cultural studies

Imagining Chinese Cinemas

2012-02-15T02:50:00.001-08:00

Call for Papers

“Imagining Chinese Cinemas in the 21^st Century”

9^th-11^th July 2012 (Mon-Wed), University of Exeter, UK

Funded by a Leverhulme Trust International Network grant, the research project “Chinese Cinemas in the 21^st Century: Production, Consumption, Imagination” would like to invite scholars and PhD students to the launch event and workshop to be held at the University of Exeter from 9^thto 11^th July, 2012. This project is led by Dr Song Hwee Lim (University of Exeter), and the keynote speaker for the launch event is Professor Rey Chow (Duke University).

The twenty-first century has been hailed as the Chinese century. This project seeks to examine the role of art and culture (in particular, film) as a form of “soft power” capable of shaping both the region’s self-image and others’ perception of Chinese culture, which has varying impacts on local, national, regional and global levels. The phenomenal success of Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon (Ang Lee, 2000) is a clear example of how a quintessential Chinese film genre of wuxia (knight-errant swordplay) can transcend national boundaries to become a global imaginary. This project will pay particular attention to aspects of production, consumption and imagination that have facilitated the transnational travel of Chinese films.

The Exeter workshop will focus on the role of imagination in the production and consumption of Chinese cinemas in the 21^st century. It seeks to address the following topics:

What and how does imagination signify in Chinese film culture? What kinds of hopes, dreams, alliances or futures can it inspire? What kinds of conflicts, tensions, dialectics or catastrophes can it incite?
Is imagination necessarily a liberating force or could it be potentially dangerous? Where and how might imagination be policed and censured?
How can issues of gender, class, sexuality and ethnicity be imagined in Chinese cinemas?
Does imagination have a material basis? What does it cost to imagine Chinese cinemas in a century likely to be dominated globally by a new superpower that is China?
Who and what are the new imagined communities in the production and consumption of Chinese cinemas? What is the role of imagination in the production and consumption of film styles, stars and genres?

This Call for Papers is aimed at two groups of participants:

(a) We invite academics to send a 250-word abstract for a fifteen-minute paper and a 50-word biographical note. Topics are open, though preference will be given to those exploring Chinese cinemas of the 21^st century and the notion of “imagination”. Selected papers will be considered for a special issue in the Journal of Chinese Cinemas to be published in 2013-2014.

(b) We also invite PhD students working on any area of Chinese cinemas to present their dissertation outline or a chapter summary (250-word abstract and institutional affiliation to be sent in the first instance) at a day of workshop where the project’s network partners will serve as discussants to provide feedback. There will also be a roundtable session on “Studying Chinese Cinemas in the 21^st Century” with Professor Chris Berry (Goldsmiths College, London) and Professor Rey Chow (Duke University). Up to ten sponsorships, which include two nights’ accommodation and travel expenses, are available to UK-based PhD students.

Please send your abstract to Song Hwee Lim at s.h.lim@exeter.ac.uk by 16^th April 2012. Selected participants will be informed by the Network Facilitator by 30^th April 2012. Please feel free to circulate this Call for Papers to your contacts. We look forward to welcoming you to Exeter in July 2012.

FORTHCOMING EVENTS:

Exeter ("IMAGINATION", July 2012)
Amsterdam ("CONSUMPTION", January 2013)
Singapore ("PRODUCTION", July 2013)
Taiwan (Symposium, December 2013)

NETWORK PARTNERS:

Song Hwee Lim (University of Exeter, principal investigator)
Michelle Bloom (University of California, Riverside)
Brenda Chan (Nanyang Technological University)
Kenneth Chan (University of Northern Colorado)
Jeroen de Kloet (University of Amsterdam)
Gaik Cheng Khoo (Australian National University)
Kien Ket Lim (National Chiao-Tung University)

More information about the workshop will be available in the coming months at:

http://humanities.exeter.ac.uk/research/conferences/chinesecinemas/

New paper: 'Return of the Dragon: Handover, Hong Kong Cinema and Chinese Ethno-Nationalism'

2012-02-14T02:31:00.001-08:00

Here's a draft of a new paper on Hong Kong Cinema and Chinese ethno-nationalism:

http://tinyurl.com/7onwmfy

Interview with Stuart Hall

2012-02-11T05:08:00.001-08:00

Interview with Stuart Hall:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/theguardian/2012/feb/11/saturday-interview-stuart-hall

Very important.

Interviews on "I Am Bruce Lee"

2012-02-10T03:25:00.001-08:00

Of tangential interest to many, but hey:

The "documentary feature", I am Bruce Lee, has been released in cinemas in Canada and the USA. I pop up in it throughout and make sometimes intelligent sometimes boyishly effusive comments. The trailer is here:

http://iambruceleemovie.com/

A podcast interview with me about Bruce Lee and martial arts is here:

http://www.thefightnerd.com/dr-paul-bowman-on-theorizing-bruce-lee/

And (for the next few days only) a BBC Radio Wales interview with me is here:

http://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/console/b01bpj1v

For the BBC radio interview, start playing the show at 2 hours and 9 minutes. Apologies for the fact that the song playing before my interview starts is a Phil Collins track. God knows what the song half way through the interview. The producer told me that the songs in the show are selected by a computer programme, based on blandness and familiarity, so as not to alienate the majority of listeners. So stick that factoid in your Adorno lecture and smoke it ;-)

JOMEC Journal, Issue 1: reconnecting political disconnection

2012-02-02T08:16:00.001-08:00

There's still time to submit an article for issue 1 of JOMECjournal, 'reconnecting political disconnection:

http://tinyurl.com/75nxrce

The homepage is here: www.cardiff.ac.uk/jomecjournal

Seminars: Film and Visual Culture Research at Cardiff University

2012-01-27T05:46:00.000-08:00

Here's the schedule of seminars for the Centre for Interdisciplinary Film and Visual Culture Research (IFVCR) at Cardiff University. Contact me (Paul) for further details:

Date	Speaker & Title	Time: 6-8
2 Feb	Dr. Paul T. Nicholson (SHARE): The Archaeology of the Indiana Jones films	Bute 1.61 (Birt Acres)
16 Feb	Dr Louise Child (SHARE): Trance in anthropology and contemporary film	Bute 1.61 (Birt Acres)
1 Mar	Dr Martin O’Neil (SOCSI): Using film making as a strategy for engaging "hard to reach groups"	Bute, 0.14
15 Mar	Dr Cristian Suau (Welsh School of Architecture): Keaton's silent film 'One Week' (1920) and its potential architecture	Bute 1.61 (Birt Acres)
26 Apr	Dr Richard Stamp (Bath Spa University) Rancière's animated Vertigo: or, how to be specific about medium	Bute 1.61 (Birt Acres)
10 May	Dr Christopher Hood (Japanese Studies Centre) Death of a Jumbo: The JL123 crash on screen	Bute 1.61 (Birt Acres)
24May	Professor Catherine Driscoll (Sydney) Visible Plasticity, Plastic Visibility: Imagining Girl Sexuality

Differences issue on Sound

2012-01-25T01:37:00.000-08:00

Full PDF of Rey Chow and James Steintrager's introduction to the special "Sense of Sound" double-issue of "differences" available here:

http://differences.dukejournals.org/content/22/2-3.toc

Asian Martial Arts in 1970s Britain and on BBC Radio 4

2012-01-24T05:33:00.001-08:00

I've just been interviewed by BBC Radio 4 for a programme ostensibly about the impact of Bruce Lee on UK and Western popular culture and consciousness (although they seemed more interested in whether I'd had many fights and whether I'd used martial arts within them...!). Apparently it will air on BBC Radio 4 on 22nd February 2012. The series is called 'In Living Memory', but I'm not sure what this particular episode will be called. I'll let you know.

Stop the RBS fat cats

2012-01-20T02:40:00.001-08:00

Subject: Stop the RBS fat cats

Dear friends across the UK,

In days incompetent RBS bosses will try to pay themselves astronomical bonuses, but George Osborne heads up the public body that will negotiate this deal. Let's shame him into stopping the great fat cat rip-off by delivering a deafening 100,000-strong petition to the RBS execs and the Chancellor. Act now and spread the word!

In days incompetent Royal Bank of Scotland bosses want to pay themselves astronomical bonuses from our taxes! But we can stop these fat cats swallowing more cream.

Despite losing the bank £750 million in the last six months, RBS executives are spending a fortune lobbying the government and now want to get another £500m in bonuses! It’s a scandal at a time when cuts are biting all of us. But George Osborne heads up the body that will negotiate the deal. If we raise a massive public stink, the Chancellor could be shamed into rejecting RBS’s outrageous claim.

We don’t have long to stop this offensive corporate greed -- RBS executives meet on Wednesday. Let's deliver a deafening 100,000 strong petition to Osborne to force a drastic cap on RBS bonuses and ban the use of our money to lobby the government.Click here to stop the great fat-cat rip-off, and then share this with everyone:

http://www.avaaz.org/en/stop_rbs_bonuses_a/?vl

RBS’s crash in 2008 shook the global economy, and the British taxpayer had to step in with £45bn to buy most of the bank. Since then RBS’s management have sold off the best bits of the bank, sacked around 20,000 people, and refused to boost lending to embattled businesses. The share price has plummeted, and British taxpayers are currently £23bn out of pocket.

Shockingly, RBS’s arrogant executives still want to award themselves “performance” bonuses. It’s incredible, but the chief executive wants a repeat of the £6.8m he took in 2011, and the head of the investment banking division wants to cash in share options for over £5m.

Yesterday Cameron made vague promises about tackling unfair rewards, yet claims his hands are tied on RBS. The truth is that over 80% of the bank is owned by the British taxpayer through a company whose board reports straight to Chancellor Osborne. Let’s remind him that he is accountable to us, not the greedy gamblers at RBS. Sign now and share this with everyone:

http://www.avaaz.org/en/stop_rbs_bonuses_a/?vl

Fat cats and corporate raiders have pillaged our economy, and we are paying with our jobs and services while executive pay continues to skyrocket. But our campaign against the Murdochs shows that, when we stick together and stay strong, we can stop even the seemingly untouchable. Let’s stop the RBS bonuses and turn the tide of corporate greed..

With hope and determination,

Alex W, Luis, Alex R, Carol, Alice, Ricken, and the rest of the Avaaz team

SOURCES

BBC: "What is ‘appropriate’ pay at RBS?":
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-16609987

Independent: The £1m question: Will Cameron really tackle bonus excess?:
http://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/politics/the-1m-question-will-cameron-really-tackle-bonus-excess-6292248.html

This is Money: "Government to demand RBS caps cash bonuses at its investment arm":
http://www.thisismoney.co.uk/money/news/article-2086696/Government-demand-Royal-Bank-Scotland-caps-cash-bonuses-investment-arm.html#ixzz1ji6FA3NZ

Telegraph: "RBS chief to be paid almost £7m":
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/finance/newsbysector/banksandfinance/8248374/RBS-chief-Stephen-Hester-awarded-a-2.5m-bonus.html

Telegraph: "RBS horror story as 20,000 jobs cut":
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/finance/newsbysector/epic/rbs/7978529/RBS-horror-story-as-UK-job-cuts-top-20000.html

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Tory-led, UK-wide, BBC-sanctioned Xenophobia

2012-01-20T01:49:00.001-08:00

Today we see how spectacularly artful and all-encompassingly blinding British xenophobia actually is:

1. First, the government publishes figures about how many immigrants claim various state benefits.

2. The results reveal that a statistically negligible proportion of all benefits claimed are claimed by "immigrants".

3. However, further inspection reveals that those counted as immigrants are actually people who "were" of immigrant status at some point in their lives Many are now British citizens. In other words: the figures are figures about a pool that is everyone who was born outside the UK or without British citizenship at the time of birth.

4. Of this immense potential group, a tiny proportion entirely legitimately claim various benefits.

5. Of this tiny proportion, a barely perceptible speck of dust claim benefits illegally.

6. According to the BBC, and other UK media, this whole thing "raises questions" about whether "we" are "too generous".

No it doesn't. It raises questions about why "we" - all of us: BBC, other TV, newspapers, politicians, readers - all of us - are so consistently led by the nose into a xenophobic crypto-fascism at every step.

The only question it raises to me is why we feel the need to conduct a witch hunt against those scrambling after a few pennies when the people who have looted and robbed the economy of countless billions - banks, the biggest businesses, and the very wealthiest - are sitting pretty.

If you want to look at just one of the many articles about this today, here is one:

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-16643677

This whole thing is shameful.

I AM BRUCE LEE | OFFICIAL PAGE | IN THEATRES FEB. 9TH

2012-01-19T12:40:00.000-08:00

What the director hopes to be the definitive documentary about Bruce Lee, I Am Bruce Lee, will be out soon. The trailer is on the official page below. To my shock, horror and delight, I'm in the trailer. I come in at 1 minute and make the most giddy schoolboy comments that any academic talking head has ever made. Still, the rest of the trailer looks grrrreat!

http://iambruceleemovie.com/

I AM BRUCE LEE | OFFICIAL PAGE | IN THEATRES FEB. 9TH:

'via Blog this'

Martial Arts and Oriental Philosophy (Mediated)

2012-01-11T13:01:00.001-08:00

Here's a paper I'm giving tomorrow at Brighton University, entitled "Martial Arts and Oriental Philosophy (Mediated)". The main title was their idea. The bit in brackets was mine:

http://cardiff.academia.edu/PaulBowman/Talks/68031/Martial_Arts_and_Oriental_Philosophy_Mediated_

Question about Festive Pantomime Racism

2011-12-30T12:37:00.001-08:00

I have a question about UK pantomimes and racism, which I'm hoping someone out there will be able and inclined to answer for me.

The situation is this: I went to a pantomime today (for the second time in my life. The first time was when I was about 5. This second time, I'm not proud, I'm a parent. Forgive me. Anyway). It was an amateur dramatic production - we couldn't afford any of the professional shows anywhere. (As I say, I'm a parent.)

The production was of Aladdin. The story started in Egypt but flitted quickly to "Peking". Aladdin and the Princess were not the Disney ones I am unfortunately most familiar with. No: Aladdin was from "Peking". The Princess was called Princess Mandarin. Aladdin's mother was Widow Twanky, who ran a Chinese Laundry. Aladdin's brother was called Wishy Washy, and every time he entered he did a version of the flamboyant 'crane technique' kick that Daniel Laruso learns from Miyagi in The Karate Kid. You know the one. In response to this the audience were enjoined to shout "ah-so!". Which they did.

The Chinese characters were all "ah-so" sing-song "ching-chong Chinamen". Mercifully, most of them spoke without affecting "accents" or "bloken Engrish". However, the two key Chinese characters were two "Chinese Policemen", evidently crafted from Laurel and Hardy plus Mickey Rooney's Mr Yunioshi from Breakfast at Tiffany's. These two characters affected the accents, the 'hilarious' T-R pronunciation problems and the hilarious names ("Wan Long Poo" is but one example). At one point they had their own lengthy scene in which they traded rapid-fire "he a ping pong sing song ching chong" type exchanges in a contrived argument about too many Chins and Wings and Wongs in the Chinese phone book, in which one might wing the wong wong, etc., etc. You get the picture.

Entire scenes, long dialogues, and virtually all of the comedy in the entire production was structured and organised by and through the play of the most crass of stereotypes about "Chinese" dress, dialogue, concerns and lifestyle. I could go on and on about it. But I won't. Instead, I really just want an answer to the question of these representations, these fee-charging productions, and whether they are even legal. Is yellow-face really still alive and well? Is it really just ok?

Watching it, I was constantly thinking, ok, what if we substituted the "Ching-Chong Chinaman" clichés about China and Chinese with something equivalent about Africans, Indians, Israelis? Blacked-up or browned-up actors playing out the most shocking caricatures: what would have happened? Would it have been ok? Would it not?

There are obviously structures of visibility, perception, and feeling around racialised discourses at different times and in different places. There are obviously going to be different sensibilities and sensitivities and different things that will or won't offend at different times. But why is it still so ok to be overtly racist about Chinese characters in at least one British Pantomime this year?

In the past and elsewhere, in books and articles, I myself have more than once followed Meaghan Morris in her inestimable analysis of race and ethnic visibililty and visuality, in her reading of the Breakfast at Tiffany's scene as it is used in the film Dragon: The Bruce Lee Story. Morris reads a scene in which we see Linda seeing Bruce Lee seeing Mickey Rooney's Mr Yunioshi as hideously racist, while all around are consumed in laughter. Only Linda notices (what Bruce has known all along) that this stuff is all entirely racist. Everyone else thinks it's harmless fun.

So I have analysed this sort of stuff before, using the critical terms and perspectives afforded to me by Meaghan Morris, Rey Chow and Jacques Rancière, among others. Equally, and at the same time, I have also, of course, laughed at ultimately racist, sexist and classist jokes. But this bit of harmless family fun today completely took me off guard. Maybe it's my lack of knowledge of a genre. Maybe I'm over-sensitive. But, could someone enlighten me about its legality? How can it even be legal? I'm confused. Then: How widespread is it? Why was everyone laughing? Why was it not openly perceived as and condemned as racist?

Answers as comments or as emails to BowmanP@cf.ac.uk

Happy New Year!

Rey Chow and James Steintrager issue of 'differences'

2011-12-22T12:08:00.001-08:00

This issue of differences, 'The Sense of Sound', edited by Rey Chow and James Steintrager, looks absolutely brilliant:

Contents:

rey chow and james a. steintrager: 'In Pursuit of the Object of Sound: An Introduction'

veit erlmann: 'Descartes’s Resonant Subject'

jonathan sterne and tara rodgers: 'The Poetics of Signal Processing'

nick seaver: '“This Is Not a Copy”:Mechanical Fidelity and the Reenacting Piano'

mara mills: 'On Disability and Cybernetics: Helen Keller, Norbert Wiener, and the Hearing Glove'

mladen dolar: 'The Burrow of Sound'

dominic pettman: 'Pavlov’s Podcast: The Acousmatic Voice in the Age of MP3s'

john mowitt: 'Like a Whisper'

christopher lee: 'Rhythm and the Cold War Imaginary: Listening to John Adams’s Nixon in China'

eugenie brinkema: 'Critique of Silence with composition by evan johnson'

michel chion: 'Dissolution of the Notion of Timbre'

michel chion: 'Let’s Have Done with the Notion of “Noise”'

james a. steintrager: 'Speaking of Noise: From Murderous Loudness to the Crackle of Silk'

caroline bassett: 'Twittering Machines: Antinoise and Other Tricks of the Ear'

iain chambers: 'Sounds from the South'

Thatcher state funeral to be privatised - e-petitions

2011-12-22T11:24:00.000-08:00

Thatcher state funeral to be privatised - e-petitions:

'via Blog this'

Interview with Jacques Rancière

2011-11-26T03:09:00.001-08:00

Againstan ebbing tide: An interview with Jacques Rancière

Jacques Rancière

Interviewed by Paul Bowman &Richard Stamp

First published as ‘Against anEbbing Tide: An Interview with Jacques Rancière’, Reading Rancière: Critical Dissensus, ed. Paul Bowman and RichardStamp, London: Continuum, 2011.

1. Some recent scholarship hasargued that your political position is best described as ‘anarchist’. How doyou respond to this?

At a fundamental philosophicallevel my position can be called anarchist strictosensu since I hold that politics exists insofar as the exercise of powerdoes not rest upon any arkhê. InGreek, the arkhê is the identity ofcommencement and commandment: the fact that the exercise of power is theexercise of an already active superiority that precedes it, and which in returnit confirms. This is what happens when the exercise of power is identified withthe power of science, of birth, of wealth or any other entitlement to governfounded upon an unequal distribution of positions. Conversely, a government ispolitical when it claims the people as its subject, that is to say thecollection of those who have no more reason to govern than to be governed. Itis in this sense that democracy – the power of those who have no particularentitlement to wield it – is the very principle of politics and not aparticular form of government. Working on this principle involves putting twoideas at the base of politics at the same time: the idea of a finalillegitimacy of every employment of power and that of a competency that belongsto anyone. It’s clear that this approach is a long way from all those for whichpolitics is first of all the conquest of the State, the exercise of power oravant-garde science. What is precisely proper to the State in general is toseal the democratic breach that lies at the basis of every exercise of power,to make this final illegitimacy that defines power as political, disappear. Itis in this way a permanent work of depoliticisation, which also means apermanent work to transform the power of the people into the impotence of thepeople. My ‘anarchism’ doesn’t signify a disinterest in what States do. Quitethe contrary, I have always sought to redirect attention upon the Statepractices, whilst those who reproach me for my anarchism generally practice aconvenient short-circuit between the general tendencies of Capital and thosephenomena labelled as society. I’ve insisted upon the properly state forms of a‘cold racism’ whereas many analyses, faced with the question of racism, contentthemselves with hackneyed analyses that turn it into the distressed expressionof declining social categories.[1]I’ve insisted on the contemporary forms of State reinforcement whilst, from allsides, we’re told about its effacement in the age of the global market; andI’ve indicated all the anti-democratic practices of our governments whilstothers mollify us with the fable of triumphant ‘liberalism’ and the greatdemocracy of consumers inundated by freedoms of all kinds. I’ve done itprecisely on the basis of tightening the knot between three terms that areordinarily disjointed: politics, democracy and anarchism. That said, this ideaof anarchism has not been strongly shared by historically active anarchisms.All sorts of theories and practices have declared themselves anarchist in themodern epoch: some have placed greatest importance on the idea of thecollective capacity of the anonymous. But others have shared with Marxism thecult of science, or have repeated the ‘liberal’ opposition of the enlightenedindividual to the stupid mass. Still today we find that both doctrines ofdirect action based on a Nietzschean denouncement of democratic gregariousness,and thoughts that aim at replacing politics with ecology (just as someanarchisms, in the nineteenth-century, wished to substitute it with the economy)are declared anarchist.

2. Often, the same sorts of themesand concerns recur within your works, even as the conceptual language andapproach shifts – for example, the conceptual chain of ‘theatrocracy’ –‘police’ – ‘distribution of the sensible’. This variation and continuity givesthe impression that you have an underlying ‘project’. You have certainly madeit very clear from time to time that you want to intervene into various debates– theoretical, political, national. So, do you have a project? Either way, howthen do you see the nature of your interventions?

There are two questions here: onebears upon the preoccupations that guide my research, the other upon the formsof my intervention. Let’s begin from the point of departure represented by mychoice, in the 1970s, to turn away at once from the academic philosophicalscene, from intra-Marxist debates and from the mediatised intellectual scene inorder to shut myself away in archives and libraries researching the forms ofthought of yesterday’s workers. From the beginning there was a refusal and anidea, both very simple: the refusal to follow an ebbing tide [la vague du reflux], a refusal to decreethat all these ideas of emancipation and revolution were an error or a crime,and thus a resolute opposition to notions of the end – the end of illusions, ofutopias, of politics, of history. The idea was that these ways of rejecting anentire revolutionary tradition in the name of denouncing Marxism’s crimesextended the life of precisely those intellectual schemas that had beentransmitted by the Marxist tradition. A common thread throughout my work isthis attention to the ways in which arguments circulate between reasons oforder and the reasons of those who claim to attack it: this critical attentionwas already at the heart of La Leçond’Althusser, and it’s still at the core of Hatred of Democracy or TheEmancipated Spectator. Resisting this refluent thought first of all meantgoing back prior to Marxist and anti-Marxist certainties, trying to find outwhat and whom was being spoken about in the use of words like ‘workersmovement’ or ‘proletariat’, ideology or ‘class consciousness’. Who were thesepeople, what did they do, think, want, say? It was a task of recovering thetexture of a perceptual experience [uneexpérience sensible]: what singular experiences make a condition becomeintolerable? For what kinds of gaze did this intolerability become visible? Bywhat use of words might it be expressible? This is where we can see the originof the idea of a ‘distribution of the sensible’: in the idea that to consentand to refuse are first of all a matter of sensible perception becausedomination itself operates across an organisation of the visible, the sayable,the thinkable and the possible. Whence comes my way of posing problems fromscenes that are scenes of interpretation – and eventually of quarrels overinterpretation – of a perceptible datum: what permits a poet (Wordsworth) toread the reality of a Revolution in the contrasts of a landscape; or permits anovelist (Balzac) to symbolise the criminal subversion of a social orderthrough the dreamy narrative that a scrap-metal merchant’s daughter casts uponan island? How to decide whether the noise made by plebeian mouths is reallyargumentative speech? What is at stake in the glance that a carpenter caststhrough a window, or at stake in the way that workers dissect the minutiae oftheir masters’ and judges’ discourses? What interests me, as a researcher andas a writer, is to follow these fluctuations of perception and speech and totry to let their power and their stakes be felt. It’s clear that this attentionfollows its own temporality which is not that of public events, and moreimportantly that it obliges us to break up the borderlines between the genresof discourse that define accepted ‘competencies’ in public speech.

This means that my publicinterventions are not the natural continuation of my research. Instead, theyare born of occasions when the ‘simple ideas’ that underpin my research take ona topicality in contexts that aren’t dependent upon me, but lie at the junctionbetween external instigations and my own personal intolerances. As, forexample, when some artists asked me to elaborate a reflection on the spectatorstarting out from Jacotot and this request brought me to put the implicationsof the thought of inequality into the form of a polemical relation with thereigning post-Situationist mood. Or else such a context places me in thesituation of being the voice sounding a discordant note in the chorus ofopinion: for example, the surge of a new anti-democratic discourse in theleft-wing intelligentsia was an opportunity for me to put to the test of thepresent everything that I’d been able to learn about the complicities betweenthe discourses of domination and those who claim to criticise them. But also itis often circumstances out of my control that can transform a text into an‘intervention’. The Politics ofAesthetics [Le Partage du sensible]was at the outset an interview given to a limited circulation journal.[2] Aschance would have it some people in the art world read it and told others aboutit, who saw in it weapons to get out of the routine pseudo-critique thatprevailed in their world – and so this confidential text became a referencetext in the contemporary art world.

3. There appears to be a tensionbetween your proposition that, on the one hand, in any given context there willbe a ‘distribution/partition of the perceptible’ demarcating, structuring andreigning over thought and action, and on the other hand, your proposition that,at any time at all, any individual at all might simply shake off thestultifying effects of all of this and emancipate themselves. Is it the casethat these distributions and partitions are little more than discursiveinventions and institutional implementations (inscribed within and structuringscholarship, institutions, legislations, policies, practices and so on); andthat these discursive inventions are produced in ignorance or blindness ordenial of the infinite complexity of individuals’ emancipatory agency?

There are two questions here aswell: one about the possibility of escaping from a given distribution of thesensible; and one about the relations between the collective distribution ofpositions and individual forms of emancipation. On the first point, I mustinsist on the fact that the distribution of the sensible is not an ideologicalmachine or the disciplinary rule, fixing individuals in their places by amechanism of necessary illusion or a control of the body. It is the play ofrelations between the visible, the sayable, the thinkable and the doable at theheart of which gazes operate, things are named, discourses produced, actionsundertaken. From one perspective, the forms of distribution of the sensible arelike a datum, more or less accepted, more or less conscious – which forms andlimits the capacities of perceiving and thinking. But on the one hand thisdatum defines a plurality of different articulations between its elements, amultiplicity of possibilities that combine together in different ways; on theother, it is constantly modified, for individuals and collectivities, either bysingular sub-systems, or by events that, breaking the ordinary temporal logic,deploy other forms of possible experience, other possible ways of giving senseto these experiences. Insurrectional experiences have taught us howunimaginable things can very quickly enter into the field of possibilities. Thejudgement and sentencing to death of the king of France by an assembly ofrepresentatives of the people was something unimaginable in 1789. Theinstitution of worker power in French factories was something perfectly imaginableat the end of May 1968, etc. In the experiences of workers’ emancipation that Ihave studied, one sees how the very forms that structure the community andassign individuals their places – work, family, national belonging, religiousbelonging, forms of cultural (or other) identity – are in each case susceptibleto being deviated and of provoking a reorganisation of the whole: nationalbelonging becomes an affirmation of republican equality that entails a certainidea of the worker’s independence, which is itself combined with the fraternityof new religions and appropriates the indecisive identities of romanticliterature. Emancipation, for individuals and for the collectives in which theygather, is the work that undoes the order of positions and identities thatdefine what is possible. This work of subjectivation operates by taking ondiverse forms of experience that define subject-forms, ways of being anindividual and those of being a small or large collectivity. Being subject issomething that draws on forms of juridical inscription or forms of labourrelation, on religious narratives, on models taken from school books, on waysof being alone or of meeting others that are put into circulation byliterature, on definitions of bodily health and corruption circulated by lifesciences, on ways of seeing and hearing formed by metropolitan cultures withtheir modes of strolling and display, etc. The religious phrase that shouldsubjugate, the spectacle that should fascinate, the juridical inscription thatshould set things in order – they constantly lend themselves to theconstruction of unforeseen trajectories of looking and speaking, to theformation of deviant lines of subjectivation. The complexity of which we speakdoesn’t isolate individual forms of emancipation in relation to greatcollective signifiers. It is much rather identified with the voyage betweenthese different registers of subjectivation. Deviant lines of subjectivation atonce produce individualities, inter-individual relations and new modes ofcollective subjectivation. This is why that canonical opposition betweenindividual and collective is so pointless. It is much rather a question ofseeing how singularities get defined – whether as ways of being one or of beingtogether – at odds with constituted identities.

4. From The Ignorant Schoolmaster to The Emancipated Spectator, your perspective on emancipation has beenfocused on the individual. It seems to us that this is because you see aproblem in the ‘macro’ perspectives of socio-political work, perspectives which‘flatten’ specificity by leading people to speak reductively of ‘the masses’,‘the poor’, and so on. The scholarly, ethical and political virtues of pointingout the skewing effects and reductiveness of these macro-political andsociological perspectives seem eminently valid and important to us. But doesthis make your position individualist?

First of all, we have to leavebehind the false obviousness – as much Marxist as liberal – that opposes theindividual and the collective. Indeed, one way of taking part in a communitygoes hand in hand with a way of being an individual. Moreover, this has beenthe historical problem of emancipation. Communities composed of communists havegenerally collapsed: they were composed of men of the people who hardlyattained the possibility of being individuals or of living family lives freedfrom very old communitarian rules. They weren’t ‘individualists’ for all that,they were sincerely communist, but this new communism did not recognise itselfin the rules of communitarian discipline to which, in contrast, groups foundedon a religious rule or a charismatic authority adapted very well. Thesociological or macro-political models that you mention have generally focusedupon an imaginary vision of the collective according to which the lattercollectively puts to work common interests and values rooted in a communalexperience. At the beginning of my research, I too believed things worked likethat. I looked for the workers’authentic thought that expressed the life experience and the struggle of aclass forged in the workplace. Research forced me to find out that this was notthe case, and that there were always, on the basis of an experience, severalantagonistic ways of constructing common interests or common values. There isalways a plurality of ways of constituting the common of a community, just asthere is in defining the singularity of an individual. This is what‘subjectivation’ means, either for an individual or for a collective: you constructa way of being ‘one’ in opposition to the identity you’ve been assigned; youalso construct it by combining ways of life that were supposed to belong toseparate identities. This construction is the work of individuals and randomgroupings of individuals who have formed as such through singular paths betweenthe ways of being subject that collective structures and signifiers allow to bebuilt. But these ways of being-subject are always at the same time ways ofworld-making, ways of being counted as members of a certain collectivity. Andthe collectivity built in this way is not the sum of individuals who belong tosuch and such a group of the population, or share such and such a situation. Tomark the gap between subjectivation and identification doesn’t characterise anindividualism.

5. In The Ignorant Schoolmaster, you argue for the suspension of mastery inthe name of emancipation, and claim that the mastery of the teacher has nothingto do with the content of hisknowledge, and everything to do with the pedagogical power he holds over the gap between ignorance andknowledge. How do you answer the complaint that your insistence on this formalpower of the ‘master’ blunts from the outset any possibility of communicatingbetter the knowledge and expertiseinvolved in intervention? In other words: is there not a pedagogical value inmastery and expertise worth preserving?

Several questions appear to bemixed together here. First of all, I have not opposed mastery and emancipationin general and I have always hated forms of guilting that prove to the masterthat he is guilty in advance due to his institutional position. The ‘ignorantmaster’ is an emancipating master. From a Jacotist perspective, a master is anemancipator if he dissociates his mastery – that is, the effect his will canhave upon the actions of his pupil – from his own knowledge. It’s a principleddissociation [une dissociation deprincipe]. Here the principle is not the opposite of reality, it is a wayof distinguishing between two sides of the same ‘reality’. It’s a fact that theeffects one produces through mastery are distinct from those produced by one’sexpert capacity. It’s another fact that these effects are often produced by thesame acts and within the same institutional apparatuses [dispositifs], and thus constantly mixed together. On that basis,the logic of domination is to make indistinguishable in order to identify ingeneral the exercise of a power with that of a form of knowledge. The functionof the distinctions I make is to enable judging and acting in confusingsituations. The distinction is like a Kantian formula that helps to distinguishwhat is, in such and such a situation, the maxim to adopt, the reasons one hasto adopt it, the type of effect one want to favour. What we generally call‘transmitting’ is allowing the other to produce performances equivalent tothose produced specifically for him. That can be very effective for enabling people to pass an exam that willenable them to get a better job – and I’ve got absolutely nothing against thefact that we enable people to pass exams. I find that preferable topseudo-radical attitudes that refuse students the benefits of the master’sknowledge. It is necessary to know simply that the beneficial effect of‘transmission’ is limited, that this benefit doesn’t produce any emancipationand very likely comes at the price of losing one’s own intellectual capacity.The experience of each day and of a lifetime teaches us to distinguish betweenthe results of knowledge and those of mastery, the effects sought by one kindof intelligence and those produced by another, as it teaches us to distinguishthe different indeed contradictory effects of an apprenticeship. We cancertainly use our status as legitimate ‘transmitters’ to put our knowledge atothers’ disposal. I’m constantly doing it. But what is ‘stultifying’ from aJacotist perspective is the will to anticipate the way in which they will graspwhat we put at their disposal. From this point of view, Jacotist radicalismstrikes me as much closer to experience and good sense than those discoursesthat first liken the exercise of mastery to the transmission of a body ofknowledge and then class this transmission of knowledge as the awakening of asoul, as the acquisition of critical thought or sense of citizenship [sens citoyen], or some other warmed-overfairytale served up for us on a daily basis by good progressive souls.

6. Many readers are struck by theaffinities in your work with the works of Michel Foucault and Jacques Derrida.It might be argued that your argumentative moves are very often deconstructive,whilst your focus on the messy realms of individuals operating in particularsituations seems concerned with distinctly Foucauldian ‘visibilities’. However,whilst you often criticize deconstruction, Foucault rarely surfaces explicitlyin your work. Is this because you feel a greater sense of proximity toFoucault’s project(s) and approach?

I’ve been influenced very littleby Derrida’s thought and I’ve never thought of myself as practicingdeconstruction. Doubtless there is in me, as there is in both Derrida andFoucault, a calling into question of dominant categories that are used todescribe forms of experience. But beyond this work of putting categories intoaporia, it seems to me that deconstruction is caught between the Heideggerianform of awaiting the complete reversal of a civilisation’s development and theKierkegaardian privilege of the decision in a situation of radical uncertainty.Basically, it’s a matter of making a logical aporia lead on to an ethicalconfrontation with the impossible. That is to say, it’s a matter of gettingphilosophy to recognise an outside – an unknowable and an unmasterable – thatis of a religious nature. As far as I’m concerned, my approach has never beento deconstruct in order to come back to the undecidable via the mediation ofthe aporia, but to bring to light, through the checking of contradictions, aheterogeneity of logics that is, in the final instance, a conflict of worlds. It wasn’t the double aspect of the pharmakonthat interested me in the Platonic critique of writing but the articulationbetween a theory of speech and a social stratification. In other words, theoutside that interests me is not the ethico-religious outside, but the one offorms of domination that come to be internalised in the thoughts and practicesof speech and of discourse. It is the latter that draws me closer to Foucault’sthought, the only contemporary thought, in fact, to have strongly influencedme. What that also means is that it’s the only one I’ve been able toincorporate in my own way, without therefore needing to comment on it, or takeit as an external reference point. That said, the aspect of Foucault’s thinkingthat I’ve been able to turn into my own is that which first asks itself how such a thought is thinkable and who can think it. It is a thought thattakes philosophy out of its privileged domain, forcing it to encounter allthose discourses and practices in society that mark out the discursive linesand material barriers separating the possible from the impossible, thepermitted from the forbidden, the thinkable from the unimaginable. The force ofFoucault’s thought is located at the point where it allows one to wonder: whatthought is at work in a regulation or in a building? But also: what happens,what worlds confront each other in the insignificant words of some individualor other? That for me was an organon, allowing one to think the way in whichwords manifest the tension of lives caught between two possible universes (Nights of Labour) or the way in whichliterature deploys this tension as the tension of fictional logics (Politique de la littérature), or the waycinema deploys it as a conflict of temporalities (Film Fables), etc. It seems to me that this tension of livesgripped by relations of possibility and impossibility has been nullified by thedominant discourse about Foucault today, the biopolitical discourse. Whateverradical political references it may be given, the discourse of biopoliticsrepatriates Foucault’s thought onto traditional philosophical terrain, that ofa metaphysics of life, and rids it of the subversive potential it got preciselyfrom its capacity to problematise the conflict of lives.

7. Several of your works make use of what might be readas a rhetoric of utopian failure – one thinks, for example, of the final pagesin The Ignorant Schoolmaster, where it is stated that universal teaching wouldn’t ‘take’ butdoesn’t die, and the essays in Film Fables that treat of the ‘thwarted’ fables animating cinema. Some of yourcritics read this recurrent oscillation between failure and hope in your workas a refusal of political engagement; but what, for you, is the politicalimport of the experience of ‘failure’ and of being ‘thwarted’?

The ‘thwarting’ [‘contrariété’] that Film Fables speaks about is the tension between two logics: a logicof linkage and a logic of suspension. I show that for cinema as for literaturethis tension is a productive force and not an obstacle. The most beautifulfilms like the most beautiful novels are the result of this tension. It’s not amatter of failure, except for those specialists in literary theory or filmsemiotics who will endeavour, until the end of the world, to maintain theillusion that literature or cinema are arts solely the concern of their ownconcept, employing their own language, etc. And the fact that universalteaching doesn’t ‘take’ marks not the failure of intellectual emancipation, butof those who want to transform into a social institution a thought and apractice that cuts across the logic of social institutions. In fact, there area vast number of things that ‘don’t take’, but which are no less those thathave changed our lives and those worth living for. Men live and die for wordsthat never entirely keep their promise. This excess of words is itself theobject of pleasure [jouissance] andis the energy source for the creation of individual works like collectiveuprisings or forms of community. This is what I meant by saying that man is apolitical animal because he is a literary animal. It is this capacity to be disappointed, tobear the disappointment and if needs be enjoy it that I tried to show in thethought and the practice of these men and women of the people that the learnedalways wanted to confine within a positive story of gains and losses, and it isprecisely this that allows them to create works and forms of community. I haveconstantly tried to challenge the simplistic way in which success and failure,faith and disillusion are conceived. I’ve attempted to show that a movement ofemancipation is never simply an instrument for ends that might be objectivelyjudged according to whether or not they’ve been reached, but already a way oftransforming the forms of what is thinkable and possible in the present. Manyhave enjoyed the communist fraternity far more than they were saddened not tohave founded a dictatorship of the proletariat. The great hopes of workers’emancipation have often met with failures, sometimes ending in social reformsby which the learned claim that capitalism has only been adjusted. But for manymilitants the failures, on the one hand, and the limits of success, on theother, have contributed towards maintaining the very meaning of the strugglebetween two worlds that their movement brought to life. Dominant thought,including its ‘progressive’ and ‘radical’ variants, always operates accordingto a caricatural logic of ends to come and means to attain, of expectations andbalance sheets. This logic spends its time blocking any experimentation withlife, in art or knowledge, in the name of an entirely imaginary knowledge thatit grants itself over what is possible and what is impossible, as well as overthe means to realise the possible. In the past it functioned as a means ofsubmitting every emancipatory aspiration to pseudo-scientific strategies. Todayit functions as a way of crushing them beneath the endless and acrimoniousstocktaking of dead illusions. I’ve always insisted on the contrary upon theambiguity of these expectations that one opposes to results, and upon theprecise difficulty of knowing what is success and what is failure.

8. You use the word ‘police’ toilluminate your argument about the rarity of politics. However, because of therhetorical and semiotic baggage of the word ‘police’, it is very easy to readin your usage as signifying the negative in a binary of ‘police’ versus‘politics’. But is your use of the word ‘police’ always negatively charged? Isthere a good and bad police? Is there a good and bad politics?

We must pay attention to the factthat a concept rarely designates a unique and univocal thing. A concept oftensays several things at once because it tries to bring together several lines ofreflection. So the concept of ‘police’ in my work tries to respond to twoproblems. I first proposed the term in response to a question that was put tome: ‘what is the political?’ It seemed necessary to me at that time to unravelthe confusion that identifies political activity with the various practices ofgovernment. I therefore proposed the term ‘police’ in order to designate theset of practices associated with the operation of institutions, with themanagement of populations and the administration of things. It’s in this sensethat one can say that there is a good and a bad police. I have said that thereis politics when this set of practices happens to come up against another setof practices that put into operation the verification of equality. I havesubsequently been led to clarify – that is, to displace – the politics/policerelation, by rethinking it in terms of the distribution of the sensible. At thetime I insisted on another signification of the ‘police’, namely the type ofcommunity that it constructed: a saturated community, defined as the entiretyof places, functions and identities, ruling out any supplement. And I definedpolitics as the activity that breaks this closure through the intervention ofsubjects in excess of any social identity. From this point of view the twoterms are necessarily opposed, and this opposition can’t be reduced to theopposition between spontaneity and institution. It doesn’t mean that politicsis good, as opposed to police being bad. They are two forms of the distributionof the sensible that are at once opposed in their principles and yet constantlyintermixed in their functioning. The State is an institution whose operationtends to transform the political scene into purely a matter of policemanagement. But that’s exactly why it needs political legitimisation. And itsmanagerial operations, therefore, constantly lead to the opening of scenes ofpolitical debate and action. The State presents such reforms of socialinsurance or retirement schemes as a purely technical matter of redistributingresources and expenditures, and of future projections. But technicaloptimisation has to be considered a matter of common good, thus such projectionasks the question: who is capable of thinking the future? Whence opens thequarrel about the stakes of equality and inequality set out by these‘technical’ reforms. That also means that the common space opened by thepolitical difference lends itself to all sorts of perversion. I’ve ofteninsisted on the fact that one of the reasons for the success of certainfar-right groupings, like the National Front in France, came from theircapability of restaging an idea of popular power abandoned by the purelymanagerial discourse and practice of the right- and left-wing parties. Theempty concept of ‘populism’ is a handy way of concealing this reality of theextreme-right’s seizure of political signifiers abandoned by the ‘left’.Instead of talking about a bad politics, it’s better to say that politicaldivision also produces bad things.

9. Does your emphasis on thedisarticulation of equality place too much emphasis on the individual (qua ‘subjectivisation’) atthe expense of addressing the problem of contemporary political organisation? In other words, isn’t the organisationallogic of police rejected too quickly for the interruptive moment of politics?And might it not call for a closer examination of what might be called the‘politics of police’ in the formation of collectivities? Or, reciprocally: Isit possible for an individual to make politics happen?

Once again, the question ofsubjectivation isn’t that of the relation between individual and collectivity.A political subjectivation is the constitution of a collective capable ofspeaking in the first person and of identifying its affirmation with a reconfigurationof the universe of possibilities. To contrast the moment of interruption withorganisational continuity is a handy way of masking the basis of the problem:to what extent is a collective capable of giving this reconfiguration of theuniverse of possibilities an autonomous temporality? All those who deafen uswith their old refrain about the critique of spontaneity and the necessity oforganisation forget precisely that an organisation is only political if it is‘spontaneous’ in the strict sense of the word, that is to say if it functionsas a continuous origin of an autonomous perception, thought or action. Thequestion is not how long an organisation lasts, but what it does with thistime, that is to say how it transforms this time into something political. Toput it another way, it’s a question of which forms of the present are inthemselves future-bearing. That’s precisely the question at the heart of thethinking of emancipation: how the break with the time of domination is at workin the present. Both organisations and individuals live in several timessimultaneously. The same goes for both the organisational and the pedagogicalsuccesses we spoke about earlier. The question is what they consist of, whatorganisations do. There is no denying that those who tell us what to do firstof all set about reinforcing their collective identity and that, as regards anautonomous temporality, they extend their continuity in the relation betweentwo temporalities: that of expiry dates imposed by the dominant power – whetherthat be elections or capitalist outsourcing – and that of a revolutionaryprocess now forever comfortably installed.

Translated by Richard Stamp

Notes

[1]Translator’s note: see Rancière,‘Cold Racism, July 1996’, in Chronicles of Consensual Times, trans.Steven Corcoran, London & New York: Continuum (2010), pp.12-15.

[2]Translator’s note: ‘Le partage dusensible’ originally appeared in Alice(issue 2, Summer 1999) and is archived online at multitudes-web -http://multitudes.samizdat.net/Le-partage-du-sensible

An Interview With Rey Chow

2011-11-26T02:54:00.001-08:00

AnInterview with Rey Chow

Paul Bowman & Rey Chow[*]

Abstract:An interview with Rey Chow carried out for this special themed issue of Social Semiotics, which is concernedwith asking Rey Chow about her past, present and future work. It is organisedby questions related to her ongoing work in postcolonialism, cultural studies,cultural theory and comparative literature, as well as her work’s connectionsto history, philosophy and cultural politics.

Keywords:Rey Chow, postcolonialism, discourse, Foucault, visuality, Žižek, Deleuze,technology

Paul Bowman: Your work has tackled manyobjects and fields: comparative literature, woman and Chinese modernity, filmand modernity, problems in postcolonialism, questions of intervention incultural politics, the relationships between “high” theory or philosophy and“pragmatic” cultural-political concerns, feminism and film studies,retheorizing translation in a postcolonial world, the relationships betweenarea studies, atomic bombs and US geopolitical hegemony, the status of “the sentimental”within contemporary Chinese films, and so on – to gesture to a few. How do youposition yourself in relation to what are normally thought to be such diverseand discrete fields? Are each of your books intended for different audiences?

ReyChow: It’s difficultto talk about one’s work objectively because one’s own psychic investments areinvolved, but if I am to give it a try, in response to these questions, I’d saythat (in relation to my published work) my point of departure was seldom aparticular field or its established object of study, but more often a set ofquestions that came with a specific work, be it a literary, film, orcritical/philosophical text, a recurrent narrative, or a popular stereotype.Instead of beginning with a bird’s eye view of a field, then, I am more proneto working with features of specific works that strike me as demanding morethought, more discussion, more debate; that suggest that there has to be alarger set of issues that have led to those features’ visibility andintelligibility. For instance, when modern Chinese literature was supposedlyundergoing revolutionary transformation in the early twentieth century, whywere there also these rather morose, sentimental, “politically incorrect”stories (in what came to be known as Mandarin Duck and Butterfly fiction) beingpublished and read with such enthusiasm – what did it tell us about therelationship between the production and consumption of fiction, and socialreform? Alternatively, among the many stories and images that can be used inrelation to people from non-Western cultures, why are some typically chosen torepresent them to a Western public, so that these cultures are either seen asprimitive and unchanging, or politically progressive and avant-garde? Whathappens to the middle regions between these two extreme ends of representation?Or, how is it that colleagues in the discipline of comparative literature tendto love the idea of translation – which, as a topic, is perhaps one of the mostheavily theorized in the field – but at the same time seem to scorn the use oftranslated works for research and pedagogical purposes as improper,inauthentic, low-rent, etc., even in a comparative context? What kinds ofassumptions make the coexistence of such contradictory attitudes and practicespossible in the first place?

When one begins with specific questions such as these,it soon becomes clear that the official field and/or object of inquiry to whichthese questions seem to correspond is often insufficient – or at leastincapable of accommodating the critical scope and extent forced open by thequestions. The questions, in other words, tend to put pressure on thedefinitions of the field(s) and objects of inquiry, and mess up theirboundaries. A more appropriate notion to invoke would be Foucault’s“discourse,” as I see many of these fields you have named as complexly relatedas discourses, once we begin with specific questions. To use the language ofelectronic communications, discourses are always “linked” or “networked”articulations; there is no telling how many “windows” can be opened or arepotentially open-able if we ask the serious questions. But then of course, theirony is that, once the work is published and out there, most audiences tend toread it in accordance to already-existing headings and subheadings ofknowledge, and the more familiar names of the fields and subfields aretypically reinvoked to “make sense” of what I have written. And so forth, andso on. Still, I am fascinated by the generative nature of discourses and by theunexpected turns they may take, as much as I am intrigued by the myths, thelong held assumptions and beliefs, that are embedded in them.

PB: You mention the “familiar name” Foucault, who seemsto be a strong (perhaps even growing) presence within your work. Wouldreinvoking Foucault be a justifiable way to “make sense” of what you havewritten? Or, given what you have just said about the stabilizing(domesticating?) effects of familiar names, is it more complex than this –despite the discernible presence and effects of Foucault’s work throughout yourown thinking on and interventions into many interlinked discourses?

RC: Yes, to some extent, Foucault is a logical way tounderstand what I have been writing, though it may surprise you to hear thatFoucault has been a major influence on my work only since about a dozen yearsago. Before then, I did not read him seriously because, to be completelyhonest, I had conflated the ways in which some of his works, such as TheHistory of Sexuality, Volume 1 and Discipline and Punish, had beenpopularized in the U.S. academy with Foucault’s own arguments and perspectives.The emphases that came with such popularization – sex and sexuality,panopticism, surveillance, and so forth – were not wrong but were notparticularly interesting to me as a close reader of literary, film, and othercultural texts. Only when I started reading Foucault carefully on my own did Idiscover that I had been quite mistaken about his contributions. In particular,his early works, such as The Archeology of Knowledge and The Order ofThings, have been instrumental in helping me articulate issues that surfacein the trans-cultural examination of knowledge production and dissemination.The explicit discussions of race, racism, biopolitics, populations,governmentality, and so forth, that were documented in the Collège de Francelectures and that became widely available only in recent years, are alsocrucial. If we remain strictly on the level of names, my attraction to Foucaultprobably has much to do with Foucault’s own indebtedness to Nietzsche. As didmany of his contemporaries (Deleuze, for instance), Foucault inherited ajoyously nihilistic attitude toward what Nietzsche called the stones ofknowledge: the momentum that springs from a readiness to destabilize theconventions of knowledge organization – the courage to overturn establishednorms, to interrogate what has long been accepted as normal – this Nietzscheanspirit I find very uplifting. This is, of course, a simplification of thecomplexities of Foucault’s work as a whole, but the Nietzschean-ness of hisintellectual energy strikes me every time I read and teach him.

What I continue to find thought-provoking is alsoFoucault’s relationship to Freud and the psychoanalytic tradition. I havewritten here and there about this relationship, which is exemplary of a kind ofproductive tension that informs the work of the most interesting authors.Foucault helps us see the historicality of some of our most cherished,deep-seated beliefs about ourselves, our “psyches,” our desires. This iseminently enabling, because the perspective he brings to the psychic isprecisely that it is the kind of fiction we moderns live on a daily basis inthe most intimate manners, yet that does not mean we should simply accept it asnature. To invoke another name: if you think of Althusser’s influential work onideology and subjectivity, and how Foucault, who was Althusser’s student,reworked Althusser’s argument in the form of discipline, by elaborating not so much on the psyche per se as onthe ways “gentle coercion” is realized through a proliferating network ofinstitutions and apparatuses, you’d get a sense of what I mean by “enabling.”Lacanians such as Slavoj Žižek, also taking as a point of departure Althusser’snotion of ideology, simply proceed to argue – and demonstrate again and again,ad nauseum! – a kind of absurd unconscious that is external to the subject inthe form of an Other, a gap, a hole that can never be completely patched over,etc. I have learned a great deal from reading the Lacanians and from Žižek aswell, and admire the skills that go into their deft and deterministicargumentative turns. But I am inspired by Foucault’s decision to turn away fromthe psychoanalytic per se and to turn toward the sociological in all its impuremessiness. Instead of revealing over and over again how a certain unconsciousmanifests itself in the most unexpected and often comical fashion, inphilosophy, politics, and popular culture alike, Foucault’s work allows us toexamine practices, which are impermanent and changeable rather thantranscendental. In this way it avoids the tendency toward dogmatism that is the other side of some otherwise very smart usesof Lacan, Althusser, and psychoanalysis, and for that matter manywell-intentioned invocations of Marx and the notions of emancipation andrevolution. If we are after dogmatisms and absolutes – and I say this with nosarcasm whatsoever – Foucault is definitely what we should avoid; he is bigdisappointment in that department.

In brief, to respond to your questions very broadly,my indebtedness to Foucault has much to do with gradually, and very slowly,understanding how he used the same sources differently from some of his mostimportant contemporaries – how he, being just as well-versed in Marx, Freud,and all these indispensable forebears, made a decisive move to go in anon-dogmatic intellectual direction and what that entailed. That said, manyproblems remain unresolved in Foucault’s work; that’s one reason it is such apositive challenge to teach it. Besides, there are so many first-ratepublications on Foucault, done by scholars from such a wide range ofdisciplines that he is simply a terrific pedagogical resource. One area inwhich I’d like to do more in-depth research, if I can find the time, isFoucault’s uses of visuality. I am interested in this area not in order towrite more about films and images but in order to articulate the dynamicsinherent in the encounter between the phenomenology of seeing and the emergenceof epistemic ruptures that Foucault was so good in charting. To some of mycolleagues, this is, of course, nothing new – just look at the excellent workof Gary Shapiro, for instance – but I think Foucault and visuality would be arichly provocative subject to explore.

PB: Although you have not yet begun this project onFoucault and visuality, can you say at this stage more about what interests youabout the relation between Foucault’s work and your thinking of visuality, orabout, as you say, Foucault’s “uses of visuality”?

RC: Well, perhaps “uses of visuality” is not the bestway to put it. Let me begin with something I recently wrote that is about to bepublished in a collection edited by Simone Bignall and Paul Patton called Deleuze and the Postcolonial. Mycontribution is about Deleuze’s reading of Foucault’s writings and how thatmight form productive links with postcoloniality. One of the illuminatingpoints made by Deleuze is that it is a misrepresentation to think of Foucaultas a thinker of confinement. Retracing Foucault’s work on Maurice Blanchot andall those spaces of confinement such as the prison, the clinic, the asylum, andso forth, Deleuze argues that what appears as confinement in Foucault is reallya secondary formation, a formalization of a relation of exclusion; what hasbeen confined is really the outside. As you can tell, this is a significantshift in the way Foucault has been interpreted, and the consequences of thatshift are only slowly beginning to unfold in global critical work. If we followDeleuze’s reading (which does not mean we have to agree with everything hesays), then one of the things we need to come to terms with is the status ofvisibility in Foucault. I cannot elaborate this status in sufficient detailhere, but perhaps I can briefly indicate some of the interesting aspectsinvolved.

First, I think we should ask: if Foucault’s work canbe understood in terms of a medium, what would that be? I’d suggest that it islight. Foucault’s earliest work on madness may thus be seen as a study in light– that is, an approach to light as a medium of thought, as this medium isembedded in the notions of enlightenment, clarity, luminosity, and so forththat come with the European Enlightenment. The history of madness is a historyof how a mystery – a form of darkness – ascribed to certain kinds of humanbehavior gradually became visible – or visibilized – against the light ofreason. Being given visibility means that madness became discernible by way ofvarious scientific, medical, penitentiary, and other categories. Becomingvisible is, accordingly, a process of differentiation through light, whichrenders things possible by making them visible and, importantly, divisible. Theextreme example of the working of light is Bentham’s Panopticon, and Foucault’sfamous assertion in his reading, in Disciplineand Punish, of panopticism is that visibility is a trap: light is what theprisoners are caught in; light is what defines, watches, and improves them;light is what reforms their souls. If we postpone the conclusion that this issimply a bleak or pessimistic reduction of modern existence to incarceration(the way Foucault is typically read), then the relation between visibility andconfinement could be the first step to a different kind of inquiry, an inquiryinto what Foucault calls limit-experiences. What if visibility is reconsideredas a form of limit-experience in thought? What happens when what is assumed tobe clarity and luminosity is in fact the space of a certain boundary,challenging us with the unthought or unthinkable? The implicit mutualitybetween visibility and divisibility, between light and partitioning, isthought-provoking, and we find a version of it in, for instance, JacquesRancière’s discussion of the distribution of the sensible, of what it means tothink about art and politics in terms of sharing (partage), etc.

Second, as Deleuze, Shapiro, and others have pointedout, the relation or non-relation between saying and seeing, between words andthings, is a fascinating area in Foucault’s work that demands much moreattention. If words and things, or discourse and visibilities, areincommensurate orders, how would we need to rethink all the relations that havebeen constructed on the assumption that they are continuous, that one hassomething to tell us about the other? In other words, precisely thejuxtaposition – the proximity – of words and things may reveal the void, the nonsensicalnature of their assumed correspondence and mutuality. Among contemporarythinkers, Bruno Latour has extended the ramifications ofproximity-as-non-relation to his interesting studies of the confrontation ofdifferent discourses (such as science, philosophy, sociology . . .) inmodernity. Foucault was clearly elaborating such a non-relation (ordisjunction) among disciplinary knowledges in a book like The Order of Things (with its unforgettable analysis of Velasquez’sLas Meninas). It would be interestingto see what he was trying to do with the forms of visibilities in an explicitlyvisual medium such as art, as found in a painter like Manet.

Third, Foucault suggests a quite unique reading ofAdam Smith’s “invisible hand” (in the Collège de France lectures), in that,instead of placing the emphasis on the hand, he puts it on the condition of theinvisible. Whereas most interpretations of this well-known notion tend toconcentrate on the hand, as the directive that, in unseen ways, helps regulatethings on the market, Foucault’s reading stresses rather the unknowability ofthe actual forces shaping things in the market. By taking seriously theadjective invisible, he is raising the interesting question how therelationship between the sovereign and the economy in the modern state ismarked by a non-knowing – and it is this condition of not knowing everythingthat defines sovereignty in the age of economic liberalism. These are just mypreliminary observations, but it seems that there is much going on inFoucault’s thinking about visibilities that will compel us to change the way wehave been looking at even a familiar issue like liberalism as an ideology ofpolitical governance.

PB: How do you assess the increasing visibility or discursiveproliferation of ways of visualizing and discoursing “the postcolonial” ingeneral?

RC: Like many theoretical trends, the postcolonial hasbeen fashionable for a while, though many people also express a lack ofinterest in its continued relevance, while others try to suggest that it hasbeen superseded by other terms. I don’t find the debate at this level – thatis, the relevance of the term postcolonial as a fashionable theoretical turnthat may or may not still have purchase – very interesting. Indeed, the term hasprobably lost its aura as a hot item, but perhaps it is during its coolerperiod that it has more to reveal to us. To that extent, the term may have morein common with a term like modern/modernity: in both cases, the controversiesover the more positivistic question of chronologies – When exactly wasmodernity? When exactly was the colonial, giving rise to the “post,”? etc. –have to give way to another perception, namely, that even when the chronologiescan never be pinned down with absolute certainty, the marker itself continuesto evoke historical issues and effects that permeate vast subject areas. It isthe evocative quality of the term postcolonial that interests me, preciselybecause in that quality lies the suggestion that things are not quite finishedand can perhaps never be finished. The postcolonial as what is residual,open-ended, and incomplete: this is how, I believe, it will likely continue tomatter, and why there seems to be such a proliferation of ways of visualizingand discoursing it in general.

In a more pedantic frame, the postcolonial has alreadytransformed well-established fields of knowledge. To take the most obviousexample: the field of English. When I was an undergraduate at the University ofHong Kong, pursuing studies in English meant, as it still means in manypost-British places of higher education, learning the line of great works thatprogresses from Chaucer, through Milton and Shakespeare, to Johnson, Pope,Swift, to the Romantics and the Victorian novelists, and finally to the modernand contemporary writings of the British Isles. Today, it would be impossibleto adhere to this curriculum without appearing provincial, and without missingthe wonderful creative works by writers writing in English who for one reasonor another cannot be restricted to the British Isles or even the BritishCommonwealth. Writers such as Rushdie, Coetzee, Ishiguro, Lahiri, Desai,Ondaatje . . . (and these are only a very few among many) demand differentconceptual categories, different codes of organization, and a quite differentkind of literary history that is still in the process of being written.Classifying them as “postcolonial” may be just a provisional trick, but thistrick, precisely because it is not entirely satisfactory, also forces a fieldsuch as English literature to update and renovate itself. The process is notunlike housecleaning or remodeling: what can be thrown out? What has been lyingin the basement or in the attic that we have no use for, that is simply takingup space? What alternative arrangements of space – and the intimations of timethat come with such spatial rearrangements – may be introduced? How do some oddpieces of furniture compel us to change the views of entire rooms, and why hadwe not done it before? What would such a change do to the demographics of thehouse, the folks who have been living there as though they were the rightfulpermanent owners – and their offspring? Who should be the future occupants ofthe house, if it is being made over? So you see, the demands placed by the termpostcolonial on the established manors (manners) of academic learning are whatI find most thought-provoking. In addition to English, similar demands havebeen placed on fields such as French, East Asian Languages and Literatures,even German, and much newer fields such as Women’s or Gender Studies. The workrequired in each case to overhaul the older paradigms is quite different, ofcourse, but in each case my sense is that some seismic shifts are happening,and this is not because of some fashionable trend in theory, with thepostcolonial being one of the more recent terms, but rather because thetheoretical term is itself a belated reflection of the historical, cultural,and social transformations that have been occurring over a long period of time.

That said, it must be pointed out that some troublingpatterns of knowledge production continue (they too have a life of their own).The apparent popular use of the notion of the postcolonial in conjunction witha big-name theorist is one example. Here, the situation is somewhat analogousto what has been well known in the world of art: the first-world artist, likePicasso, Klee, Kandinsky, Duchamp, etc., is usually allowed identification inthe form of a name of his own, that is to say, in the form of singleauthorship, while the artists of the non-Western world have typically beenidentified in the form of the group to which they supposedly belong, andinstead of being given their individual names, these artists remain, typically,anonymous. This divide between the artist as individual author and the artistas anonymous member of a collective is an entrenched part of the modern West’sway of organizing what are so called art museums and ethnographic museums. Thissilently racialized epistemic boundary has been the object of critique byscholars such as Sally Price, James Clifford, Alfred Gell, Michael M.J.Fischer, and others; I am simply borrowing their insights here. But thoseinsights can be taken much further if we see how the realm of theory iscomparable to the realm of art: there are, on the one hand, the individualartists or theorists with recognizable names such as Derrida, Foucault,Deleuze, Rancière, Badiou, Butler, and so forth, and on the other, we have acollective category, the postcolonial, which is not unlike the typicalethnographic museum where non-Western artists or theorists can be thought of enmasse, as a group exhibit whose interest value lies not in the individualgenius of the artist or theorist but in the anonymous contributions s/he makesto the group as a whole. In the one case, even when the contributions are of acollective value, the artist or theorist is visibly individuated; in the othercase, even when the contribution is of a private, eccentric, or avant-gardenature, the artist or theorist is by default judged in accordance to the group,in accordance to what Albert Memmi has called the mark of the plural. So, thecoupling of the postcolonial with particular big-name theorists could beexactly the place to begin a different kind of intervention, one that wouldrequire us to pose questions about the status of theory as, de facto, a kind ofcontemporary art (whereas the convention has been to think of theory as a kindof philosophy), and what such art – and with it performativity – means in termsof authorship, ownership, the politics of individualism and collectivity as itis linked to the non-Western world.

PB: In light of these connections, hierarchizations andseparations that you are pointing out – the various forms ofconnection/separation between “the Name” and (or versus) “the postcolonial,”the artwork and the ethnographic work, and other such “Western ways oforganizing” – one term seems conspicuous by its absence here: namely, the oldchestnut of “capitalism” – and the sets of terms associated with it:commodification, consumption, appropriation, exploitation, and so on. How doescapital/ism relate to or feature within this (or these) complex discursiveprocess(es)?

RC: For me, the link between capital/ism and thesediscursive processes is the general mode of abstraction derived from exchangevalue. I am making a huge statement here, I know, so let me just explain myselfin the following way. Abstraction tends to be frowned on because it suggestsvagueness, lack of precision, generalization, etc., but one of the mostimportant legacies we have from the many investigations of capital is thatabstraction is structural to human social relations based on exchange. (I wouldinclude under that rubric everyone from Lukács, Adorno, and Benjamin, toJameson, Baudrillard, and Žižek.) A book I have found particularly useful is bythe German Marxist philosopher Alfred Sohn-Rethel, on manual and intellectuallabor; the book shows how even empirical and mundane acts of human exchange,like going to the butcher to buy a piece of meat, are acts of abstraction –that is to say, they involve a mental operation that is inscribed materially orembodied in the very unreflective or spontaneous behavior of exchange itself –in a manner that is inaccessible to non-humans. For precisely this reason (thepresence of reflection or lack thereof), much of the cultural work that takesoff from the critique of capital tends to elaborate on consciousness – on howconsciousness has been manipulated or duped. Exchange value throughcommodification, in other words, is largely associated with the production ofwhat is called false consciousness, to which reality appears, as Marx writes inThe German Ideology, in an upside down version. Although its analysesare anything but crude, Adorno and Horkheimer’s Dialectic of Enlightenment muststill be understood in terms of this powerful Marxist critique of falseconsciousness. For Adorno and Horkheimer one of the major manifestationsof false consciousness in late capitalism is the culture industry, whichbrought about an unprecedented scope and scale of reification of human lifethrough the mass commodity. I believe that this uncompromised dismissal ofpostwar mass culture, American-style, was what led a theorist such as FredricJameson to offer a more redemptive analysis of mass culture by identifying init implicit forms of utopianism (the famous example in Jameson’s corpus beinghis insightful reading of the film Jaws).

In the case of a thinker such as Žižek, “false”consciousness is analyzed by way of mass culture – the films of Hitchcock,media events, jokes, even popular song lyrics – as well as scholarly texts suchas the writings of Hegel, Lacan, and other philosophers. Not only does Žižek notseem to worry about the culture industry as Adorno and Horkheimer did; in hiscase the more orthodox notion of falsehood has become irrelevant, as ideologyis not something to be deconstructed but rather something that works with alogic that cannot be reduced to consciousness per se. Variations of thisformulation are often offered by Žižek: they don’t know what they are doing,but they are doing it . . . His way of dealing with consciousness, then, is bydisplacing it onto another manifest level, such as repetitive behavior thatindicates another dimension – an unconscious – that has a life of its own andthat can bring us much closer to whatever the truth may be. Žižek’s way ofhandling capital, that is to say, is not the “vulgar” Marxist way of interrogatingclass relations; nor is it Adorno’s manner of pitting avant-garde artisticforms/practices against commodified cultural relations. Rather, it is to showhow the follies of so-called consciousness already live a kind of objectifiedexistence, external to us, in our language, our behavior, our socialrelations, our most cherished desires, and so forth.

Obviously, I can go on and on about capital,abstraction, exchange value, and consciousness, but the question I would poseto the Marxist tradition of dealing with consciousness is its anthropocentrism.There remains an implicit belief in human nature as such in these sophisticatedelaborations of consciousness. Whether it is through the criticism of massculture (as what produces false consciousness) or a Lacanian revelation of theunconscious in all kinds of unexpected objectifications, the work onconsciousness (or its variant, subjectivity) remains chained to a kind ofhuman-centered universe. If we are to take seriously Foucault’s suggestion thatMan himself is a fairly recent historical invention, then consciousness – be itin the form of false consciousness, the unconscious, subjectivity, and so forth– would need to be given a new historicity, perhaps no longer the one itreceived from Marx and his predecessors like Feuerbach and Hegel, and theirfollowers, but a different kind of history in which human consciousness itselfno longer takes center stage. One trajectory in this posthuman direction isalready laid down by our new technologies, in the midst of whichde-humanization has become our normal way of life, in the sense that the humanhas now become, literally, bits of information, dispersed and circulatedubiquitously in ways that are beyond individuals’ conscious control. Anothertrajectory is perhaps the larger ecological framework that compels us toreexamine some of the terms that had been thrown out with the focus on capital:nature, animal, earth, spirituality . . . It is not an accident that Deleuze isbeing read with so much interest. I may not agree with everything I read byDeleuze but the questions he raises are timely, precisely because they help usthink of capital/ism in a historical and also millennial dimension, so thatthose forces that seem anachronistic in earlier discussions of capital/ismbegin to matter in a new light.

PB: Your use of the word “timely” to account for thecurrent popularity of a figure who was mainly writing between the 1960s and1980s is provocative. There is much that might be asked about this “anachronistic”relation, and the “forces” it may testify to. But what do you think are theforces which determine visibility, intelligibility, clarity or popularity here(in the contexts of “engaged” or “politicized” scholarly work), and, moreover,how does academic writing (whether that be philosophical or anti-theoretical) relateto, connect with or intervene into the objects it is concerned with (such ascultural or political “issues” and “problems”)?

RC: I don’t think the 1960s through the 1990s were that distantfrom us. Deleuze and his contemporaries were writing during a period whenimportant world events were unfolding – the cold war, movements ofdecolonization on different continents, the Cultural Revolution in China, May’68, the civil rights movement in the U.S., and so forth. One could say thatthese were the decades when Europe’s sense of itself was undergoing asignificant shift, and that this was reflected in the many philosophical andtheoretical writings that continue to influence us to this day. One consequenceof this shift is a change in the way race and ethnicity are conceived. Whilethe Holocaust remains for many people the definitive event of racial or ethnicviolence in the twentieth century, it has become increasingly impossible to acceptthis definitiveness. Instead, the work on race and ethnicity these days mustaddress other episodes of violence and discrimination that have been occludedprecisely in this exclusive focus on anti-semitism, which, while beingintolerable, is also part of what of what we mean by the term Eurocentrism. So,in doing my own work, I have tried to think by juxtaposing happenings thatseem at first unrelated. What does it mean for Foucault to talk about, let’ssay, literature as a form of self-referential writing (whose power comes fromits knowledge of its own impotence) when we think not so much in the context ofthe European avant-garde but in terms of the pluralistic, perhapsincommensurate, histories of world literature? How may deconstruction as asubversive practice of language teach us about (French) colonialism as a typeof governance? Why is the essentialism of the Lacanian Real so attractiveat a time when we have supposedly learned to historicize and contextualizeeverything? How do comparative literature and area studies serve as silentpartners to each other?

In this admittedly eclectic and heterologous way ofreading, anachronism is more a question or a contentious claim than acertitude, since temporality itself can no longer be assumed as clearly indexical,with neat divisions into the past, the present, and the future. Rather, whenone reads this way, temporality tends to operate in the form of upsurges,through the unexpected proximities constructed around seemingly unrelatedthings. (Of course, this way of reading is closely related to technologies ofphotography and film as well as modernist painting.) In that vein, what mayseem anachronistic – let’s say, questions about religion, nature, animality,and affect, to give some of the most topical examples – could be rethought asthe effects of bracketing or suspension from a particular time, which is not tosay that such questions have become irrelevant once and for all. Indeed,anachronism could be another way of understanding the indispensable element oftime lag in thinking and intellectual work in general. To use a term fromDeleuze, anachronism could be a matter of deterritorialization, thedeterritorialization, or nomadization, of time’s complete correspondenceto itself. Instead, anachronism suggests that time is always “out of joint,”that this out-of-jointness or fugitiveness need not be something to lament, asphilosophers such as Heidegger and Bernard Stiegler, in their discussions oftechnologies and technics, seem to suggest (quite sentimentally, in myopinion).

The problem with our latest technics such asdigitization is not, I think, that they have produced an alienating world inwhich time is out of joint; quite the contrary: the newest technologies ofcapture, as they become ever-more exact, efficient, and flawless, are leadingto a vanishing of time lag. As it enables numerous forms of instantaneousdocumenting, immediate replayability, live coding, simulcast, open access, andso forth, digitization is eliminating from time precisely that out-of-jointnessthat is fundamental to the imagination and creative work. When you think of it,there is no such thing as an imperfect or belated copy of anything anymore.Everything is readily available as a present/now and interchangeable with somethinglike it. That elimination of time’s potential to be anachronistic, to be justapproximate, to become fossilized, to become fugitive from itself – a potentialthat for thousands of years was preserved by the imperfect technics ofreproduction – is I think the greatest challenge posed by our contemporarymedia. But we do not really know what consequences this will have on ourthinking, memory, habits of learning, or interpersonal communications. There isa lot of speculative talk about the possible consequences, but it’s probablystill too early to tell. Suffice it to say, for now, that this fundamentallychanging relation to time – a relation which pervades everything from politicsto art, health care, sexuality, or bureaucratic record-keeping, a relationwhich is rewriting the way we as a species leave our imprints on the universe –is one of the “forces” – and a major type of violence – we need to reckon with,even in the small arena of academic work. Of course, we’d need to ask whatdivisions of academic work we are talking about: the humanities always have aharder time justifying their existence (an effect also of the history oftechnics, perhaps?) but many scholars are genuinely attempting to go beyond themore restrictive disciplinary boundaries in order to create more supple, ratherthan mutually exclusive or ignorant, networks of thinking and writing. That isan encouraging sign.

Rey Chow was Andrew W. Mellon Professor of the Humanities at Brown Universityfrom 2000 to 2009, and is currently Anne Firor Scott Professor of Literature atTrinity College of Arts and Sciences, Duke University. Since 1991 she hasauthored the following books: Woman and Chinese Modernity; WritingDiaspora; Primitive Passions: Visuality, Sexuality, Ethnography, andContemporary Chinese Cinema; Ethics after Idealism; TheProtestant Ethnic and the Spirit of Capitalism; The Age of the WorldTarget: Self-Referentiality in War, Theory, and Comparative Work; and SentimentalFabulations, Contemporary Chinese Films. Primitive Passions wasawarded the James Russell Lowell Prize by the Modern Language Association.Chow’s work has been widely excerpted, anthologized and translated into majorEuropean and Asian languages. She serves on the editorial and/or advisoryboards of over 30 academic journals, book series, and research centers aroundthe world.

Paul Bowman, the interviewer, teaches cultural studies atCardiff University. He is the author of several books on cultural studies andpopular culture and editor of The Rey Chow Reader (Columbia UniversityPress, 2010).

[*] Rey Chow email: rey.chow@duke.edu; Paul Bowman(interviewer): BowmanP@cf.ac.uk

CFP ASIAN CINEMA STUDIES SOCIETY CONFERENCE

2011-11-21T01:39:00.001-08:00

ASIAN CINEMA STUDIES SOCIETY CONFERENCE

MARCH 18-20, 2012

THE UNIVERSITY OF HONG KONG

This meeting of the Asian Cinema Studies Society welcomes paper, poster, workshop and panel proposals covering all aspects of Asian film and media.



Please send proposals of 200-300 words as RTF or WORD attachments to Dr. Natalie Wong at nslw@hku.hk.   For all proposals, be certain to include the title, author(s) name(s), institutional affiliation, mailing address, and email contacts, as well as a brief biography of each contributor. For panel, workshop, and group submissions, be certain to provide a brief description (100 words) of the contribution of each participant. Sessions will be 1 ½ hours in duration, and time limits will be strictly enforced.

CALL FOR PAPERS DEADLINE: December 31, 2011

Notifications of acceptance will be sent out by the end of January 2012.

We regret that we cannot offer any funds for travel or accommodation. However, there will be NO registration fee for those presenting papers, serving as panel chairs, or participating in workshops, poster sessions, or in any other official capacity.   Registered guests are welcome to attend as well; however, some conference events/meals may only be available for those presenting papers or serving in other official capacities.

Program committee members: John A. Lent (Chair of ACSS), Tan See-Kam (Macau), Natalie Wong (HKU), Staci Ford (HKU), Mirana Szeto (HKU), Winnie Yee (HKU), Ang Sze-wei (HKU), Gina Marchetti (HKU).

Proposal submissions & inquiries: Dr. Natalie Wong at nslw@hku.hk

Visit our website at http://www.hku.hk/complit/acssc/

About the Asian Cinema Studies Society (ACSS):

Inaugurated in 1984, ACSS has been dedicated to fostering research in Asian film and related media. It publishes Asian Cinema twice yearly, and features all types of Asian film, including full-length movies, documentaries, animation, and experimental. Nine ACSS conferences have been held since 1988, including five in the United States and one each in Australia, Canada, South Korea and China. Many of the papers presented at ACSS conferences have been published in Asian Cinema and other journals and books.

For more information on ACSS and for membership details, visit its website at http://astro.temple.edu/~jlent/asiancinema/acss.html

About the Centre for the Study of Globalization and Culture:

The Center for the Study of Globalization and Cultures (CSGC), set up in 1999, is an interdisciplinary center based in the Department of Comparative Literature. The focus of its work is on issues of culture and globalization with special reference to Asia, China and Hong Kong. Major research themes include: the cultures of capitalism; global flows of culture, media and technology; cities and globalization; new communities, publics, and identities; and post-colonialism and neo-liberalism.

For more information on CSGC, visit its website at http://www0.hku.hk/complit/csgc/

Save the Internet

2011-11-16T07:30:00.001-08:00

This looks... strangely predictable:

Dear friends,

Right now, the US Congress is debating a law that would give them the power to censor the world's Internet -- creating a blacklist that could target YouTube, WikiLeaks and even Avaaz! Now if we stand with key members of the US Congress, we can defeat this attempt at global Internet censorship. Click here and help build an unprecedented global petition for a free and open Internet:

Right now, the US Congress is debating a law that would give them the power to censor the world's Internet -- creating a blacklist that could target YouTube, WikiLeaks and even groups like Avaaz!

Under the new law, the US could force Internet providers to block any website on suspicion of violating copyright or trademark legislation, or even failing to sufficiently police their users' activities. And, because so much of the Internet's hosts and hardware are located in the US, their blacklist would clamp down on the free web for all of us.

We only have days before the vote but we can help stop this -- champions in Congress want to preserve free speech and tell us that an international outcry would strengthen their hand. Let’s urgently raise our voices from every corner of the world and build an unprecedented global petition calling on US decision makers to reject the bill and stop Internet censorship. Click below to sign and then forward as widely as possible -- our message will be delivered directly to key members of the US Congress ahead of the crucial vote:

http://www.avaaz.org/en/save_the_internet/?vl

For years, the US government has condemned countries like China and Iran for their clampdown on Internet use. But now, the impact of America's new censorship laws could be far worse -- effectively blocking sites to every Internet user across the globe.

Last year, a similar Internet censorship bill was killed before reaching the US Senate floor, but it's now back in a different form. Copyright laws already exist and are enforced by courts. But this new law goes much further -- granting the government and big corporations enormous powers to force service providers and search engines to block websites based just on allegations of violations -- without a trial or being found guilty of any crime!

US free speech advocates have already raised the alarm, and some key senators are trying to gather enough support to stop this dangerous bill. We have no time to lose. Let's stand with them to ensure American lawmakers preserve the right to a free and open Internet as an essential way for people around the world to exchange ideas, share communication and work collectively to build the world we want. Sign below to stop US censorship, and save the Internet as we know it:

http://www.avaaz.org/en/save_the_internet/?vl

In the past months, from the Arab Spring to the global Occupy Movement, we've seen first hand how the Internet can galvanize, unify and change the world. Now, if we stand together, we can stop this new attack on Internet freedom. We've done it before -- in Brazil and Italy, Avaaz members have won major victories in the fight for a free Internet. Let's take the fight global, and mobilize to defeat the most powerful censorship threat that the Internet has ever seen.

With hope,

Luis, Dalia, Diego, Emma, Ricken, Aaron, Antonia, Benjamin and the rest of the Avaaz team

More information:

Op-Ed: Blacklist Bill allows Feds to remove websites from Internet (Digital Journal)
http://digitaljournal.com/article/313463

Disastrous IP Legislation Is Back – And It's Worse than Ever (EFF)
https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2011/10/disastrous-ip-legislation-back-%E2%80%93-and-it%E2%80%99s-worse-ever

Silicon Valley legislators oppose online piracy act (SFGate)
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2011/11/15/BUO81LV0KI.DTL

House Hearing on Stop Online Piracy Act Scheduled (PC World)
http://www.pcworld.com/businesscenter/article/243659/house_hearing_on_stop_online_piracy_act_scheduled.html

Growing Chorus of Opposition to "Stop Online Piracy Act"
https://www.cdt.org/report/growing-chorus-opposition-stop-online-piracy-act

The stop online piracy act: summary, problems, and implications
https://www.cdt.org/files/pdfs/SOPA%202-pager%20final.pdf

Why Is Justin Bieber So Pissed Off?
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/timothy-karr/why-is-justin-bieber-so-p_b_1071055.html

Support the Avaaz Community!

We're entirely funded by donations and receive no money from governments or corporations. Our dedicated team ensures even the smallest contributions go a long way.

Avaaz.org is a 10-million-person global campaign network that works to ensure that the views and values of the world's people shape global decision-making. ("Avaaz" means "voice" or "song" in many languages.) Avaaz members live in every nation of the world; our team is spread across 13 countries on 4 continents and operates in 14 languages. Learn about some of Avaaz's biggest campaigns here, or follow us on Facebook or Twitter.

This message was sent to BowmanP@cf.ac.uk. To change your email address, language, or other information, contact us via this form. To unsubscribe, send an email to unsubscribe@avaaz.org or click here.

To contact Avaaz, please do not reply to this email. Instead, write to us at www.avaaz.org/en/contact or call us at +1-888-922-8229 (US).

POSITION IN HONG KONG CINEMA

2011-11-15T01:18:00.001-08:00

Subject: POSITION IN HONG KONG CINEMA

Please help to spread the word on this job opening. Thanks!

POSITION IN HONG KONG CINEMA

Assistant Professor in the School of Humanities (Comparative Literature)

Institution Type:   College / University
Location:   Hong Kong
Position:   Assistant Professor

Founded in 1911, The University of Hong Kong is committed to the highest international standards of excellence in teaching and research, and has been at the international forefront of academic scholarship for many years. The University has a comprehensive range of study programmes and research disciplines spread across 10 faculties and about 100 sub-divisions of studies and learning. There are over 23,400 undergraduate and postgraduate students coming from 50 countries, and more than 1,200 members of academic and academic-related staff, many of whom are internationally renowned.

Assistant Professor in the School of Humanities (Comparative Literature)
(Ref.: 201100947)

Applications are invited for appointment as Assistant Professor in the School of Humanities (Comparative Literature) from August 2012 or as soon as possible thereafter, on a three-year fixed-term basis, with the possibility of renewal. Appointee with demonstrated performance will be considered for tenure towards the end of the second three-year contract.

The Department of Comparative Literature enjoys a reputation as a leader in literary, theoretical, and cultural studies using cross-cultural materials and interdisciplinary approaches. Main areas of research and teaching in the Department include visual cultures and film studies, literature, critical theory, feminism and gender studies, postcolonial, Hong Kong and China studies, and new media and global studies. The Department offers B.A., M.A., M.Phil. and Ph.D. degree programmes, and has excellent teaching and research facilities and support. The University and the Hong Kong Research Grants Council provide substantial competitive funding for research projects of all kinds. Information about the Department can be obtained at http://www.hku.hk/complit.

Applicants should possess a Ph.D. degree or equivalent that focuses on Hong Kong cinema. The applicant will primarily contribute to teaching and research in the Department of Comparative Literature and should possess the expertise in teaching major and common core courses on Hong Kong cinema and culture, courses related to world cinema and globalization, or other courses compatible with those offered by the Department. The applicant is also expected to participate in the Arts Facultys emerging programme in Global Creative Industries as well as the new, interdisciplinary Hong Kong Studies programme. Those with a strong publication record demonstrating an ability to explore the global impact and engagement of Hong Kong cinema will be favorably considered. Capacity to engage in teamwork is fundamental to the position. Enquiries about the post should be sent to Dr. Esther Cheung, Chairperson of the Department of Comparative Literature (e-mail: estherch@hku.hk).

A globally competitive remuneration package commensurate with the appointees qualifications and experience will be offered. At current rates, salaries tax does not exceed 15% of gross income. The appointment will attract a contract-end gratuity and University contribution to a retirement benefits scheme, totalling up to 15% of basic salary, as well as leave, and medical/dental benefits. Housing benefits will be provided as applicable.

Contact: Applicants should send an application letter, an up-to-date curriculum vitae, a 1-3 page description of dissertation and/or current research project, a sample syllabus on Hong Kong Cinema and Global Creative Industries and 3 confidential references (quoting Ref.: 201100947) sent directly by the referees, to the Assistant Registrar (Appointments), Human Resource Section, Registry, The University of Hong Kong by e-mail (r1100947@hku.hk). Further particulars can be obtained at http://www.hku.hk/apptunit/. Shortlisted candidates may be invited to attend an interview. Review of applications will start on November 30, 2011 until the post is filled. Candidates who are not contacted within 4 months of the review date may consider their applications unsuccessful.

The University is an equal opportunity employer and is committed to a No-Smoking Policy

Website: http://www.hku.hk

JOMEC Journal - final call for papers

2011-11-09T03:32:00.001-08:00

Last chance to submit an abstract for issue 1 of JOMECjournal:http://tinyurl.com/6e4j4p7 (Deadline for abstracts is this Friday)

Living Books About Life

2011-11-02T06:24:00.001-07:00

This is a fantastically exciting and important development in the field of open access publishing in the Arts and Humanities. Well done to the editors and all concerned! -

Open Humanities Press publishes twenty-one open access Living Books About Life

LIVING BOOKS ABOUT LIFE
http://www.livingbooksaboutlife.org

The pioneering open access humanities publishing initiative, Open Humanities Press (OHP ) (http://openhumanitiespress.org), is pleased to announce the release of 21 open access books in its series Living Books About Life (http://www.livingbooksaboutlife.org).

Funded by the Joint Information Systems Committee (JISC ), and edited by Gary Hall, Joanna Zylinska and Clare Birchall , Living Books About Life is a series of curated , open access books about life -- with life understood both philosophically and biologically -- which provide a bridge between the humanities and the sciences. Produced by a globally-distributed network of writers and editors, the books in the series repackage existing open access science research by clustering it around selected topics whose unifying theme is life: e.g., air, agriculture, bioethics, cosmetic surgery, electronic waste, energy, neurology and pharmacology.

Peter Suber , Open Access Project Director, Public Knowledge, said: ‘This book series would not be possible without open access. On the author side, it takes splendid advantage of the freedom to reuse and repurpose open-access research articles. On the other side, it passes on that freedom to readers. In between, the editors made intelligent selections and wrote original introductions, enhancing each article by placing it in the new context of an ambitious, integrated understanding of life, drawing equally from the sciences and humanities’.

By creating twenty one ‘living books about life’ in just seven months, the series represents an exciting new model for publishing, in a sustainable, low-cost, low-tech manner, many more such books in the future. These books can be freely shared with other academic and non-academic institutions and individuals.

Nicholas Mirzoeff , Professor of Media, Culture and Communication at New York University, commented: ‘This remarkable series transforms the humble Reader into a living form, while breaking down the conceptual barrier between the humanities and the sciences in a time when scholars and activists of all kinds have taken the understanding of life to be central. Brilliant in its simplicity and concept, this series is a leap towards an exciting new future’.

One of the most important aspects of the Living Books About Life series is the impact it has had on the attitudes of the researchers taking part, changing their views on open access and raising awareness of issues around publishers’ licensing and copyright agreements. Many have become open access advocates themselves, keen to disseminate this model among their own scholarly and student communities. As Professor Erica Fudge of the University of Strathclyde and co-editor of the living book on Veterinary Science, put it, ‘I am now evangelical about making work publicly available, and am really encouraging colleagues to put things out there’.

These ‘books about life’ are themselves ‘living’, in the sense they are open to ongoing collaborative processes of writing, editing, updating, remixing and commenting by readers. As well as repackaging open access science research -- together with interactive maps and audio-visual material -- into a series of books, Living Books About Life is thus involved in rethinking ‘the book’ itself as a living, collaborative endeavour in the age of open science, open education, open data, iPad apps and e-book readers such as Kindle.

Tara McPherson, editor of VECTORS, Journal of Culture and Technology in a Dynamic Vernacular, said: ‘It is no hyperbole to say that this series will help us reimagine everything we think we know about academic publishing. It points to a future that is interdisciplinary, open access, and expansive.’

Funded by JISC , Living Books About Life is a collaboration between Open Humanities Press and three academic institutions, Coventry University, Goldsmiths, University of London, and the University of Kent.

Books:

* Astrobiology and the Search for Life on Mars, edited by Sarah Kember (Goldsmiths, University of London)
* Bioethics™: Life, Politics, Economics, edited by Joanna Zylinska (Goldsmiths, University of London)
* Biosemiotics : Nature, Culture, Science, Semiosis , edited by Wendy Wheeler (London Metropolitan University)
* Cognition and Decision in Non-Human Biological Organisms, edited by Steven Shaviro (Wayne State University)
* Cosmetic Surgery: Medicine, Culture, Beauty, edited by Bernadette Wegenstein (Johns Hopkins University)
* Creative Evolution: Natural Selection and the Urge to Remix, edited by Mark Amerika (University of Colorado at Boulder)
* Digitize Me, Visualize Me, Search Me: Open Science and its Discontents, edited by Gary Hall (Coventry University)
* Energy Connections: Living Forces in Creative Inter/Intra-Action, edited by Manuela Rossini (td-net for Transdisciplinary Research, Switzerland)
* Human Genomics: From Hypothetical Genes to Biodigital Materialisations, edited by Kate O’Riordan (Sussex University)
* Medianatures : The Materiality of Information Technology and Electronic Waste, edited by Jussi Parikka (Winchester School of Art, University of Southampton)
* Nerves of Perception: Motor and Sensory Experience in Neuroscience, edited by Anna Munster (University of New South Wales)
* Neurofutures , edited by Timothy Lenoir (Duke University)
* Partial Life, edited by Oron Catts and Ionat Zurr (University of Western Australia)
* Pharmacology, edited by Dave Boothroyd (University of Kent)
* Symbiosis, edited by Janneke Adema and Pete Woodbridge (Coventry University)
* Another Technoscience is Possible: Agricultural Lessons for the Posthumanities , edited by Gabriela Mendez Cota (Goldsmiths, University of London)
* The In/visible, edited by Clare Birchall (University of Kent)
* The Life of Air: Dwelling, Communicating, Manipulating, edited by Monika Bakke (University of Poznan)
* The Mediations of Consciousness, edited by Alberto López Cuenca (Universidad de las Américas , Puebla)
* Ubiquitous Surveillance, edited by David Parry (University of Texas at Dallas)
* Veterinary Science: Animals, Humans and Health, edited by Erica Fudge (Strathclyde University) and Clare Palmer (Texas A&M University)

Contact the Living Books about Life series editors:
Gary Hall, Joanna Zylinska and Clare Birchall
E: gary.hall@coventry.ac.uk
E: j.zylinska@gold.ac.uk
E: c.s.birchall@kent.ac.uk
W: http://www.livingbooksaboutlife.org

Open Humanities Press is a non-profit, international Open Access publishing collective specializing in critical and cultural theory. OHP was formed by academics to overcome the current crisis in scholarly publishing that threatens intellectual freedom and academic rigor worldwide. OHP journals are academically certified by OHP’s independent board of international scholars. All OHP publications are peer-reviewed, published under open access licenses, and freely and immediately available online at http://openhumanitiespress.org.

Dr Clare Birchall
Lecturer in Cultural Studies
University of Kent

Reviews Editor Culture Machine: http://www.culturemachine.net/
Author of Knowledge Goes Pop (Berg) http://www.bergpublishers.com/?tabid=761
Co-editor of New Cultural Studies (EUP ) http://www.amazon.com/New-Cultural-Studies-Adventures-Theory/dp/0820329606

2nd Draft of 'Bruce Lee versus Zizek and Badiou'

2011-10-28T11:27:00.001-07:00

Here's the second draft of a paper that is now called "Ideology or Philosophy: Which Side is Martial Arts Discourse On? Bruce Lee's Philosophy versus Alain Badiou and Slavoj Zizek's Ideology":

http://tinyurl.com/5wg9p7y

It's destined for a book on martial arts and philosophy. Well, that's the idea, anyway.

Here's the very long version of the url:

http://cardiff.academia.edu/PaulBowman/Papers/1090231/Ideology_or_Philosophy_Which_Side_is_Martial_Arts_Discourse_On_Bruce_Lees_Philosophy_versus_Alain_Badiou_and_Slavoj_Zizeks_Ideology

JOMEC Journal [nearly] has a home...

2011-10-22T12:52:00.001-07:00

JOMECjournal nearly has a permanent home. It's temporarily here:

http://www.cardiff.ac.uk/jomec/research/journalsandpublications/jomecjournal/index.html

In a few days it should be here:

http://jomecjournal.cardiff.ac.uk

It's already here:

http://twitter.com/JOMECjournal (aka: @JOMECjournal)

And here:

http://jomecjournal.blogspot.com/

If you want to publish in it, email here:

BowmanP@cf.ac.uk

JOMECjournal: Call for Papers: Reconnecting Political Disconnection

2011-10-21T06:41:00.001-07:00

Call for Papers: Reconnecting Political Disconnection

Winter 2010 to Summer 2011 saw surprising political processes and events: massive political upheaval and transformation in formerly undemocratic countries, on the one hand, and the apparent ineffectuality of widespread discontent and protest in many ‘democratic’ countries on the other. At the same time, new and old forms of media and journalism technology and practice had disparate effects: some appeared to enable political connection, movement and transformation, while others worked to disconnect, close down and preserve stasis. This issue of JOMEC, Reconnecting Political Disconnection, invites contributions which engage with what is to be learned from these complex conjunctions in which new and old forms of journalism, media, cultural and political practice converge and operate in competing ways.

Submission guidelines:
Abstracts: 100-500 words
Deadline for abstracts: Friday 11th November 2011
Contributor details: 100-200 words (position, institution, publications, etc.)
Deadline for first draft submissions: End February 2012.
Article Length: 1,000-6,000 words.
Journal Referencing Style: Harvard

Contact: Paul Bowman: BowmanP@cf.ac.uk

White Philosophy

2011-10-21T00:54:00.001-07:00

Research seminar in Cardiff on November 23rd, entitled "White Philosophy":

http://cardiff.academia.edu/PaulBowman/Talks/58738/White_Philosophy_Research_Seminar

Call for Papers: Reconnecting Political Disconnection

2011-10-17T07:44:00.000-07:00

JOMECJournal

ReconnectingPolitical Disconnection

Callfor Papers: Reconnecting Political Disconnection

Winter 2010 to Summer2011 saw surprising political processes and events: massive political upheavaland transformation in formerly undemocratic countries, on the one hand, and theapparent ineffectuality of widespread discontent and protest in many‘democratic’ countries on the other. At the same time, new and old forms ofmedia and journalism technology and practice had disparate effects: someappeared to enable political connection, movement and transformation, whileothers worked to disconnect, close down and preserve stasis. This issue ofJOMEC, Reconnecting PoliticalDisconnection, invites contributions which engage with what is to be learnedfrom these complex conjunctions in which new and old forms of journalism,media, cultural and political practice converge and operate in competing ways.

Submissionguidelines:

Abstracts:100-500 words

Deadlinefor abstracts: Friday 11^th November 2011

Contributordetails: 100-200 words (position, institution, publications, etc.)

Deadlinefor first draft submissions: End February 2012.

ArticleLength: 1,000-6,000 words.

JournalReferencing Style: Harvard

Contact: PaulBowman: BowmanP@cf.ac.uk

#JOMECjournal

2011-10-17T01:47:00.001-07:00

JOMEC Journal is now on Twitter:

#JOMECjournal

New journal: JOMEC: coming soon.

2011-10-14T11:59:00.000-07:00

JOMEC Journal

Introduction

JOMEC is an online peer reviewed journal dedicated to publishing the highest quality innovative academic work in Journalism, Media and Cultural Studies. It welcomes work that is located in any one of these disciplines, as well as interdisciplinary work that approaches Journalism, Media and Cultural Studies as overlapping and interlocking fields. JOMEC is particularly interested in work that addresses the political and ethical dimensions, stakes, problematics and possibilities of Journalism, Media and Cultural Studies.

As well as publishing regular themed and open issues, JOMEC also aims, from time to time, to intervene quickly into selected political discourses and debates, by publishing ‘rapid responses’ to political issues: responses that are always rigorously scholarly but that may be politically partisan, punchy and polemical, and that are not slowed down by a cumbersome publishing apparatus or timeline.

JOMEC is a peer reviewed online open access academic journal run by an editorial collective based in the School of Journalism, Media and Cultural Studies at Cardiff University. It is peer reviewed with an international Editorial Board and Advisory Panel.

Publication Schedule and Submissions

The first issues of JOMEC are scheduled for publication in 2012. To discuss publication, or to submit a paper, please contact Paul Bowman: BowmanP@cf.ac.uk

JOMEC Editors

Paul Bowman (Cardiff University, UK)

Iñaki Garcia-Blanco (Cardiff University, UK)

Kerry Moore (Cardiff University, UK)

Verica Rupar (Cardiff University, UK)

Karin Wahl-Jorgensen (Cardiff University, UK)

Andrew Williams (Cardiff University, UK)

Editorial Board

Christopher Anderson (City University of New York, USA)

Emma Bell (Universite de Savoie, Chambery, France)

Anita Biressi (Roehampton University, UK)

Marcel Broesrma (Groningen University, Netherlands)

Patrizia Calefato (Bari University, Italy)

Matthew Carlson (University of Saint Louis, USA)

Samuel Chambers (Johns Hopkins University, USA)

Jeremy Gilbert (University of East London, UK)

Zahera Harb (Nottingham University, UK)

Michael Higgins (Strathclyde University, UK)

Peter Lee-Wright (Goldsmiths College, University of London, UK)

Seth Lewis (Minnesota University, USA)

Donald Matheson (Canterbury University, New Zealand)

Henrik Ornebring (Oxford University, UK)

John Richardson (Newcastle University, UK)

Richard Stamp (Bath Spa University, UK)

Yan Wu (Swansea University, UK)

Advisory Panel

Benjamin Arditi (UNAM, Mexico)

Stuart Allan (Bournemouth, UK)

Lilie Chouliaraki (London School of Economics, UK)

Rey Chow (Duke University, USA)

John Corner (Leeds University, UK)

Nick Couldry (Goldsmiths College, University of London, UK)

Mark Deuze (Indiana University, USA)

Natalie Fenton (Goldsmiths College, University of London, UK)

Ted Glasser (Stanford University, USA)

Lawrence Grossberg (University of North Carolina, USA)

Gary Hall (Coventry University, UK)

Philip Hammond (London South Bank University, UK)

Douglas Kellner (University of California at Los Angeles, USA)

Oliver Marchart (University of Lucerne, Switzerland)

Robert McChesney (University of Illinois, USA)

Brian McNair (Queensland University of Technology, Australia)

Toby Miller (University of California Riverside, USA)

Meaghan Morris (Sydney University, Australia & Lingnan University, Hong Kong, China)

John Mowitt (Minnesota University, USA)

Heather Nunn (Roehampton University, UK)

John Storey (Sunderland University, UK)

John Street (University of East Anglia, UK)

Terry Threadgold (Cardiff University, UK)

Liesbet Van Zoonen (Loughborough University, UK)

Barbie Zelizer (University of Pennsylvania, USA)

Contact

Dr Paul Bowman: BowmanP@cf.ac.uk

Open Book Publishers - Open Book Publishers

2011-10-14T05:13:00.000-07:00

Welcome to Open Book Publishers - Open Book Publishers:

'via Blog this'

Studentships in Comp Lit and Cultural Studies

2011-10-03T05:31:00.000-07:00

SUBJECT: Studentships in Comparative Literature and Cultural Studies

The Department of Comparative Literature at the University of Hong Kong offers studentships in conjunction with its Master of Philosophy (MPhil) and Doctor of Philosophy (PhD) programmes. We are looking for exceptional candidates with a strong research plan in any of the following areas:

Visual Cultures and Film Studies
Feminism and Gender Studies
Postcolonial, Urban and Global Studies
Literature and Cultural Theory
Hong Kong and China Studies

Our colleagues have published in the areas of contemporary Chinese culture (cinema, literature and critical discourse), Hong Kong literature and film, critical theory in an Asian context, film and literature in the Asian diaspora, globalization, postcolonialism, orientalism, ethics in literature, urban modernity, cultural identity (including ethnicity, race, gender, and sexual orientation) as well as cultural policy and community activism. We analyze literature and film as well as other cultural texts and discourses by employing critical theory with an eye to the local/global configurations that shape their form. By situating literary and cultural texts within an historical framework, we try to dialogue with Western theory in a specific Asian context. Our postgraduates regularly participate in international conferences, publish essays, win scholarships, and have found teaching and research positions at major universities in Asia and elsewhere.

The current faculty includes: Esther Cheung, Esther Yau, Daniel Vukovich, Mirana May Szeto, Ang Sze-wei and Gina Marchetti.

INFORMATION DAY

An MPhil/PhD Information Day will be held on November 2, 2011

(Wednesday) from 6:00 p.m. to 7:00 p.m. at Rayson Huang Theatre,

at which the Associate Deans of the Graduate School will introduce

our MPhil and PhD programmes. All students within and outside HKU

are welcome (registration not required).

FELLOWSHIP/STUDENTSHIP INFORMATION

To encourage students with outstanding academic performance to

join our programmes, fellowships/ studentships are offered as follows:

Hong Kong PhD Fellowships (HKPF) Scheme#

HK$240,000 per year

(For details, please visit: www.rgc.edu.hk/hkphd)

University Postgraduate Fellowships (UPF)

At least HK$180,700 per year*

Postgraduate Studentships (PGS)

At least HK$163,200 per year

#HKPF awardees will not be concurrently awarded UPF and PGS

*Combined value of UPF and PGS

Hong Kong PhD Fellowships (HKPF)

Initial application to the Research Grants Council: Early September-

December 1, 2011 noon

Full application to HKU: September 1-December 1, 2011

MAIN ROUND APPLICATION

September 1, 2011 -December 1, 2011

Please note that MPhil students should enrol on either September 1,

2012 or January 1, 2013, and PhD students can enrol on the first day

of any calendar month. As for the awardees of Hong Kong PhD

Fellowships, students are expected to start their studies on

September 1, 2012.

For further details, please refer to the Graduate School website

(www.hku.hk/gradsch/apply) or contact the Graduate School.

Graduate School

P403, Graduate House

The University of Hong Kong

Pokfulam, Hong Kong

Tel : (852) 2857-3470, Fax : (852) 2857-3543

E-mail: gradsch@hku.hk

For more information on specific requirements for the Department of Comparative literature, visithttp://www.hku.hk/complit/postgrad/mphilphd_guidelines.htm

When Bruce Lee Meets Alain Badiou (Paul Bowman) - Academia.edu

2011-09-20T06:02:00.000-07:00

When Bruce Lee Meets Alain Badiou (Paul Bowman) - Academia.edu:

'via Blog this'

The march of the neoliberals

2011-09-13T03:26:00.000-07:00

New article by Stuart Hall in today's Guardian:

The march of the neoliberals | Politics | The Guardian:

'via Blog this'

The March of the Neoliberals

2011-09-13T03:07:00.000-07:00

Article by Stuart Hall in today’s Guardian:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/politics/2011/sep/12/march-of-the-neoliberals

Re-Enter the Dragon

2011-09-05T06:43:00.000-07:00

Here's a paper I'm giving at SOAS on Wednesday:

Re-Enter the Dragon (Paul Bowman) - Academia.edu:

'via Blog this'

Penny Red: Panic on the streets of London.

2011-08-09T02:30:00.000-07:00

Penny Red: Panic on the streets of London.

Post-Cinematic Effects

2011-07-26T04:19:00.000-07:00

Post-Cinematic Effects

Paul Bowman

Steven Shaviro’s Post-Cinematic Affect (2010) engages with the effects of post-cinematic technologies on our experiences, orientations, emotions, feelings and lives. ‘Post-cinematic’ technologies include all that is associated with the rise of interactivity, gaming, multimedia, and the proliferation of different internet platforms, as well as various new types of text, such as the music video, the new ways, modes and contexts of experiencing and consuming them and the effects they have on consciousness and perception. Shaviro considers the rise to dominance of these ‘post-cinematic’ technologies in terms of a transformation of ‘affects’: mutations of experiential landscapes, emotional geographies, and perceptual and sensorial ecosystems. Using Raymond Williams’ term, yet following and developing a distinctly Deleuzean paradigm, Shaviro characterises this as an epochal transformation in dominant ‘structures of feeling’.

If such post-cinematic technologies have transformed structures of feeling, this is not the first time this has happened. Consider the emergence of cinema itself. Rey Chow opens her 1995 book Primitive Passions with a reconsideration of the famous story of the turn towards a writing career of the monumental figure of Chinese literature, Lu Xun. Whilst a medical student at the very beginning of the 20^th Century, Lu Xun watched with horror newsreels depicting atrocities committed in the Russo-Japanese War in Manchuria, including the executions of Chinese people. Chow’s analysis of Lu Xun’s emotional and intellectual response is far reaching and immensely important. But the only point that I have space to mention here is that Chow emphasises the significance of the fact that this new technology (the cinematic apparatus) precipitated a peculiar response from Lu Xun: he turned away from medicine and towards literature, believing that he could do more to improve the health of China by cultural (or ideological) intervention than by medical intervention.

Central to Chow’s reading of this famous narrative is the following: Xun’s response to the new cultural technology (cinema) sends him into a relationship with an older technology (literature). From this, Chow proposes that it is possible to perceive the effects of cinema in (and on) Xun’s literature. From this point, one may broaden the perspective and begin to grasp the significance of the emergence of cinema in much, if not all, subsequent developments in literature. Indeed, we might begin to regard the majority of 20^th Century literature as ‘post-cinematic’, insofar as it is literature produced in a cultural world into which the cinematic apparatus has intervened and transformed. In other words, in the wake of cinema, literature could never be the same again. In this sense, Lu Xun’s story is exemplary of the epochal mutation entailed in the shocks of modernity. Literature in modernity is itself post-cinematic, even if this reverses the chronological periodization and emphasis that organizes Shaviro’s title. For, the ‘post-cinematic’ that Shaviro refers us to is of course all that new stuff that comes after cinema: computers, the internet and so on. But, as with Lyotard’s ‘post-modern’, one of the key points about the postmodern is that the ‘post’ is there at the outset. Postmodern thinkers of the postmodern have long pointed out that the postmodern is implied in and active in the emergence of the modern, right from the start.

Chow’s reading of Lu Xun’s affective response to these early experiences of (or encounters with) cinema demonstrate this explicitly. The new technology intervenes into, informs and thereby transforms the cultural landscape in ways which have knock on (albeit unpredictable) effects on other forms of cultural production and reception. To see this at a basic level, one need merely consider the extent to which so many literary best-sellers today have clearly been written with the production requirements of the standard Hollywood film form firmly in mind. This is but one register of the hegemony of the cinematic form and its ‘hegemonization’ of so-called literature.

Nevertheless, Shaviro’s book argues that contemporary cultural conditions are such that that the cinematic epoch is coming to a close. We are now at the end(s) of the cinematic. This is being registered within cinema, even as cinema remains strongly influential across all of cinema’s inheritors. (Hence, the times are ‘post-cinematic’ and not ‘anti’ or ‘non-cinematic’.) Thus, gaming, all things interactive, the music video, and so forth, all remain hugely informed by cinematography, but they move away from its technological limitations.

Meanwhile, cinema attempts to incorporate the new technological advancements within itself: from DVD menus, extras, commentaries, outtakes and other supplements, all the way to the inclusion of forms of interactivity that ultimately signal the demise of the older form. According to this perspective, films like Blade Runner or Sim-One are not post-cinematic, whilst The Matrix and even Old Boy are. The former are films about future technologies, whilst the latter incorporate future technologies into themselves, insofar as both films famously affect the styles of computer simulated choreographies in their most famous fight scenes, albeit in different ways: The Matrix employs the sharpness and precision of arcade game fights, whilst Old Boy incorporates the two-dimensional plane of older forms of computer game, but it counterbalances this with the inclusion of all of the scrappiness, imprecision, stumbling, gasping, moaning and, indeed, messy brawling, that almost all action films exclude or repress (as exemplified by the ultra-precise choreography of The Matrix or The Bourne Identity trilogy).

Quite what the ‘affect’ of all of this ‘is’ – if it necessarily has ‘one’ or if indeed there necessarily is ‘one’ – is, to my mind, irreducibly debatable. In my own first viewing of the famous fight scene in Old Boy, for example, I distinctly remember perceiving passion, enjoyment, delight: Oh Dae-su was enjoying his vengeance, I thought. And this reading was eminently in keeping with the theme the film had introduced earlier, upon Oh Dae-su’s first release from his five years of sensual deprivation in captivity: the film showed us his inability to resist, and his delight in, each and every kind of sensual experience. Accordingly, this fight, I supposed, was simply a continuation of that theme: a real orgy of violence. Yet, the director’s commentary later informed me that the scene was conceptualised as one of loneliness: Oh Dae-su was the loneliest man in the world; his lack of fear was the lack of fear of someone who has lost everything, all fear, all hope (anelpis), all passion...

So whose reading is ‘right’, mine or the director’s? And what is the ‘affect’? To my mind, this ‘affect’ is not ‘one’. There is not one ‘affect’, nor even one economy, ecosystem, ecology, or whatever of affect(s); just as there is not one reading of one text. Post-cinematic effects, yes, certainly; Shaviro makes an important observation. But affects? I’m not so sure why or how they would be different from everything that postmodern theorists have long been saying about postmodernity. The ultimate question, to me, and the only one which matters, is the extent to which approaching the world in terms of affect offers or adds (or indeed takes or denudes) anything specific for cultural theory and the understanding of culture and politics.

Multiculturalisms

2011-07-14T05:16:00.001-07:00

Multiculturalisms: Theories and Practice

An International Conference

Gregynog Hall

14^th – 17^th May 2012

Call for Papers

The Reconstructing Multiculturalism Research Network and the Centre for Critical and Cultural Theory at Cardiff University are organizing an interdisciplinary conference on multiculturalisms from 14^th – 17^th May 2012.

The conference will be held at Gregynog Hall. This residential conference centre is situated near Newtown in mid Wales. It is set in beautiful landscaped gardens and extensive grounds. (http://www.wales.ac.uk/en/UniversityConferenceCentre/GregynogHall.aspx)

The conference will bring together scholars and practioners working in the broad areas of multiculturalism and difference, across a wide range of disciplines, social and cultural texts and practices.

Plenary Speakers:

Handel Wright – Department of Educational Studies, University of British Columbia

Charlotte Williams – Professor of Social Justice, University of Keele.

Glenn Jordan – Cardiff School of Cultural and Creative industries, University of Glamorgan and Director of Butetown History & Arts Centre

Helena Appio – Filmmaker, Lecturer and Course Leader on the Scriptwriting and Production BA at Regent's College

Sanjay Shama –School of Social Science, Brunel University

Papers are invited from people working in the areas of critical and cultural theory, cultural studies, religious studies, literature, the arts, media studiies, film studies, language studies, political theory, sociology, social policy, the built environment and other relevant fields.

We will discuss cuttting edge research that addresses the various ways in which multiculturalism has been theorized and how it works in practice in the social, political and cultural spheres. Papers that deal with multiculturalism from historical perspectives are also welcome.

Prospective speakers are invited to submit a 500 word proposal along with a short CV to the conference organizers at: multiculturalism@cf.ac.uk. Please send in your proposals as soon as possible and no later than 15^th December 2011.

Continuum's "Ranciere Month"

2011-07-13T01:48:00.001-07:00

Continuum are calling July “Rancière Month”. There’s even a competition to win some Rancière books:

http://continuumphilosophy.typepad.com/continuum_philosophy/2011/07/july-is-ranci%C3%A8re-month-at-continuum.html

Martial Arts as Embodied Knowledge

2011-07-10T22:50:00.001-07:00

This book will be very important:

http://www.sunypress.edu/p-5294-martial-arts-as-embodied-knowle.aspx

It is the first to posit a field of ‘martial arts studies’, and to trace the characteristics of this field. Here’s what the website says:

A wide-ranging scholarly consideration of the martial arts.

This landmark work provides a wide-ranging scholarly consideration of the traditional Asian martial arts. Most of the contributors to the volume are practitioners of the martial arts, and all are keenly aware that these traditions now exist in a transnational context. The book’s cutting-edge research includes ethnography and approaches from film, literature, performance, and theater studies.

Three central aspects emerge from this book: martial arts as embodied fantasy, as a culturally embedded form of self-cultivation, and as a continuous process of identity formation. Contributors explore several popular and highbrow cultural considerations, including the career of Bruce Lee, Chinese wuxia films, and Don DeLillo’s novel Running Dog. Ethnographies explored describe how the social body trains in martial arts and how martial arts are constructed in transnational training. Ultimately, this academic study of martial arts offers a focal point for new understandings of cultural and social beliefs and of practice and agency.

“The book successfully demonstrates that martial arts and other traditional art forms are not static entities. Instead they respond to changing environments by a process of constant reinvention.” — Thomas A. Green, coeditor of Martial Arts of the World: An Encyclopedia of History and Innovation

“Taken together, these essays give a new picture of Asian martial arts as a transnational phenomenon, ranging from Singapore’s preservation of Chinese traditions to British adaptation of Indian martial arts for the stage and African usage of Okinawan traditions. Since martial arts are one of the most famous traditions to have originated in Asia, it is useful to see exactly how they are viewed or practiced around the world, from a scholarly perspective.” — Margaret B. Wan, author of Green Peony and the Rise of the Chinese Martial Arts Novel

Transformations Conference: introducing Professor Gary Hall

2011-07-07T02:39:00.001-07:00

Transformations Conference,

Introducing the keynote: Gary Hall

Cardiff University, 7^th July 2011

Hello. I am Paul Bowman, one of the organisers of this conference, and it is my great pleasure to introduce our keynote speaker, Professor Gary Hall.

Now: in the context first of the Labour-commissioned Browne Report, which recommended removing virtually all state funding for university teaching, and second the execution of these recommended cuts, and more, by the accursed coalition of the Conservatives and the Liberal Democrats – or the current government, that has been appropriately called the ‘Con-Dem’ coalition – in the context of this, it has become not simply fashionable or current to rethink the university, but urgent. The transformation of the university is widely recognized as urgent, as serious, as challenging, as immensely significant – as likely to be transformative not just of the university, but of untold realms and contexts of culture and society.

Well, our keynote today, Professor Gary Hall has long been at the forefront of thinking and rethinking all manner of transformations of the university, long before the current state of emergency. He is currently Professor of Media and Performing Arts in the School of Art and Design at Coventry University. But his first book, Culture in Bits (Continuum, 2002) was located firmly in the field of cultural studies. And when I say ‘cultural studies’ I mean to refer to a very precise institutional field, which is also what Professor Hall means when he refers to cultural studies: a project, a politicization of academia – or, at least, an insistence on the political dimensions of academic work; some of the features of which more and more of us are now coming to see, now that the Con-Dem Government are working to transform the university in so many ways. The disciplines are political. They have political charges, values, orientations, and consequences.

Gary Hall’s first book, Culture in Bits, identified and focused on many of these, and argued for the importance of cultural theory (and, specifically, deconstruction) not only for rethinking culture, but also for rethinking, reworking and potentially – hopefully – transforming the disciplines – but in directions that we, as academics, as scholars, as researchers, might desire (rather than the corporate, consumerist directions preferred by managerialism and government).

This is also why Professor Hall set up an online, open access, experimental but peer reviewed and eminently serious academic journal – called Culture Machine – and long before the proliferation of such journals. Most importantly, this project did not have anything like a ‘business model’. In fact it always aimed to promote basic, theoretical, innovative, political, philosophical, and otherwise cutting edge experiments and transformations in cultural studies and cultural theory – and it did so in order to try to disarticulate academia from a business model – to release it from the stranglehold that profit-seeking publishers were tightening around academics’ necks. (This was at a time when – it is important to know – a few big publishers dominated the landscape and would routinely tell new PhDs to forget about trying to publish their research as a monograph and instead just to write them a snappy ‘lite’ entry-level undergraduate textbook.)

This concern feeds into Hall’s next book: Digitize This Book!: The Politics of New Media, or Why We Need Open Access Now (Minnesota UP, 2008). We need open access, Hall argues, for all sorts of ethical, political and scholarly reasons. Without it, we lose a lot. And we lose it not just into thin air, but we actually it to a certain enemy.

As part of this project, Gary founded CSeARCH, the cultural studies e archive, and then, with an international group of academics, The Open Humanities Press. This largely online endeavour also has a print dimension, but it is not tied to it. Rather, Hall seeks to experiment with new formats and functions: as part of The Open Humanities Press he is an editor of the Liquid Books series, which is open access, open ended, collaborative and democratic.

His other books include New Cultural Studies: Adventures in Theory (Edinburgh UP, 2006) and Experimenting: Essays with Samuel Weber (Fordham UP, 2007). And he has published in numerous journals, including Angelaki, Cultural Politics, Cultural Studies, Parallax and The Oxford Literary Review. In 2010 he was Visiting Fellow in The Centre for Research in the Arts, Humanities and Social Sciences (CRASSH) at the University of Cambridge.

His website tells me he is currently developing a series of what are called ‘politico-institutional interventions’ that have been called activist scholarship or 'deconstructions in the public sphere' – which draw on digital media to actualise or creatively perform critical and cultural theory; and that he is currently writing two monographs: Media Gifts, designed as a follow-up to Digitize This Book! and There Are No Digital Humanities. Together with a few others and The Open Humanities Press, he is also working on the JISC-funded project LivBL: Living Books about Life, a sustainable series of electronic open access books about life – with life understood both philosophically and biologically – which seeks to provide a bridge between the humanities and the sciences.

I have known Gary Hall’s work since I was an editor of the journal Parallax the mid-90s. It immediately and has always struck me as being committed to transforming the university, by tactics and strategies of subverting the stultifying holds of corporatism, elitism, homogeneity, and, indeed, anti-intellectualism. His work is theoretical, yes; but it is also democratizing. It is always rigorous and diligent, but always equally unquestionably fascinating and engaging.

On a slightly more personal note, I want to conclude by saying that – for his sins – Gary was the editor of some of the first reviews and articles that I ever published. So I should probably take this opportunity to apologize to him for all the extra work that my clumsy, bumbling early drafts caused him. I’m sorry. But thank you: For this is another way of saying that he was the most patient, caring, tolerant and consistently constructive editor I have ever worked with. He set the bar very high. For Gary Hall never wants to reject. He always wants and works to transform. As a speaker, too, he is attentive and caring: he never wants to lose even a single listener, and always hopes to engage everyone on their terms, in terms of their concerns. And all of this is why I have such great pleasure in introducing to you, Professor Gary Hall.

Review of 'The Rey Chow Reader'

2011-06-30T04:52:00.001-07:00

A Review of The Rey Chow Reader just published on Culture Machine, by Esther Whitfield:

http://www.culturemachine.net/index.php/cm/article/view/450/474

The Partition of the Pedagogical: Adrian Rifkin's Rancierean Cultural Studies

2011-06-29T04:08:00.001-07:00

Here’s a chapter on Adrian Rifkin, Jacques Rancière, cultural studies and archival research ‘methods’:

http://cardiff.academia.edu/PaulBowman/Papers/718495/Autodidactics_of_Bits_Adrian_Rifkins_Rancierean_Cultural_Studies_and_the_partition_of_the_pedagogical

Asian Cinema Studies Conference

2011-06-29T02:16:00.001-07:00

CALL FOR PAPERS
===========

ASIAN CINEMA STUDIES SOCIETY CONFERENCE
=============================

With the Support of
THE CENTRE FOR THE STUDY OF GLOBALIZATION AND CULTURE and
THE DEPARTMENT OF COMPARATIVE LITERATURE at
THE UNIVERSITY OF HONG KONG

MARCH 18-20, 2012
AT THE UNIVERSITY OF HONG KONG

Hong Kong and Asian Cinema: Creativity and Culture in an Era of Globalization
----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

This meeting of the Asian Cinema Studies Society welcomes paper, poster, workshop and panel proposals covering all aspects of Asian film and media. Although proposals related to the conference theme of Hong Kong and Asian cinema in the era of globalization may be given priority, proposals on all aspects of Asian film and media are welcome.

Please send proposals of 200-300 words as RTF or WORD attachments to Dr. Natalie Wong at nslw@hku.hk. For all proposals, be certain to include the title, author(s) name(s), institutional affiliation, mailing address, and email contacts, as well as a brief biography of each contributor. For panel, workshop, and group submissions, be certain to provide a brief description (100 words) of the contribution of each participant. Sessions will be 1 ½ hours in duration, and time limits will be strictly enforced.

Deadline for proposals: December 31, 2011

Notifications of acceptance will be sent out by the end of January 2012.

We regret that we cannot offer any funds for travel or accommodation. However, there will be NO registration fee for those presenting papers, serving as panel chairs, or participating in workshops, poster sessions, or in any other official capacity. Registered guests are welcome to attend as well; however, some conference events/meals may only be available for those presenting papers or serving in other official capacities.

About the Asian Cinema Studies Society (ACSS):

Inaugurated in 1984, ACSS has been dedicated to fostering research in Asian film and related media. It publishes Asian Cinema twice yearly, and features all types of Asian film, including full-length movies, documentaries, animation, and experimental. Nine ACSS conferences have been held since 1988, including five in the United States and one each in Australia, Canada, South Korea and China. Many of the papers presented at ACSS conferences have been published in Asian Cinema and other journals and books.

For more information on ACSS and for membership details, visit its website athttp://astro.temple.edu/~jlent/asiancinema/acss.html

About the Centre for the Study of Globalization and Culture:

The Center for the Study of Globalization and Cultures (CSGC), set up in 1999, is an interdisciplinary center based in the Department of Comparative Literature. The focus of its work is on issues of culture and globalization with special reference to Asia, China and Hong Kong. Major research themes include: the cultures of capitalism; global flows of culture, media and technology; cities and globalization; new communities, publics, and identities; and post-colonialism and neo-liberalism.

For more information on CSGC, visit its website at
http://www0.hku.hk/complit/csgc/

Please direct all inquiries to Dr. Natalie Wong at nslw@hku.hk.

Program committee members: John Lent (Temple), Tan See-Kam (Macau), Natalie Wong (HKU), Staci Ford (HKU), Mirana Szeto (HKU), Winnie Yee (HKU), Ang Sze-wei (HKU), Gina Marchetti (HKU).

Everything that's wrong with the Future of UK Universities

2011-06-05T22:27:00.001-07:00

Keep checking the Infinite Thought blog to keep up to date on the protests against the neoliberalisation of UK universities and the intensification of class privilege and the perverse back-door re-entry of media friendly intellectuals into pseudo-legit.-sounding colleges:

http://infinitethought.cinestatic.com/index.php/site/new_college_of_the_humanities_boycott/#When:11:15:21Z

Reading Ranciere: Critical Dissensus

2011-06-02T22:14:00.001-07:00

http://www.cardiff.ac.uk/jomec/newsandevents/news/11readingrancierepaulbowman.html

How Can Mainstream Media Engage Effectively With Black and Ethnic Minority Audiences?

2011-05-25T04:52:00.001-07:00

How Can Mainstream Media Engage Effectively With Black and Ethnic Minority Audiences?

If you are:

· are a UK-based academic, PhD student, researcher or media practitioner,

· have something interesting/substantial to say in response to this question,

· would like to come to Cardiff University on Thursday 16^th June to say it,

Then please contact me, Paul Bowman, at BowmanP@cf.ac.uk asap, letting me know who you are and broadly what you’d like to say.

I’d be interested to hear from you, and may even be able to pay for your train fare, lunch and snacks.

(Preference has to go to work focusing on News Media, unfortunately.)

paul

--
Dr Paul Bowman
Director of Postgraduate Research Studies
Director: Race, Representation & Cultural Politics Research Group
Co-Director: The (Re-)Constructing Multiculturalism Research Network
School of Journalism, Media & Cultural Studies [JOMEC], Cardiff University

http://cardiff.academia.edu/PaulBowman

How to Not Read Zizek

2011-05-19T04:33:00.000-07:00

I know that this is not going to make me any friends, but, hey, perhaps this will change the coordinates such that history will retroactively redeem me, or something:

http://cardiff.academia.edu/PaulBowman/Papers/601845/How_to_Not_Read_Zizek

The Truth of Zizek online

2011-05-16T12:31:00.000-07:00

Here is the full text of The Truth of Zizek (2007):

http://cardiff.academia.edu/PaulBowman/Books/595515/The_Truth_of_Zizek

Deconstructing Popular Culture online

2011-05-16T11:57:00.001-07:00

Here is the full text of Deconstructing Popular Culture by Paul Bowman, published by Palgrave in 2008:

http://cardiff.academia.edu/PaulBowman/Books/595506/Deconstructing_Popular_Culture

The Philosophers' Magazine

2011-05-04T03:25:00.001-07:00

The Philosophers’ Magazine seeks writers for news and feature items. They’re after philosophically-minded journalists, philosophers with dark pasts in journalism, or anyone capable of straight reporting. There are examples of news items here:

http://www.philosophypress.co.uk/?cat=28

The British Police are the Best in the World

2011-04-27T02:43:00.001-07:00

http://leninology.blogspot.com/2011/04/british-police-are-best-in-world.html

Radical Foucault Expanded! Final cfp

2011-04-21T01:10:00.001-07:00

Radical Foucault: An International Conference

September 8th - 9th, University of East London (Docklands Campus)

Centre for Cultural Studies Research, University of East London

http://culturalstudiesresearch.org/?p=591

Following the superb international response to our initial call for papers,
we have decided to expand the event into a two-day conference. This has
opened up a very limited amount of space for further contributions.
Abstracts of no more than 350 words are invited, to arrive no later than
Sunday May 8th 201.

The publication of Michel Foucault's Lectures at the Collège de France,
1983-84 in English will be complete in April 2011 and his first Collège de
France lecture course, La Volunté de Savoir will be published for the first
time in February. The Centre for Cultural Studies Research at the University
of East London is holding a an international conference which will re-assess
Foucault's contribution to radical thought and the application of his ideas
to contemporary politics. What does it mean to draw on Foucault as a
resource for radical politics, and how are we to understand the politics
which implicitly informs his work?

Many commentators today would seem to claim Foucault as the theorist of a
politics which eschews all utopian ambition in favour of a certain
governmental pragmatism, while others would claim him for a rigorous but
ultimately rather simple libertarianism: can either of these positions ever
be adequate to the radicalism of Foucault's analyses? Does it matter?

What is the significance of Foucault's ideas of 'governmentality' and
'biopolitics' in understanding his later oeuvre and its implications; do
either of these terms deserve to carry the weight attributed to them by some
commentators? What is the ongoing relevance of Foucault's account of
disciplinarity: is, it, as Lazzarato has claimed, a historical category no
longer fully applicable to contemporary forms of power?

How can Foucauldian ideas be brought bear on the analysis of austerity
politics? Is there a role for Foucault's ideas in formulating effective
resistance to the increasing erosion of civil liberties that operates both
within countries and across state boundaries? Can the notion of bio-power
account for contemporary forms of racism? How can Foucauldian epistemology
enable an understanding of the biopolitics of contemporary scientific
discourse?

Confirmed Keynotes:
Stuart Elden, Professor in the Department of Geography, Durham University.
Mark Kelly, Lecturer in Philosophy, Middlesex University.

Subjects may include, but are not limited to:

Foucauldian thought and contemporary subjectivation
Foucault and other thinkers
Governmentality and everyday life
Strategic discourses of war and terror
New technologies of the self
Foucault and new forms of resistance
Heterotopias now and in the future
Foucault and the erosion of the state
Disciplinary society and the society of control
Foucault, British politics and the 'big society'
Foucault, post-Fordism and post-democracy

Email abstracts to Jeremy Gilbert (j.gilbert@uel.ac.uk) and Debra Benita
Shaw (d.shaw@uel.ac.uk)

Registration will cost £110.00 per delegate (including lunch, not including
accommodation or dinner) for both days. A day-rate of 65.00 will be
available, but delegates will be strongly encouraged to attend on both days,
and the organisers cannot promise to accommodate requests to present on a
particular day.

The future's shite...

2011-04-15T09:37:00.000-07:00

The shape of things to come:

http://www.timeshighereducation.co.uk/story.asp?sectioncode=26&storycode=415857&c=1

NHS reform bill and the politics of health

2011-04-14T05:31:00.001-07:00

This is important stuff:

http://abetternhs.wordpress.com/2011/04/14/the-role-of-the-nhs-and-the-health-of-the-nation/

Spectres...

2011-04-11T12:57:00.001-07:00

…of Bruce Lee:

http://www.uzak.it/lo-stato-delle-cose/49-spectres-of-bruce-lee.html

The Receptions of Poststructuralism

2011-04-08T12:19:00.001-07:00

Here’s a draft of an article I’m writing, under the title of ‘The Receptions of Poststructuralism’:

http://cardiff.academia.edu/PaulBowman/Papers/513244/The_Receptions_of_Poststructuralism

Music, Politics and Agency

2011-04-05T04:57:00.001-07:00

Music, Politics and Agency

A one-day conference presented by:

Centre for Cultural Studies Research, University of East London

Faculty of Social Sciences, Open University

Media Industries Research Centre, University of Leeds

May 20^th 2011

11:00 - 18:00

University of East London

Docklands Campus

Room EB.2.43

permalink: http://culturalstudiesresearch.org/?p=694

Can music change anything, or does its potency lie merely in its exemplary status as an organised human activity? What are the effects of power relations on music and to what extent is music itself a site at which power relations can be reinforced, challenged or subverted? What are the economic, affective, corporeal or ideological mechanisms through which these processes occur? Has the age of recorded music as a potent social force now passed, a relic of the twentieth century; or with the music industry in crisis, is music culture in fact the first post-capitalist sector of the cultural economy, only now emerging from the long shadow of the culture industry? What historical or contemporary examples can we draw on to address some or all of these questions?

This conference is programmed by Jeremy Gilbert (Centre for Cultural Studies Research, University of East London), David Hesmondhalgh (Media Industries Research Centre, Institute of Communications Studies) and Jason Toynbee (Centre for Research on Socio-Cultural Change, Open University).

The conference is free to attend, but pre-registration is recommended.

To register email j.gilbert@uel.ac.uk with the subject “Music, Politics and Agency Registration”

For any further information, email j.gilbert@uel.ac.uk

UEL Docklands Campus is best reached via Cyprus DLR (Docklands Light Railway) station, which is literally located at the campus.

For information about the campus, see http://www.uel.ac.uk/campuses/docklands.htm

Room EB.2.43 is on the second floor of the main building (‘East Building’) which is to the left of the main square upon entering from the square from Cyprus DLR .

See http://journeyplanner.tfl.gov.uk/user/XSLT_TRIP_REQUEST2?language=en to plan your journey.

Speakers and Papers

Anne Danielsen

Power, mediation, and aesthetics in the music of Public Enemy

Anne Danielsen is Professor and Head of Research in the Department of Musicology at the University of Oslo. Her publications include Pleasure and Presence: the Funk Grooves of James Brown and Parliament (2006) and Musical Rhythm in the Age of Digital Reproduction (2010).

Barry Shank

The political agency of music

Barry Shank teaches popular music, American studies and cultural theory in the department of Comparative Studies at Ohio State University. He is the author ofDissonant Identities: The Rock'n'Roll Scene in Austin, Texas and A Token of My Affection: Greeting Cards and American Business Culture. He is currently completing a book for Duke University Press entitled Silence, Noise, Beauty: The Political Agency of Music.

David Hesmondhalgh

Music and human flourishing

David Hesmondhalgh teaches and researches at the University of Leeds. His books include Creative Labour: Media Work in Three Cultural Industries (2011), co-written with Sarah Baker, and Western Music and its Others: Difference, Appropriation and Representation in Music (with Georgina Born, 2000).

Helen Reddington

The sound of women musicians in the punk era

Helen Reddington lectures in songwriting and production on the University of East London's Music Cultures BA. Her research interests include the punk subculture and women's engagement with music technology. Her book The Lost Women of Rock Music will appear revised in paperback in January 2012 and a double CD of archive material by her punk-pop band is due to be released by the label Damaged Goods later this year.

Jeremy Gilbert

Music after capitalism? Culture, creativity and markets

Jeremy Gilbert is Reader in Cultural Studies at the University of East London. His publications include (with Ewan Pearson) Discographies: Dance Music Culture and the Politics of Sound (Routledge 1999) and Anticapitalism and Culture: Radical Theory and Popular Politics (Berg 2008). He is co-director of the Centre for Cultural Studies Research, editor of new formations and a founder member of Lucky Cloud Sound System.

John Street

Music as political thought and action: the arguments and the evidence

John Street is a professor of politics at the University of East Anglia. His latest book is Music and Politics, which is due to be published by Polity later this year. He is a member of the editorial group of the journal Popular Music.

Martin Stokes

Scale, agency and music in religious movements

Martin Stokes is University Lecturer in Ethnomusicology and Tutorial Fellow at St. John's College, University of Oxford. Martin is an ethnomusicologist with a particular interest in social and cultural theory. His most recent book The Republic of Love: Cultural Intimacy in Turkish Popular Music, has just been published by the University of Chicago Press (2010).

Tim Lawrence

Rhizomatic musicianship: Arthur Russell and after

Tim Lawrence is a Reader in Cultural Studies at the University of East London and the programme leader of the Music Culture: Theory and Production degree. He is the author of Love Saves the Day: A History of American Dance Music Culture, 1970-79 (Duke University Press, 2003) and Hold On to Your Dreams: Arthur Russell and the Downtown Music Scene, 1973-92 (Duke University Press, 2009). He is a founding member of the Centre for Cultural Studies Research and Lucky Cloud Sound System.

Tuulikki Pietilä

Body politic: youth musics in the “New South Africa”

Tuulikki Pietilä is a social anthropologist and a research fellow in the Helsinki Collegium for Advanced Studies. She has published a monograph and a number of articles on trade and gender in Kilimanjaro and the post-colonial Africa more broadly. Currently she is studying South African music and music industry.

Reading Ranciere: out now

2011-04-05T01:40:00.001-07:00

Our latest book, Reading Rancière: Critical Dissensus is out now from Continuum:

http://www.continuumbooks.com/books/detail.aspx?BookId=136161&SearchType=Basic

Manifesto for UK Higher Education

2011-04-05T01:38:00.001-07:00

The manifesto is here:

http://www.goldsmithsucu.org/content/manifesto-higher-education-please-sign

To sign the petition, send an email to the address on that page.

Bruce Lee V. Egemonia

2011-03-15T12:39:00.001-07:00

A paper I’m giving in Bari, Puglia (Italy) on 29^th March:

http://cardiff.academia.edu/PaulBowman/Talks/37209/Bruce_Lee_V._Egemonia

(It’ll be worth attending just to hear/laugh at my effort to present in Italian…)

War Games (or: politics and hashtag #ukuncut)

2011-02-22T13:08:00.000-08:00

Here's a talk I gave tonight at a Cardiff University education activist event. I cut a bit here and interpolated a little there, but this is essentially it.

War Games

Reading The Independent this morning, I learned two things. The first was a clarification of the extent to which the Con-Dem Coalition government seeks to privatize public services. The second was that the government has started to play war games: theoretical computer simulated enactments of various scenarios of how a period of protest, demonstration, striking and political mobilisation may play itself out and be combated, dominated, controlled and defeated by the government.

Of course, this is all couched as necessity. The government needs to make cuts, to balance the books, remember? But, of course, this is nonsense: remember. The causes and solutions to all of the financial problems are considerably simpler than the government pretends. If you remember nothing else, remember this: the banks caused the crisis; the government bailed out the banks, the poorest in society are being made to pay for this.

Also remember this: the sums don't even add up. The easiest way to balance the books would be, of course, to privatize the debt. The second easiest way would be to make those who took our money pay it back. Another logical if not necessarily easy way would be to make all those global and international companies who avoid paying tax in the UK actually pay the tax that they owe.

Instead of this, the government has chosen to persecute those who are least responsible for the deficit and certainly the least able to pay: the public services; the services that constitute society as such; the services and institutions that are all we have that could be classed as society in distinction to economy: education, welfare state, council services, public services, social services, the NHS, and all that goes with them: public sector pensions, book-start (free books for preschool children), community libraries, swimming pools, free swimming for children and OAPs, subsidised public transport, never mind forests, maintenance grants to help teenagers gain an education and the prospect of a future.

To me one of the most outrageous (in the sense of preposterous) elements of the Con-Dem sophistry is the erection, in the face of the real onslaught to society, of the nonsensical notion of 'the big society'. This vacuous and asinine platitude is being held up like a shield to deflect and divert and dazzle and bamboozle – or like the pack of cards that the conjurer asks us to watch while the other hand is busy behind the scenes. The idea of the big society is a Maguffin, a red-herring, a nothingness, presented to turn our gazes away from the black hole caused by the wholesale dismantling of actual society.

In the 1980s, Thatcher argued that there was no such thing as society. Her point was that if you think in terms of society then you are thinking in the wrong terms: we should, insisted Thatcher, be thinking in terms of economic efficiency and performance, and only this way will we produce a wealthier world for all. That is because, she held, a welfare state breeds 'dole scroungers'; the discipline of market forces breeds efficiency and wealth. Hence the Thatcherite (or, rather, neoliberal) argument – the often downplayed argument – that massive social inequalities and a dramatically polarised society between the haves and the have-nots is a 'good thing'. It is presented as a good thing because the argument or cant is that the immense wealth at the top will 'trickle down' to such an extent that even the have-nots will be better off overall. (This is of course an ex post facto argument: an argument retroactively constructed to justify the status quo, manipulated into existence to support the desired answer.)

Three decades of evidence to the contrary later (wealth does not trickle down; societies do not benefit from inequality) and the Con-Dems are here to finish the job started by Thatcher. They arrive after the period of ideological consolidation and fumbling of and fiddling with the baton by Labour. For, Labour shed their socialist skin to win political power. But Labour were rather more carried along by macro-economic currents (occasionally trying to patch up and alleviate the most dramatic consequences of the currents they rode), rather than furthering them dramatically themselves.

But the Con-Dems were given a gift: a crisis of capitalism that they could call a crisis caused by Labour. Moreover, the vocabulary of 'crisis' and 'urgency' was used with gay abandon to justify rushing through dramatically right wing neoliberalist policies. And all this despite the overwhelming empirical evidence that neoliberalism only advantages the very top end earners. For the rest of us it introduces insecurity, uncertainty, anxiety and instability.

And this has been introduced into the university, as in so many other places. The cutting of funding for many undergraduate programmes has supposedly been justified by a market logic of competition. But it has been weighed down by an artificial (non-market) cap placed on the amounts of fees the universities can actually charge.

This is contradictory, and suggests that those implementing these supposedly marketizing principles do not believe in or trust the market after all. For, if they trusted the market, then surely the state should fund no subjects at all. But this is not being done, and mainly because if we did not artificially prop up the sciences, the costs to everyone concerned (producer and consumer) would be so astronomical as to make them completely unviable.

Many have asked: why marketize education at all? Why only some subjects? And if we are marketizing, then why place an artificial cap on the top prices of a so-called free market?

Interpretations abound about this utterly internally self-contradictory situation and discourse. These range from regarding the whole thing as bodged, as a botch job, to regarding it all as a deliberate, coherent and concerted attempt to implement a socio-economic programme that will either emancipate us all or retrench class privilege by moving higher education out of the reach of the poorest and by forcing more people to choose vocational qualifications rather than the once-prestigious-sounding BA honours degree.

(The Con-Dems explicitly hold the position that not everyone should be able to pursue a degree because, they say, it merely raises people's expectations of gaining a professional career. This expectation, the Con-Dems tell us, is now unreasonable. So, despite the fact that today's generation of young adults is far fewer in number than ever before, jobs are now scarcer and less professional than ever before…)

Some interpretations suggest that this will destroy UK higher education in all but the most financially secure institutions. Some suggest that nothing whatsoever will essentially change, except that students will graduate with mortgage-sized debts. Others that the government has initiated a change at the genetic level of higher education, in a piece of genetic social engineering whose consequences remain to be seen.

There are lots of issues and interpretations circulating. I cannot hope to engage with them all. But the point, as we should all know, is not merely to interpret the world: the point is to change it. So, if we oppose these cuts, in higher education as elsewhere – cuts which are ultimately designed to privatise what are currently public institutions – the key question is surely: what is to be done?

To reiterate: The government is playing war games. The government is, in other words, preparing for war – the tumult of mass and widespread protest; perhaps political war, political conflict. It is preparing for conflict on the reasonable assumption that its onslaught on everything society normally says it holds dear will provoke some anger. And we should bear this calculation in mind: cause and response, action and reaction are carefully planned, with as little as possible left to chance.

The conflict the government is preparing for is going to be the traditional confrontational kind of strike action and marching in the streets. And it is preparing to fight this sort of conflict on all fronts: from micrological and technical (how are protests to be policed and managed) to mediatic and political (how are conflicts to be spun in the media and in parliament) to pragmatic (how might they be used to political advantage – for instance, to usher in private companies to provide the services that striking workers are withholding – the very thing that the government ultimately wants, in many cases, in fact) to legislatively (how might protesting and striking actually be criminalized).

All of this has happened before, and will happen again. And this is what anyone concerned to redress the government's imposition of so many draconian cuts in so many realms and sectors must bear in mind: the government is planning for a political response, and is planning to fight it on the streets, in the media, in parliament, and in the courts. The government is planning not only to break strikes but to actually make strikes work for its own ends: so that if the public sector withholds, then the private sector will be invited to provide. Job done.

So what is to be done? I would suggest that protestors and opponents of the government must play their own war games, but according to different paradigms and scenarios than those envisaged by traditional confrontational protest.

Let us look at the case of UKuncut. UKuncut is what cultural theorists might call a kind of non-hierarchical, non-identitarian desiring assemblage. It is an impassioned and technologically mediated facilitator of movement. It is a twitter hashtag, a facebook page, a point of identification, a way of making rallying calls, a place to find words and vocabularies and arguments and accusations and evidence, and facts and figures and calls to arms and suggestions for creative demonstrations of an anti-governmental and anti-cuts message. It is at the same time its own reporting on and representation of its own and others' activities. It is something quite new and immensely promising.

However, at the same time as we look at UKuncut, which is not necessarily connected to any single or concrete institution, and which is animated by a wholehearted anti-cut and anti-injustice ethos, we must also look at the many institutions that are actually facing cuts. These will act via their own representatives – basically, their unions. And their unions may call for strikes. And these strikes will play themselves out through standard narrative structures and tropes and representations and vocabularies: the media will speak of a radical minority and the police will blame the strikers and protestors and the protestors will blame the police; and people may or may not sympathise and will become sick of being unable to get or do what the striking workers used to enable them to get or do. And so on.

In this, traditional political forms and media forms will play key roles: union representatives will speak with political representatives in a mediatized discourse. This is the terrain on which the war games are being planned. It is about police management, and media management and discursive management – the domination of these scenes.

But then there is twitter and UKuncut. I take these to stand for new and alternative repositories of strategies and tactics.[i] For, remember: Many workers will only be able to protest their own particular plight via the mechanism of the union, wherever a union is present or active. And the presence or absence of formalised protest depends very much on the specific institution or sector, here. Some cut sectors may be unable to protest through the usual unionized channels.

Which is where assemblages like UKuncut can come in (a little like the cavalry). But this is only going to be the case to the extent that the (so to speak) 'universal' energies of UKuncut are directed towards and articulated with 'particular' protests. Without such direction and connection, then UKuncut may really only be working in the realms of impotent moralism. There is only so much that can be done by the creative, performative 'exposing' of the financial and ethical misdemeanours of banks and big businesses. Of course, this 'so much' is very much. But it needs to be coordinated with politics proper. And that takes place around specific end-oriented struggles.

The communication, coordination and mobilization enabled by technologies like Twitter in particular actions and occupations has already proved to be quite remarkable. It is certainly the only reason I am on Twitter. Protestors, demonstrators and occupiers communicate with each other, inform each other, boost each other's morale, at the same time as informing any inclined to find out about what is going on, in a way which bypasses or overtakes the slower temporality and limitations and inevitably biased institutions of mainstream TV, radio, print and even online news media.

Here, the technology works as a supplement to politics and to representation. But the problem is that opposition to the cuts is going to have to play itself out in parliament. So, what is to be done?

The first thing to be done is what is already being done by the creative protests of UKuncut. This is a politics of creativity and not negativity. It is a kind of direct action, but not premised on the defensive negativity of striking. Here, UKuncut picks up the direct action baton of Reclaim the Streets, but now, staging teach-ins about economics and tax avoidance in high street stores, opening libraries and childcare crèches in high street banks, and so on.

Much of this takes the form of what Slavoj Žižek has called a strategy of overidentification. That is, these political performances take the literal and explicit words of power and insist on their actualisation. As in: so, Cameron wants a big society, then let's perform our interpretation of this, ideally at the same time as clarifying its beautiful difference from the stark ugliness of the institutions the government supports. Anything that is mobilised along the lines of 'but you said you wanted this' is a kind of overidentification, and according to Žižek, it can sometimes be the most subversive thing possible, as it reveals the lie or the obscenity or the hypocrisy of those who made the claims in the first place.

This kind of consciousness-raising performance is certainly valuable. And in today's context, it is easy and urgent and important to draw and reiterate the stark contrasts which illustrate the obscenity and hypocrisy of the state of affairs: multimillion and multibillion pound profits and bonuses for the bailed-out banks in the face of unemployment and misery dished out to providers of vital public services.

And it doesn't have to be the bankers either. We might look at the pay-rises awarded to many university Vice Chancellors or those at the top of the NHS and so on in conjunction with looking at the drastic cuts we are told we have to make to front-line staff and services.

A politics of overidentification would say: 'but you said we were all in this together. How come the rich get richer and the poor get poorer?' Or: 'if we are all in this together, how come it is not the case that everyone, everywhere, all the way up and down the chain of an institution, takes equivalent pay and budgetary cuts? If this were really about the figures and about the money – about balancing the books – then wouldn't cuts at the very top result in much greater savings than cuts at the bottom?'

In slightly different terms, the philosopher Jacques Rancière notes that there have been great changes in the orientation of political protest since the 1960s. He notes that in the 1960s, protestors tended to be 100% against the powerful and their institutions. But this meant that there could be no dialogue: for, on the one hand, the protestors believed that every word said by power was evil; on the other hand, the representatives of institutions believed that the protestors were just silly children who deserved only contempt. But, more recently, Rancière observes, protest has been less millenarian or less based in outright opposition. Protest has been more about particular clauses, the wording of proposed legislation, complaints about details, technicalities, interpretations, and so on. Rancière calls this a politics of verification.

I think that UKuncut is leading the way in the performative politics of overidentification and the argumentative or rhetorical politics of verification. This is not a party politics, and nor do I think it needs to be. But I think that it will work much better if it becomes articulated and elaborated as something that an oppositional politics could step up to.

Labour appear to have been nowhere throughout all of this. And this is the first question which now needs to be posed regularly and repetitively to Labour: where are you? The second question is: where do you stand on the cuts? The third question: will you reverse the cuts? This is the key question: do the opposition oppose? Will they cut the cuts?

These questions need to be asked, and over and over again, if these are indeed war games or political games that the protestors are playing, and not just games.

Of course, the problem with politics is that no matter who you vote for, the government always gets in. But there are governments and there are governments. And this government is a vandal.

So what is to be done? What can I do, what can you do, what can we do? I think that there is something important in the fact that the government is playing war games, based on a politics of strikes and protests. I am not suggesting that strikes and demos shouldn't take place. But I am proposing the importance of accentuating the positive too.

Thus: rather than waiting for or waging negative, defensive strike action, perhaps we can take preemptive creative strike action: strike out: tweet, email, telephone, write to Labour MPs. Ask them: will you uncut the cuts? Do you condemn the Con-Dems? Will you do the opposite of the current government? Are your politics and your ideologies different? If not, why not? We want them to be.

How do we ask them? Literally, directly, technologically: most of these people are on Twitter; all are on email. As well as showing and demonstrating through traditional demonstrations, let's discourse directly. Direct armchair action. Let's just ask them: will you uncut the cuts? Let's just tell them. Collective twitters. Put your hands out, and touch the screen and believe.

Some may say this is very little, almost nothing. And in and of itself, it is. But combined and collectively, it may become more and other and different – and may help to sidestep and wrong-foot the war machines of the right who are so very wrong.

[i] I also take them to stand to particular concrete struggles as the universal stands to the particular, the global to the local, the ideal to the actual, and so on. The universal, the global, is embodied (if embodied is the right term) in the disparate but aligned energies of UKuncut. The particular, the local, are the specific instances and institutions – those who are cut, condemned, struggling, perhaps striking.

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