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Force and Economy

Carl A. Raschke

in Force of God: Political Theology and the Crisis of Liberal Democracy

Increasingly, market economies run on credit as well as on credulity. They are gift economies that genealogically reveal themselves as impossible political economies. The liberal democratic order ... More

Increasingly, market economies run on credit as well as on credulity. They are gift economies that genealogically reveal themselves as impossible political economies. The liberal democratic order today has become an impossible economy. Its impossibility is enabled by the unboundedness of desire for a pure gift economy—and a corresponding popular will that generates the political fantasies legitimating these desires.Less

Crisis, critical perspectives, and fin de millénaire prose fiction

Ruth Cruickshank

in Fin de millénaire French Fiction: The Aesthetics of Crisis

This integrated overview of political, social, theoretical, and literary aspects of crisis establishes the critical framework for analysing the fin de millénaire French cultural field and the four ... More

This integrated overview of political, social, theoretical, and literary aspects of crisis establishes the critical framework for analysing the fin de millénaire French cultural field and the four writers. This chapter describes a ‘long twentieth century’ of crisis thinking, countering conventional distinctions between modernism and postmodernism; and the perception that postmodern perpetual crisis is culturally dominant. There is a sustained analysis of fin de millénaire thought (including Baudrillard, Bourdieu, Derrida, and Nora) and its contribution to debates about consumerism, globalization, and neoliberalism. A discussion of feminist thought announces the book's critical explorations of representations of women and discourses of misogyny. The fin de millénaire double bind and a substantial survey of the contemporary literary field considers the influence of the media and global market economics; examines commodifying labels including autofiction, ‘minimalist’, and ‘women's writing’; and whilst emphasizing heterogeneity, posits ‘returns to crisis’ in fin de millénaire French prose fiction.Less

The Simulacrum of Hypermasculinity in Comic Book Cinema

Daniel J. Connell

in Toxic Masculinity: Mapping the Monstrous in Our Heroes

This chapter discusses the intensification of hypermasculinity’s physical aspect through the character of Wolverine as portrayed by Hugh Jackman. Delving into Baudrillard’s concept of the simulacrum ... More

This chapter discusses the intensification of hypermasculinity’s physical aspect through the character of Wolverine as portrayed by Hugh Jackman. Delving into Baudrillard’s concept of the simulacrum and the hyperreal, Connell’s chapter discusses the impact of live action actors depicting our superheroes, blurring the line between what is physically achievable and what is not. This chapter posits that this proliferation of muscularity – a near requisite of male actors portraying hero roles – has paradoxically moved the aesthetics of the film further along Baudrillard’s phases of the image even while bringing the reality of the film closer to its source material.Less

Art and permeable moments

Jared Pappas-Kelley

in Solvent Form: Art and destruction

Chapter two endeavours to define art amid a portmanteau—starting with Jean-Luc Nancy’s understanding of art and the image in The Ground of the Image, Bataille’s ideas concerning art as a rupture or ... More

Chapter two endeavours to define art amid a portmanteau—starting with Jean-Luc Nancy’s understanding of art and the image in The Ground of the Image, Bataille’s ideas concerning art as a rupture or fissure, Jean Baudrillard’s Why Hasn’t Everything Already Disappeared?, and Paul Virilio’s The Accident of Art—to understand better the accident, disappearance, and destruction that art courts. Next, it proposes that through this art houses a solvency—in a sense undoing, yet at the same time securing or making fixed—as conflicting and resistant tendencies within the object formed. This chapter also puts forward a correlation between Bataille and Virilio and their ideas regarding the negative or reverse miracle (that they suggest gives art its form), which is similarly made visible through loss or destruction.Less

Kaufman’s Dissensus

James Harvey

in Jacques Rancière and the Politics of Art Cinema

Exploring the tensions between the themes and visual style, Charlie Kaufman’s Synecdoche, New York is an exemplary manifestation of dissensus: ‘the presence of two worlds in one’ (Rancière, 2010: ... More

Exploring the tensions between the themes and visual style, Charlie Kaufman’s Synecdoche, New York is an exemplary manifestation of dissensus: ‘the presence of two worlds in one’ (Rancière, 2010: 37). Staging and subsequently thwarting middle-class America and classical Hollywood style, the film ultimately allows us to envision ways of being beyond the apparent “end of history”. Yet, in so doing, the film also highlights the tendency towards irony in contemporary American art cinema: a feedback-loop, art-housing the art film spectator safely, intellectually, inside the space of the film. This takes us to the political impasse of art cinema in general: when formal innovation meets cultural critique, a redistribution of the sensible occurs and makes possible subsequent changes outside of the cinema.Less

. The Gigantic

Marc Redfield

in The Rhetoric of Terror: Reflections on 9/11 and the War on Terror

The co-implication of aesthetic and tele-techno-mediatic problems and practices becomes visible as the twin (and twinned) problem of the aesthetic rendering of catastrophe (“after Auschwitz to write ... More

The co-implication of aesthetic and tele-techno-mediatic problems and practices becomes visible as the twin (and twinned) problem of the aesthetic rendering of catastrophe (“after Auschwitz to write poetry is barbaric”), on the one hand, and the technical recording of it (“Have you no human decency?”), on the other. Both are sensed to be at once necessary and violent, imperative and obscene activities. It was predictable that efforts to make art out of 9/11 would generate spasms of outrage. It was also predictable that, in the aftermath of the attacks, the quotes from European intellectual provocateurs that middle-highbrow American critics would most love to savor and hate would be aestheticizing tags: Karlheinz Stockhausen, widely quoted as saying that the attacks were “the greatest work of art that has ever been” or Jean Baudrillard, asserting that “the horror for the 4,000 [sic] victims of dying in those towers was inseparable from the horror of living in them.”Less

Newspaper Article: The Gulf War in Real Time and Virtual Space: Approach: Hyperreality

Peter Childs

in Texts: Contemporary Cultural Texts and Critical Approaches

The literary, however identified, may be said to include many examples of non-fiction, including works of journalism. Given the reporter’s quasi-objective relationship to history, the journalistic ... More

The literary, however identified, may be said to include many examples of non-fiction, including works of journalism. Given the reporter’s quasi-objective relationship to history, the journalistic article was in some ways seen as a model for much literature in the 1930s, with a writer such as George Orwell specialising equally in fiction, essay-writing, and reportage, and a novelist such as Christopher Isherwood fashioning himself in fiction as a news camera ‘recording, not thinking’. Newspaper articles are in fact defined by their place of publication rather than their content, but there are certain likely formal characteristics or principles of journalistic writing to do with information-content, length, veracity, verisimilitude, argument, and so forth, though these are also highly variable and differ from feature writing to editorial and so on. The article that will be looked at in this chapter is the first in a series of three pieces written by Jean Baudrillard in 1991 about the war in the Gulf, or rather the lack of it.Less

Power without Politics: Domination Theory and the Crises of Capitalism

Adrian May

in From Bataille to Badiou: Lignes, the Preservation of Radical French Thought, 1987-2017

Around 1996, the review re-orientated its political critique to examine how the globalisation of financial capitalism had hamstrung the progressive left. Michel Surya’s De la domination described ... More

Around 1996, the review re-orientated its political critique to examine how the globalisation of financial capitalism had hamstrung the progressive left. Michel Surya’s De la domination described capitalism as a form of domination that exercised a form of power without politics, and decried the moralisation of economics which suggested that as long as businesses behaved well, the global financial system itself was unimpeachable. The chapter demonstrates that Surya’s work was influenced by Jean Baudrillard, but that this latter thinker’s account of a now entirely virtual financial economy increasingly seemed inadequate, and the review turned back to Guy Debord for a more Marxist critique of the alienation produced by contemporary capitalism. After exploring this historical genealogy, the chapter explores the Lignes contributions of Groupe Krisis to see how this Frankfurt School-inspired group both predicted the 2008 financial crisis and provided an apocalyptic account of capitalism’s inevitable demise. Yet this account is also seen to be inherently de-politicising and foreclosing political action, and the chapter closes by contrasting it to the analyses of other Lignes contributors, such as Daniel Bensaïd, especially when discussing the EU treatment of Greece after the financial crisis.Less

We Have Never Been Postmodern: Reading Jean Baudrillard

Steve Redhead

in The Jean Baudrillard Reader

This chapter considers other readings by and on Baudrillard which are not collected in the Reader itself. There is a critical editorial introduction to these readings provided in this chapter.

Hyperreal Peninsula: North Korea’s Nuclear Cinema and South Korea’s Digital Revolution

Elizabeth Shim

in Media Technologies for Work and Play in East Asia: Critical Perspectives on Japan and the Two Koreas

Drawing from the televisual simulacra of North Korea weapons provocations and projections of regime power, this chapter examines the emergence of a video-mediated nuclear North Korea in the new ... More

Drawing from the televisual simulacra of North Korea weapons provocations and projections of regime power, this chapter examines the emergence of a video-mediated nuclear North Korea in the new millennium within the broader frame of networked digital technologies that have facilitated South Korea media flows into the country. Military display and the more recent emergence of the leadership’s nuclear diplomacy can be evaluated as simulation, and is interrogated in the explicit context of a cultural moment when the people of the territorialised and retrenched nation-state of 21st-century North Korea are receptive to South Korean popular culture and neoliberal productions. This chapter highlights the opportunities and constraints of global media and information flows for the newly emerging society of 'transnational Korea' being built on capitalist imperatives and shaping hierarchical relations. Within this configuration, military display simulates state power at a historical moment when South Korea televisual media is the driving force behind prohibited North Korea leisure time. Mediated technologies then, and their capacity to meticulously steer the social, illustrate the uneasy relationship between work and play, state sovereignty and global flow.Less

Introduction: Eyewitnesses, Conspiracies and Baudrillard

Martin Randall

in 9/11 and the Literature of Terror

This introductory chapter discusses the impact of the events of 9/11 on the present day. It identifies the various responses to terrorist attacks, which include eyewitness reports that gave ... More

This introductory chapter discusses the impact of the events of 9/11 on the present day. It identifies the various responses to terrorist attacks, which include eyewitness reports that gave commentators empirical evidence to start creating what was happening at the time and then in the aftermath. It then looks at the appearance of 9/11 in literature, which combined authoritative documentation and accessible — and at times exciting — prose, in written format as well as in cinema. It examines the emergent ‘Literature of Terror’, which is the massive spread of counter conspiracy theories that have developed, especially on the Internet. It also considers how such conspiracies shed more light on the internal problems of ‘fictionalising’ the attacks. Finally, the chapter studies the cultural significance of the Internet, which has rapidly grown over the years, and Jean Baudrillard's views on 9/11.Less

Interface as Utopia

Michael F. Leruth

in Fred Forest's Utopia: Media Art and Activism

The Conclusion looks more closely at the utopian thread that runs through Forest’s artistic practice beginning with an overview of his lifelong preoccupation with immaterial forms of territoriality ... More

The Conclusion looks more closely at the utopian thread that runs through Forest’s artistic practice beginning with an overview of his lifelong preoccupation with immaterial forms of territoriality and his personal preference for more “realistic” forms of utopia. After outlining the symptoms of a postmodern crisis in western utopian thinking in its dominant perspectival form emphasizing visual projection, collective projects, and social-technological progress, it goes on to examine the ways in which Forest’s art represents a fundamental reconfiguration of the notion of utopia that differs from the enfeebled western paradigm in several important respects. Foremost among these differences is that Forest puts utopia in reverse by making utopia (i.e., the everyday pseudo-utopia of the modern mediascape, which he subjects to defamiliarizing realism) the mundane starting point rather than the ideal culmination of his utopian artistic practice. The Conclusion closes with a retrospective look at Forest’s body of work through the lens of the four main types of utopian interfaces he creates: the specular interface, the subversive interface, the metacommunicational interface, and the liminal interface.Less

Defiant life: the seductions of Terror amid the tyranny of the human

Julian Reid

in The Biopolitics of the War on Terror: Life Struggles, Liberal Modernity and the Defence of Logistical Societies

This chapter explores the strategies with which Terror is seeking to refuse the impositions of biopolitical order through the development of Jean Baudrillard's account of Terror as defiant life. ... More

This chapter explores the strategies with which Terror is seeking to refuse the impositions of biopolitical order through the development of Jean Baudrillard's account of Terror as defiant life. Defiant life is a life which, in contrast to nomadic life, refuses the powers of movement and possibility of alternative modes of communication, guarding its capacities to be obdurate, secretive and obscure. Faced with a form of power the strategy of which functions by governing life relationally, making it communicate and move efficiently, defiant life responds with a strategy of no negotiation, and with the outright refusal of insistences for communication and movement. Baudrillard's theories have received barely any serious attention in domains of International Relations in spite of the fact that much of his recent work has been concerned directly with issues of war in relation to political and social transformation. Most recently, he has written explicitly on the phenomenon of Terror and its relations to the developing global order. Similar to Deleuze and Guattari, his broader theory of modernity and the development of societies and modalities of governance developed in the form of an interlocution and antagonism with Foucault's account.Less

Approaches to a Concept of Simulation

Inge Hinterwaldner

in The Systemic Image: A New Theory of Interactive Real-Time Simulations

It can be shown that the different conceptions of ‘simulation’ (the one of culture critique on the one hand and the denomination of technical applications on the other) that seem to be incompatible ... More

It can be shown that the different conceptions of ‘simulation’ (the one of culture critique on the one hand and the denomination of technical applications on the other) that seem to be incompatible with each other can be reconciled on a single spectrum. Its basis in models, its replacement of reality, its lack of reference and of precession of the referent are some pejorative characteristics often emphasized in media philosophy with regard to simulations, for which the sciences applying computer simulations have no use for. It helps crossing over the views that first seem opposite to each other, but that turn out to be compatible if its root in reality is recognized and thus the representational logic is accepted at least according to the intention. The chapter combines ideas of the 'simulacrum' retrieved in the natural sciences with traces of cybernetic thinking in media studies. The whole study builds on a definition of computer simulation in the technical sense as the involvement with and the act of execution f a dynamic mathematic or procedural model that projects, depicts, or recreates a system or process.Less

Anti-Lincoln: Gore Vidal’s Lincoln (1988)

Brian J. Snee

in Lincoln before Lincoln: Early Cinematic Adaptations of the Life of America's Greatest President

This chapter examines the unconventional TV miniseries Gore Vidal’s Lincoln (1988). Again calling upon Umberto Eco’s concept of the “absolute fake,” the analysis demonstrates that Vidal’s Lincoln ... More

This chapter examines the unconventional TV miniseries Gore Vidal’s Lincoln (1988). Again calling upon Umberto Eco’s concept of the “absolute fake,” the analysis demonstrates that Vidal’s Lincoln strongly resonated with the anti-Lincoln tradition. By exposing many of the myths that surround the historical Lincoln, the miniseries appears to suggest that Lincoln has been so thoroughly abstracted through the process of representation that the “real” is forever lost to history.Less

Introduction The Cybernetic Vampire of Consumer Youth Culture

Rob Latham

in Consuming Youth: Vampires, Cyborgs, and the Culture of Consumption

This chapter presents an examination of what vampires and cyborgs have to say about consumption generally, and then proceeds to their mobilization specifically within contemporary youth culture. The ... More

This chapter presents an examination of what vampires and cyborgs have to say about consumption generally, and then proceeds to their mobilization specifically within contemporary youth culture. The vampire and the cyborg share a genealogy that transcends their seemingly fortuitous convergence in contemporary cultural theory. The chapter provides an interrogation of the early work of Jean Baudrillard, arguing that his rejection of dialectics is premature and, consequently, his account of the code is too abstractly totalizing. A dialectical construction of the image of the vampire-cyborg is significant, since it allows for a sense of the contradictory promises and dangers inherent in consumption as a mode of social integration and personal expression. “Youth” made a set of values desirable both as the means of production and the end of consumption. It was also implicitly a cyborg identity. An overview of the chapters included in this book is given.Less