共查询到20条相似文献，搜索用时 78 毫秒
1.
Tawny Andersen 《Culture, Theory & Critique》2020,61(1):4-21
ABSTRACT Catherine Malabou's opinion of non-essentialist models of gender identity and art is unambiguous: in her words, they are ‘catastrophic’ to women and to artists (Malabou [2014]. ‘Sujet: Femme'. de(s)générations des féminismes 21, 29-38: 135). What, then, are the implications of Malabou's hallmark concept of ‘plasticity’ on theories of performativity? Has plasticity come to supplant performativity, just as Malabou believes that it has come to supplant Derridean writing? Or if, as Malabou suggests, philosophical concepts are inherently plastic, may we maintain that performativity was always already plastic? In the following article, I read Malabou's work on writing alongside her work on the feminine in order to question how plasticity and performativity might be examined together to theorise the ways in which the discursive and the material interact in the production of subjectivities. By highlighting the performativity at play within Malabou's own writing about the end of writing, I propose that her work challenges her claim that literature cannot deconstruct philosophy. In response to Malabou's anti-essentialist plastic theory of the essence of woman, I underline the parallels between performativity and plasticity and suggest that the two concepts overlap in their mutual configuration of identity and form as mutable and transformable. 相似文献
2.
Denise Thwaites 《Culture, Theory & Critique》2020,61(1):79-98
ABSTRACT This article explores how breakthrough neuroscientific research regarding the Microbiome-Gut-Brain-Axis (MGBA) resonates with Catherine Malabou’s discussions of a delocalised, decentralised, plastic brain. Inspired by Malabou’s materialist methodology, as well as her confrontation of neuroscientific and psychoanalytic paradigms, the article unpacks the imbrication of symbolic and neuro-microbiological treatments of the gut and its excreta. Interlacing the thought of Julia Kristeva, Melanie Klein and Malabou alongside current MGBA research and critical studies of science and technology, I reveal how symbolic and microbial transmissions in early childhood development reflect a multimodal and multitemporal formation that challenges the established imaginary associated with functional gut and subject development. Secondly, I consider how MGBA research bears upon questions of difference, examining its further materialisation of Malabou’s otherness in a world without exteriority. Through this discussion I question the significance of this biological paradigm shift, as it disturbs notions of agency and the subject/environment distinction, opening to pressing ethical questions at this moment in human history. Through these varied interrogations and provocations, I provide a preliminary window into the potential of MGBA research to enable new departures for thinking the fragmentary movement of form and time underpinning Malabou’s motor schema of plasticity. 相似文献
3.
Simone Bignall 《Culture, Theory & Critique》2013,54(1):121-138
The film Black Swan, directed by Darren Aronofsky, provides a fruitful context for thinking about Deleuze's conceptualisation of structural transformation as a ‘presubjective’ process involving a critical and creative politics of engagement. Nina is a young dancer who has just secured the lead role in the New York Ballet's new production of Swan Lake. This role not only requires her to dance the pure and innocent character of the White Swan – a role that mirrors Nina's character in real life, and for which she is well suited – but also as the seductive and darkly erotic character of the Black Swan, a role quite alien to Nina. The film traces Nina's desperate efforts to meet the demands of this doubled characterisation. Through new forms of engagement with her peers, she enters into a ‘becoming-swan’ that frees her from the restraints and constraints imposed by her existing self. While this transformative process enables her to realise aesthetic perfection in her art, this comes at a heavy price: Nina not only is creatively destabilised, but ultimately is destroyed by the transformation she endures. By considering this work of cinema in light of Deleuze's writings on cinema, on ‘becoming-animal’, and on ‘Porcelain and Volcano’, this essay reflects upon a crucial question underlying much of Deleuze's political thought: how is it possible to privilege radical subjective and social transformation, without these structures of necessary coherence also ‘cracking up’ and being destroyed in the process? 相似文献
4.
Francis Russell 《Culture, Theory & Critique》2020,61(1):64-78
ABSTRACT One of the under-theorised aspects of Catherine Malabou’s What Should We Do With Our Brain? is the overtly political project that underpins her discussion of a renewed conception of subjectivity. Malabou's political project is framed in radical and emancipatory terms, and yet the possibilities and limitations that stem from of a neurobiological account of politics have been left under-explored. Can we really locate in the brain a progressive politics, especially in the context of debates around mental illness, when so many groups and individuals are resistant to understanding themselves as their brains? Or is this affirmation of scientific materialism at risk of obscuring the realities and complexities of the materiality of cultural practice? In order to pursue the political consequences of her work, this paper looks to stage an encounter between Malabou's account of neuroplasticity and Lauren Berlant's notion of cruel optimism. This is done in order to ask: do Malabou’s own critiques of neoliberal flexibility run the risk of embracing a neuro-liberalism, in which an optimism regarding plasticity, individual liberty, and compromise between the humanities and life-sciences obscures the political limitations of neuroscience as a site for political-philosophy? 相似文献
5.
Richard Iveson 《Culture, Theory & Critique》2020,61(1):37-63
ABSTRACT In Before Tomorrow: Epigenesis and Rationality (2014), Catherine Malabou argues that the current schism between innate a priori and a posteriori manufacture is symptomatic of our failure thus far to think the figure of epigenesis. Based primarily on a close reading of Kant's Critique of Pure Reason, Malabou maintains that epigenesis configures a possible line of flight beyond both the rigid prior accord of preformation and the magical inorganicism of generatio aequivoca, thereby transforming the principle of reason itself in making available for the first time the generative force proper to thought. In this paper, I aim to further clarify the process of temporal articulation by focusing on the alleged inseparability that Malabou seeks to establish between epigenetic temporality, the biological process to which it refers, and the future of the living being. To this end, I will be guided by three questions: first, why is it that only life possesses the capacity to manufacture within itself the future revelation of prior meaning? Second, on what basis can epigenesis be distinguished from automatism? And third, what exactly is the ‘newly figural’ element of life that for Malabou transforms both the principle of reason and the entire system of critique? 相似文献
6.
Jill Petersen Adams 《Culture, Theory & Critique》2013,54(2):228-244
AbstractThis essay revisits the question of post-Shoah responses to cataclysm in light of the now-urgent question of transmission – the shift in mourning and memory between first-generation survivors and later generations. Offering a different but complementary analysis to those in trauma or memory studies, I argue that post-Shoah witness and testimony are acts of ‘irreconcilable mourning’. This sense of mourning departs from post-Freudian approaches that focus on closure. Instead, irreconcilable mourning is a non-totalising approach to loss that resists ‘redemption’ and instead necessitates an ongoing, creative, and critical response to loss. In the course of this argument, I examine first-generation accounts such as Primo Levi's and Elie Wiesel's to highlight the necessity and contingency of transmission by interrogating concepts such as the ‘unsayable’ and the remnant. I then focus on Art Spiegelman's second-generation Maus: A Survivor's Tale, bringing cross-generational questions of witness and testimony as acts of irreconcilable mourning into the fold of Marianne Hirsch's ‘postmemory’ and Edith Wyschogrod's heterological history-telling. 相似文献
7.
Joshua Dittrich 《Culture, Theory & Critique》2013,54(1):114-128
AbstractThe essay approaches recent discussions of ‘life’ and biopolitics from the historical context of early 20th century German vitalist thought. By closely analysing the concept of the ‘drive’ in art historian Wilhelm Worringer's Abstraction and Empathy (1908) and Sigmund Freud's Beyond the Pleasure Principle (1920), the essay shows how the paradoxes of those texts prefigure and contribute to the contemporary problematic of ‘life’ in theoretical discourse across the humanities. In Worringer and Freud, the drive is an ‘elastic’ concept stretching beyond – and yet constitutive of – the epistemological object (‘life’) that it is called upon to describe. The distortion of the drive in each author's thought – from an impulse of organic vitality to a principle of inorganic primordiality – manifests the contradictory ‘life’ of vitalist concepts themselves in their elastic potential for transformation, regression and contradiction. 相似文献
8.
Colin Wright 《Culture, Theory & Critique》2013,54(1):67-82
In this paper, I contest the analytic relevance of the term ‘eurocentrism’ to the contemporary phenomenon of globalisation by examining a distinction between ‘place’ and ‘space’. The clash of these two concepts is explored in a controversial review of Gayatri Spivak's latest book by Terry Eagleton. I argue that Eagleton's understanding of Marxist theory implies an intellectual placed at the centre of a sphere of cognitive sovereignty, and that his critique of Spivak consists in suggesting that, by removing herself from this centre, she has rendered her own discourse unintelligible. In contrast, Spivak, as (in part) a poststructuralist, emphasises space over place. I discuss the gains and losses – as well as the dangers – involved in such an emphasis, and conclude by insisting that poststructuralism cannot be a universally applicable meta-theory, but is in fact ideally suited to attesting to the place in which it finds itself. 相似文献
9.
Gizem Zencirci 《Journal of Cultural Economy》2020,13(5):610-625
ABSTRACT This article examines the ways in which middle class Muslims in Turkey talk about Islamic ‘community’ and analyses these discourses in relation to the phenomenon of market Islam. The evidence is drawn from the author’s ethnographic fieldwork with donors, managers, and volunteers of a government friendly Islamic NGO, the Light House (Deniz Feneri Sosyal Yard?mla?ma ve Dayan??ma Derne?i) in 2009–2010, followed by subsequent trips in 2013 and 2015. I argue that Islamic charity is not merely a calculative economic behaviour or a reflection of deep-seated religious values, but rather a performative site of market Islam. In seeking to reconcile a faith-based understanding of charity with diverse interpretations of the neoliberal economy, I show that middle-class Muslims adhered to two discourses of ‘community’: whereas donors saw charitable giving as a market-enhancing mechanism, NGO managers defined their charitable work as part of an Islamic project focused on economic redistribution. Although they conceptualized the relationship between faith and markets in divergent ways, both discourses of market Islam posit ‘community’ as an intrinsic component of governing the poor in Turkey. 相似文献
10.
《Journal of Cultural Economy》2013,6(1):85-102
Efforts to make (and keep) knowledge public have provided a powerful counter-model to the recent expansion of exclusive intellectual property rights in such arenas as information technology, digital media, biological research, and pharmaceutical access. While sympathetic to the impulse to counteract the new ‘enclosures’ with knowledge made public, this essay critically interrogates some of the constitutive limits – in fact, the constitutive outsides – to these counter formulations. Paying particular attention to how public domain initiatives, like their strict intellectual property counterparts, also police the line between the proper and the improper copy, I argue that mechanisms for keeping knowledge public do not just circle the wagons against the predations of the Monsantos and Microsofts of the world. In their rhetorical and normative commitments to the proper copy, they also risk reproducing some of the same constrictions and exclusions that we tend to associate with (privatized) acts of enclosure itself. I explore this argument first in reference to creative commons and copyright, which can reproduce a strong ideological commitment to improvement – ‘innovation’ or ‘creativity’ – against the mere copy. What is the cost, I ask, of making the idea of improvement the price of admission not just to intellectual property claims, but to participation in newly ‘democratic’ public and common spaces of knowledge production? Second, I look to global pharmaceutical politics – specifically, regulatory efforts to improve access to cheaper copied and generic drugs in Argentina – to raise questions about the public domain's normative place in the continued expansion and harmonization of intellectual property regimes in the so-called global South. Together, these discussions suggest how the public domain and the commons, like their IP counterparts, can rhetorically and normatively expand and be secured against the improper copy. 相似文献
11.
Alan Ramón Ward 《Culture, Theory & Critique》2013,54(2):170-186
AbstractThis essay reads two differing conceptions of subjectivity in Frantz Fanon's work as corresponding to a shift in subjective orientation in certain moments of crisis, from what I term a unified individual – the subject of psychoanalysis – to a dispersed subject, the frenzied participant in collective activity. I believe that such a potential duality within the subject is best adopted when analysing Fanon's oeuvre, as well as when examining a subject's behaviour as participant in forms of unstructured collective protest such as rioting. Whereas the unified subject of psychoanalysis best expresses the consciously self-reflective individual in society, the dispersed subject expresses a subjectivity operating in excess of individualism. This dispersed subject acts collectively, as an object moving in tandem with other objects, without individual reflection. I argue that this shift comprises the initial spark of insurrection suggested in Fanon's work, the moment in which he sees the people pitched ‘in a single direction, from which there is no turning back’; and what Jean-Paul Sartre calls the explosive moment of ‘conflagration’. The two subject positions between which the subject shifts exist as two potential sides of every subject and comprise the ‘Manichean’ world in which Fanon's subject is entrenched. 相似文献
12.
An Yountae 《Culture, Theory & Critique》2013,54(3):286-301
AbstractThis essay reads Rosi Braidotti's philosophical nomadism from a decolonial perspective with the goal of uncovering the irreducible colonial difference which underlies the Eurocentric ontological vision embedded in Braidotti's reading of Gilles Deleuze. In particular, I read Edouard Glissant in tandem with Deleuze through the notion of the ‘middle’, a key concept which grounds the three thinkers' ontology of multiplicity. To this end, I borrow Nelson Maldonado-Torres' Fanonian critique of Eurocentric ontology and show how Braidotti fails to escape from the trap of Eurocentrism due to her inability to capture the abyssal and totalitarian character of coloniality imprinted in the cry of the damné. Against Braidotti's simplistic misreading of Glissant as a future-oriented constructivist, I argue that the enigmatic trope of Relation in Glissant opens up at the middle space of groundlessness constituting the ontological edifice of the colonial subject: revealing the abyssal middle in which the ineffable experience of shared suffering never stops haunting the freeing knowledge of relation. 相似文献
13.
Michael Williams 《Culture, Theory & Critique》2013,54(1):15-28
Abstract This paper critically examines the questions of agency and subject‐formation in Judith Butler’s book Giving an Account of Oneself (2005). The article problematizes Butler’s defense of agency and argues that her theorization of the subject (however in‐process) as individuated and differentiated from the other involves an economy of le propre (the proper, property, ownership) that establishes the self as a Gestalt totality that must be symptomatically, i.e. narcissistically and aggressively, defended. In contrast to Butler’s ‘account’ of ‘oneself’ I proceed to offer a non‐humanist, non‐individualist, non‐Oedipal perverse model of the subject that rejects the ideological demand of Gestalt totality of identity and destabilizes the borders between self and other. In such a model of perverse personhood there is no identifiable and coherent ‘one’ for which to give an ‘account’. 相似文献
14.
Barbara Andersen 《Culture, Theory & Critique》2013,54(3):318-334
Since their arrival in Papua New Guinea (PNG) in 2007, mobile phones have become objects of broad moral concern, particularly around issues of female social and physical mobility. I explore these concerns through a discussion of stories about ‘phone friends’ – frequently unknown callers who initiate long-term correspondence and exchange relationships via mobile. I argue that these stories, which resemble the long-established genre of giaman (trickster) folktales, condense and make explicit one of the central problems generated by mobile phone use in PNG: that of how to maintain morally appropriate forms of exchange in a context where spatiotemporal relations have been radically distorted and in which the identity of participants can be easily hidden. The appeal of phone friend stories, I suggest, lies not so much in their critique of social climbing or female mobility, but in their consideration of the problem of mediation. 相似文献
15.
Anne M. Cronin 《Journal of Cultural Economy》2016,9(4):396-409
Drawing on empirical data, this article identifies the emergence of the ‘PR University’ as an assemblage. Using a case study of university press officers’ work, I analyse how this form of media relations PR stages competition between UK universities through the media. A key form of this competition centres on the accumulation and circulation of what I term ‘reputational capital’. I focus on one core element of reputational capital – media stories about HE research and the circulation of research metrics. I argue that the assemblage of the public relations (PR) University pulls the HE sector into dialogue with PR principles and practices in the context of recent shifts towards market rationalities. But this relationship is not a simple cause and effect model in which increasing HE ‘marketisation’ creates a boom in universities’ PR practices, or intensifying investment in PR by universities merely amplifies or legitimises existing market tendencies in the sector. I argue that the PR University as assemblage starts generating its own logics around which actors in the field must orient themselves. More broadly, the PR University operates not only to promote an individual university’s market position, but also acts upon public debates about the social role, legitimacy and financing of UK Higher Education. 相似文献
16.
ABSTRACT This paper examines the social construction of ‘fashionability’ – namely, what is ‘desirable’ and ‘fashionable’ – with reference to the concept ‘cultural mediators’ that foregrounds agency, negotiation and the contested practices of market actors in cultural production. It zeroes in on the cultural mediators’ attitudes and positions in the two markets by drawing on 25 in-depth interviews with industry veterans. It shows that the mediators in South Korea and China increasingly occupy hybrid occupational roles and social positions across industries and sectors yet achieve limited success in countering the status quo of Western fashion through mediation. The analysis contributes to the literature with a categorisation of seven mediation practices that shape the valuation of fashion products (i.e. ‘fashionability’) in two ways. Empirically, this categorisation illuminates how cultural mediators make reference habitually to the broader social and cultural contexts to co-construct cultural-aesthetic objects. Theoretically, it advances a cultural-economic approach to the understanding of cultural mediation and challenges the reductionist viewpoint of actor–network theory through the notion of a matrix of cultural-economic agency. 相似文献
17.
Paul du Gay Thomas Lopdrup-Hjorth Kirstine Zinck Pedersen Anne Obling Roelsgaard 《Journal of Cultural Economy》2019,12(1):36-53
In recent years, questions of ‘character’ have become increasingly prominent in a range of policy contexts, from education to social welfare and from business to healthcare. What unites these various contemporary paens is an assumption that building ‘character’ is a crucial component of ethics and that it holds the key to establishing and maintaining virtuous conduct; moreover, that the cultivation of ‘character’ is at best under-valued and at worst actively undermined and denigrated in any number of contemporary economic and organizational practices. In this paper, we seek to interrogate key aspects of this upsurge of interest in ‘character’ as it has been articulated in particular recent and on-going debates about the reform of organizational life. We argue that this ‘turn’ suffers precisely from an abstraction and lack of contextual specificity – not simply in relation to questions of ‘character formation,’ but also in regard to matters of organization, and indeed the relationship of the one to the other – that severely curtails both its ethical reach and explanatory power. 相似文献
18.
19.
20.
Alvise Sforza Tarabochia 《Culture, Theory & Critique》2017,58(1):33-47
This essay addresses the controversial status of subjectivity in Esposito’s affirmative biopolitics and articulates it using Recalcati’s psychoanalytical theory, with the aim of promoting a non-vitalistic affirmative biopolitics. In biopolitical theory in general, and in Esposito’s especially, subjectivity has a problematic status: while life precedes intersubjectivity, it is not clear whether subjectivity is regarded as a consequence or as the precondition of intersubjectivity (and thus of life). Esposito acknowledges such an aporia, the subjectum suppositum, but fails to recognise it in his own reasoning, ultimately envisioning a powerful interpretative and transformative paradigm – affirmative biopolitics – whilst leaving at its core a life-less subject. In this essay, I read Esposito’s affirmative biopolitics through Recalcati’s clinical approach to the ‘new symptoms’, with the aim of envisioning a subjectivity compatible with the ontogenetic primacy of life posited by biopolitical theory. Ultimately, the aim of this article is to suggest that an affirmative biopolitics, grounded on the promotion of neither a pre-subjective bare life, nor of a lifeless subject, but of a fully subjective life, a living subject is possible. 相似文献