graffiti, chants, popular songs, video clips, signs, banners and dramatizations produced during the uprising wrench everyday discourses into an effective rhetoric of national resistance. The elegiac transformation of intimidation into ethical and national consciousness provides a spiritual node around which a renewed sense of national identity can accrete. To cast into relief this claim, the essay also analyzes the dominant cultural rhetorics of the Syrian regime and Lebanese Hezbollah (Party of God), arguing that their characteristic authoritarian and "pious modern" discursive regimes can offer nothing more vital, unifying, and therefore potentially stable than the uprising's "postmodern humanism."

To Buy or Not to Be: Trespassing the Gated Community

Monterescu, D. — Tue, 26 May 2009 08:12:09 PDT

The emergence of gated communities in Israel/Palestine signals new modes of urban exclusion, which reshape previous forms of spatial distinction. Focusing on the ethnically "mixed town" of Jaffa, where an unprecedented number of such gated communities have been constructed in the past decade, this article interrogates the modus operandi of the Andromeda Hill project and Palestinian resistance to it. Conceptualized as a neoliberal mode of ethnogentrification, this gated community attempts to achieve the impossible task of positioning itself both within and without local lived space and inhabited time. Operating as a neo-orientalist simulacrum, such projects subvert, spatially and semiotically, the standard logic of urban representation and modernistic notions of segregation. The concept of spatial heteronomy is proposed to address such dialectic strategies of spatial orientationality—circumventing the contested local urban space and projected onto a mythological plane of Mediterranean fantasy.

Books Received

Tue, 26 May 2009 08:12:09 PDT

Contributors

Tue, 26 May 2009 08:12:09 PDT

Erratum

Tue, 26 May 2009 08:12:09 PDT

Call for Contributions

Fri, 03 Apr 2009 14:18:24 PDT

Editor's Letter

Lomnitz, C. — Fri, 03 Apr 2009 14:18:24 PDT

Memory in Times of War

Uribe, M. V. — Fri, 03 Apr 2009 14:18:24 PDT

This article describes the complexity of transitional justice in Colombia since the approval of Law 975, known as the "Justice and Peace Law," and the demobilization of the United Autodefenses of Colombia in 2005. In the middle of the open war between the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia and the Colombian government, different victims' organizations have empowered themselves around their struggle to reconstruct memory.

Ethnic Violence and the Prospects for Democracy in the Aftermath of the 2007 Kenyan Elections

Ashforth, A. — Fri, 03 Apr 2009 14:18:24 PDT

This essay anatomizes the postelection violence in Kenya in 2007 to identify the different forms of ethnic conflict so as to analyze their implications for the future stability of a democratic regime in the country. It argues that five types of ethnic conflict marked the aftermath of the elections: ethnically targeted state repression, targeting of local ethnic proxies for national political figures, ethnic vigilantism, opportunistic criminal violence, and ethnic cleansing by Kalenjin ethnonationalists. The essay also argues that while there are good prospects for reconciliation, Kalenjin ethnonationalism poses a serious challenge to long-term stability.

Self-Appreciation; or, The Aspirations of Human Capital

Feher, M. — Fri, 03 Apr 2009 14:18:24 PDT

Human capital is to neoliberalism what Marx's free worker was to liberal capitalism, that is, the subjective formation at once presupposed and targeted by neoliberal technologies of government. According to this thesis, the neoliberal condition involves investors in their own human capital who, as such, seek to appreciate the value of the portfolio of conducts that constitutes them and whose relationship to themselves is speculative rather than possessive—as was the case of their liberal predecessors.

Imaging Tibet

Mehla, — Fri, 03 Apr 2009 14:18:24 PDT

This collection of images documents aspects of a Tibetan nomadic family's everyday life. The photographs capture members of the photographer's family in their summer pastures, near Rega Village, Sichuan Province, People's Republic of China.

Freedom and Blasphemy: On Indonesian Press Bans and Danish Cartoons

Keane, W. — Fri, 03 Apr 2009 14:18:24 PDT

A comparison of two challenges to freedom of the press, in Indonesia and Denmark, reveals some of the linkages among semiotic ideologies, secularism, and a moral narrative of modernity. By analyzing conflicts between semiotic ideologies, the article shows how actual journalistic practices both presuppose and deviate from the assumptions of any given such ideology. The article also discusses claims about the role of the press in the history of the nation. The case comparison brings out some fundamental tensions between two grounds for this role, to speak as a voice of a people and to serve as a conduit for truth. Viewed in the context of the semiotic ideologies they presuppose, conflicts over the actions and authority of the press can reveal some of the difficulties posed by the moral narrative of modernity and the common sense of contemporary liberalism.

Beyond Good and Evil, Whither Liberal Sacrificial Love?

Povinelli, E. A. — Fri, 03 Apr 2009 14:18:24 PDT

This essay probes discourses of millennial governance in current late liberal governance and contemporary critical theory. It examines a set of dilemmas for progressive critics when they mobilize discourses of sacrifice and sacrificial love against the millennial imaginary of good and evil. In particular, it asks how discourses of sacrifice and sacrificial love coordinate violence and redemption in such a way that suffering and dying, the mortification of bodies, are read from the perspective of the redeemed end of a horizonal time.

Untimely Vision: Aime Cesaire, Decolonization, Utopia

Wilder, G. — Fri, 03 Apr 2009 14:18:24 PDT

This essay focuses on Aimé Césaire's post–World War II commitment to colonial emancipation without national independence. It examines how his constitutional initiatives to enact a future with France in an age of decolonization may be read as politically untimely and strategic utopian engagements with the complex problem of freedom. It suggests that they can be grasped as such only if we recognize that Césaire's 1946 program to transform Antillean colonies into French departments and his subsequent attempt to reconstitute France as a federal republic were mediated by the spirits of Toussaint Louverture and Victor Schoelcher and the legacies of the 1790s revolution in Saint-Domingue and the 1848 abolition of slavery. At these crucial turning points, imperial conditions had created the possibility of nonnational colonial emancipation even as certain kinds of instituted liberty themselves obstructed the prospect of substantive freedom. For subsequent generations, such failed initiatives then became futures past that condensed not yet realized but ever-available emancipatory potentialities.

The Cartography of National Humiliation and the Emergence of China's Geobody

Callahan, W. A. — Fri, 03 Apr 2009 14:18:24 PDT

Maps are an important site of the production and consumption of the national image. This essay examines modern Chinese maps to show how the very material borders between foreign and domestic space are the outgrowth of the symbolic workings of historical geography and the conventions of Chinese cartography. These maps do much more than celebrate the extent of Chinese sovereignty; they also mourn the loss of national territories through a cartography of national humiliation. The goal of this essay is to shift our attention from the diplomatic issues of international borders to examine what Chinese maps of China can tell us about the Chinese people's hopes and fears, not only in the past or present, but for the future. This essay has two general aims: to demonstrate how China's current national maps have emerged through the creative tension of unbounded imperial domain and bounded sovereign territory, and to show how the cartography of national humiliation informs the biopolitics of the geobody. China's often unique experience, the essay concludes, can show us how cartography is an important site of struggle for other peoples as well.

The Visible and the Invisibles: Photography and Social Imaginaries in Brazil

Jaguaribe, B., Lissovsky, M. — Fri, 03 Apr 2009 14:18:24 PDT

This essay offer a comparative analysis of three sets of photographs made in different periods of Brazilian history: portraits of urban slaves made by the photographer Christiano Júnior in the mid-nineteenth century during the Second Empire; photographs of political propaganda commissioned by the Estado Novo in the early 1940s (Obra Getuliana); and contemporary images of Rio de Janeiro favela dwellers taken by the inhabitants of the favelas themselves as part of the communitarian projects of "visual inclusion." While examining these photographs, we find that our attention is not only centered on the visual traces of the extinct past that resurfaces; rather, we also scan the vestiges of the future that these images distill. Their use of a visual rhetoric that defines scenarios, excludes or includes protagonists, and, most crucially, evokes pedagogies of the gaze allows us to glean signs of becoming, modes of making visible imagined modernities and communities. Despite their disparity, these sets of images organize temporal experiences in specific fashions. In the carte de visite, the testimony of continuity and of succeeding generations attests to a past exemplarily recorded for the future. In the case of the Obra Getuliana, the temporal mode insists on the inauguration of the future-in-the-present. In the photographs of social "inclusion," the emphasis is cast on the present, and the future is maintained in suspenseful incompletion. In each set of images, therefore, a version of modernity is rendered as progress, rupture, and the right to the quotidian.

Books Received

Fri, 03 Apr 2009 14:18:24 PDT

Contributors

Fri, 03 Apr 2009 14:18:24 PDT

Call for Contributions

Fri, 24 Oct 2008 09:05:44 PDT

Editor's Letter

Lomnitz, C. — Fri, 24 Oct 2008 09:05:44 PDT

The Roots of the Darfur Conflict and the Chadian Civil War

Marchal, R. — Fri, 24 Oct 2008 09:05:44 PDT

This article takes issue with a number of key representations of the Darfur and Chad crises. It argues that the conflict in Darfur is to some extent the continuation of the civil war in Chad, not the opposite; the failure to acknowledge the regional dimensions of these two crises is responsible for the current fighting and the stalemate in Darfur; and a breakthrough needs a fresh reassessment of the conflicts and their dynamics by a more capable mediation team.

Detranscendentalizing the Secular

Gourgouris, S. — Fri, 24 Oct 2008 09:05:44 PDT

Against simple antisecularist claims that secularism is to be equated with Western rationalism or with Christianity, or with colonialism tout court, I argue that an essential task of secular criticism (according to Edward Said's initial conception) is to conduct a double and dialectical critique of the metaphysics of both secularism and antisecularism.

Is Critique Secular? A Symposium at UC Berkeley

Mahmood, S. — Fri, 24 Oct 2008 09:05:44 PDT

This short essay calls for an examination of the assumption that critique is necessarily secular and of the necessary disciplines of subjectivity and practices of rumination and interpretation entailed in this assumption.

Antisecularist Failures: A Counterresponse to Saba Mahmood

Gourgouris, S. — Fri, 24 Oct 2008 09:05:44 PDT

Secular Imperatives?

Mahmood, S. — Fri, 24 Oct 2008 09:05:44 PDT

Health: Crude Concept and Philosophical Question

Canguilhem, G. — Fri, 24 Oct 2008 09:05:44 PDT

If a definition of health were possible without reference to some explicit knowledge, where would we seek its foundation? In this essay Georges Canguilhem takes up this question within philosophy, science, and medicine, exposing the assumptions necessary for various notions of health to be activated in relation to the human organism—notions that are at best inexact.

Font of a Nation: Creating a National Graphic Identity for Qatar

Mattern, S. — Fri, 24 Oct 2008 09:05:44 PDT

In 2003 Qatar commissioned a young graphic designer to create a new graphic identity for the nation. The award-winning logo was intended to reinforce the history, values, religion, and language Qatar shares with other Arab countries and, simultaneously, the commitment to progressive development that aligns Qatar with the West. The contradictions ultimately prove too much for a typeface—and even for the nation—to sustain. Ultimately, what is branded is not a nation but a marketing-driven entity circulating amid flows of labor, capital, and image—a nation fetishized, a nation-as-corporation.

A Proliferation of Pigs: Specters of Monstrosity in Reformation Indonesia

Florida, N. — Fri, 24 Oct 2008 09:05:44 PDT

This essay explores visual art, literary production, memory, and politics in Indonesia at the cusp of the twenty-first century. It focuses on the paintings of the contemporary Indonesian artist Djokopekik and the translation of those paintings into literature by the novelist Sindhunata; both painter and writer are self-consciously engaged in the societal struggles that surrounded and succeeded the fall of President Soeharto in May 1998. The essay thematizes the productive possibilities generated by these works of art that challenge the boundaries between artistic creation and historical transformation.

Guest Editors' Introduction: Debating Capital, Spectacle, and Modernity

Jeffrey, A., McFarlane, C., Vasudevan, A. — Fri, 24 Oct 2008 09:05:44 PDT

This article introduces the dossier of responses to the RETORT collective's Afflicted Powers: Capital and Spectacle in a New Age of War (2005). We seek to ground this text in its political and theoretical context, identifying its relevance to scholars and activists alike. We introduce the four commentaries, which collectively provide a challenging set of observations concerning RETORT'S analysis of the contemporary geopolitical moment, focusing in particular on their theorization of the spectacle, the nature of U.S. imperialism, and the politics of modernity.

Beyond Image and Reality: Critique and Resistance in the Age of Spectacle

Campbell, D. — Fri, 24 Oct 2008 09:05:44 PDT

Engaging RETORT's Afflicted Powers, this critique asks how far RETORT takes Guy Debord's thinking, what the political implications of their use of Debord are vis-à-vis some of the geopolitical issues they raise (specifically, with regard to U.S. security policy and the Balkans), and, given the problems discussed, what conclusions can be reached about the nature of resistance both within and to a society of spectacle.

The Death Wish of Modernity and the Politics of Mimesis

Katz, C. — Fri, 24 Oct 2008 09:05:44 PDT

This commentary on Afflicted Powers focuses on RETORT's theorization of the spectacle. Through a discussion of mimetic versus metonymic politics and an examination of childhood as a site of spectacle, the domestic security state and the social reproduction of weak citizenship are brought into the discussion.

Pleasures of the Polemic

Tuathail, G. O — Fri, 24 Oct 2008 09:05:44 PDT

This review critiques Afflicted Powers on three fronts: a flawed conception of politics as spectacle, an overly functionalist account of the Iraq war, and base determinism in its reasoning about American foreign policy.

The Spectacle Today: A Response to RETORT

Mitchell, W. J. T. — Fri, 24 Oct 2008 09:05:44 PDT

This essay is a critique of Afflicted Powers, the RETORT collective's assessment of the state of culture and politics in the period of the U.S. invasion and occupation of Iraq.

The Totality for Grownups

RETORT — Fri, 24 Oct 2008 09:05:44 PDT

RETORT responds to its critics with a deep appreciation but also with a need to assert the broad purposes and character of Afflicted Powers as a polemical survey and provocation in which the authors challenge the Left to recover from its two decades of panic over the dangers of "totalization" and to begin to describe again the driving forces, the key determinants, of politics in the twenty-first century. RETORT proposes a political antiscience—a form of political writing that manages, at last, to wake us (the present writers included) from the sleep of reason. RETORT endeavors to recapture the basic Debordian insight that the power of images, to the extent that there is such a power, is a function of the powerlessness—the constantly manufactured and reinforced powerlessness—of those other forms of life, that other texture of social relations, that in the past has been capable of speaking back to the image and putting the Rumsfeld worldview in doubt.

Books Received

Fri, 24 Oct 2008 09:05:44 PDT

Contributors

Fri, 24 Oct 2008 09:05:44 PDT