MediaTropes: Vol 4, No 1 (2013): Deleuze / Foucault: A Neoliberal Diagram

MediaTropes Vol. 4,  No. 1 (2013) Download full issue on PDF

Table of Contents

Editorial Introduction:Neoliberal Diagrammatics and Digital Control
Matthew Tiessen, Greg Elmer

IPO 2.0: The Panopticon Goes Public
Greg Elmer

Resilience versus Resistance: Affectively Modulating Contemporary Diagrams of Social Resilience, Social Sustainability, and Social Innovation
Petra Hroch

Monetary Mediations and the Overcoding of Potential: Nietzsche, Deleuze & Guattari and How the Affective Diagrammatics of Debt Have Gone Global
Matthew Tiessen

Info Nymphos
Erika Biddle

A New Individuation: Deleuze’s Simondon Connection
Andrew Iliadis

Special Semiotic Characters: What is an Obstacle-Sign?
Gary Genosko

Tweets Speak: Indefinite Discipline in the Age of Twitter
Steven James May

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AMODERN 2: NETWORK ARCHAEOLOGY

Nicole Starosielski, Braxton Soderman, cris cheek

Networks have structured our social – and media – development long before the emergence of the “network society.” ^[1] From the letter-writing networks of the proto-Italian aristocracy to the electrical networks that facilitated industrialization; from the spread of woodcuts, pamphlets, and ballads that supported the Protestant Reformation to the twentieth century emergence of broadcast radio and television networks, media have always been situated in the matrices of networks of circulation and distribution, facilitating historically specific modes of connection. ^[2] These histories often remain disconnected from research on digital networks, the latest to re-shape our socio-technical environment into a mesh of interconnecting nodes. An archaeological approach, one that routes between contemporary and historical networks, Alan Liu argues, has the potential to regenerate a sense of history that would temper the presentism of digital culture, all too often experienced as instantaneous and simultaneous. ^[3]

This special issue of Amodern features original research, initially presented in 2012 at the Network Archaeology conference at Miami University of Ohio, on the histories of networks, the discrete connections that they articulate, and the circulatory forms of data, information, and socio-cultural resources that they enable. Drawing from the field of media archaeology, we conceptualize network archaeology as a call to investigate networks past and present – using current networks to catalyze new directions for historical inquiry and drawing upon historical cases to inform our understanding of today’s networked culture. ^[4] In this introduction, we elaborate how network archaeology opens up promising areas for critical investigation, new objects of study, and prospective sites for collaboration within the productively discordant approach of media archaeology.

First, network archaeology encourages the interrogation of the temporality of networked culture and media. Networks are often seen as synchronic rather than diachronic structures; as in much research on digital media, the emphasis of network studies has often been on the “new” and the “now.” Scholars have argued that networking perpetuates processes of acceleration – a speeding up and flattening of historical time. How might we instead understand the network itself as a historical structure, one conditioned by the possibilities of different periods? Are there ways to describe the differential temporal effects of networks – their ability to decelerate as well as accelerate, to ebb as well as flow? The essays included here examine the diverse temporalities of network culture, multiplying our understanding of network pasts and presents.

Second, by replacing “media” with “network” in our approach, we call attention to the definition of the object or phenomenon that is being excavated. How has media archaeology’s focus on media rather than “network,” “system,” or any other term, affected the composition of that field of study? A focus on network archaeology would orient us toward a different set of questions. For example, what does it mean to excavate a connection? Might network archaeology help to historicize processes that leave no traces or artifacts, or bring new kinds of traces and artifacts into view? Network archaeology also points to media’s relationship with other networked systems, including the electrical grid and transport network, and suggests new objects for media studies, such as the architecture of public parks, the telephone pole, the tunnel and the list.

Third, an attention to the specificity of “network” in media archaeological discourse reveals the ways in which networks have already structured the archaeological approach, both rhetorically and practically. Network archaeology therefore not only concerns the archaeological examination of networks but also what Liu refers to as the “networked structure of media archaeology itself.” ^[5]

Fourth, we hope that by posing these questions, the concept of network archaeology can foster a new set of potential collaborations – linking media archaeologists to historians of networked technology and to network theorists. It suggests new, non-media-related archives as sites for media studies inquiry, such as the archives of public works projects or other infrastructure systems, and new methods for mapping and arranging the contents of these archives. (...) Read more in PDF

AMODERN 1: THE FUTURE OF THE SCHOLARLY JOURNAL

Scott Pound

Welcome to the first issue of Amodern

This project enters the world at a timely moment in the history of the scholarly journal, and an important first task for us is to assess the opportunities and challenges ahead. For that reason, we are devoting the first issue of Amodern to a critical conversation about the future of the scholarly journal.

The emergence of online scholarship is a momentous development and an occasion for some serious rethinking of the scholarly knowledge system. This serious rethinking has been happening in earnest for some time, but it isn’t just about technology. It extends deep into our conceptions of the historical, social, and institutional dimensions of scholarly practice.

The scholarly knowledge system we have today originated in the seventeenth century. It sanctifies the individuality, originality, objectivity, and intellectual property of scholars working alone (or in small groups) within a knowledge system defined by the fixity, uniformity, and proprietary status of print. Now, networked IT proffers an apparatus in which information and knowledge no longer tend to be fixed and proprietary; where cultural breakthroughs occur as the result of exercises in collective intelligence, large-scale collaboration, assemblage, and continuous revision; and where authorship and authority are increasingly established communally and anonymously rather than individually.

By extending the locus of cultural production from the individual to the network, digital media challenge the existing scholarly knowledge system’s epistemic foundations: its basis in individual scholars seeking knowledge and authority pegged to qualitative assessments of originality and authorship, its dependence on an understanding of knowledge as proprietary, and its alignment of knowledge with anti-rhetorical, anti-literary discourse. Understanding the impact of these changes requires scholars to rethink their most basic assumptions. At hand are new possibilities for producing, structuring, and mobilizing knowledge via digital tools and networks. At stake are some of the core principles and practices that define scholarly practice.

What constitutes knowledge, publication, research, peer review, authorship, and authority is quickly changing. Each of these sites of epistemic disruption raises stubborn questions. How will scholars harness the capabilities of networked media and still maintain rigorous standards of scholarly literacy and authority? How will institutions of higher learning integrate new forms of scholarly productivity into their review and reward structures? What will it take for peer-reviewed online scholarship to achieve a comparable status to print forms? ( ... ) Read more

The Wretched of the Screen Hito Steyerl @ E-flux journal - September 2012

The Wretched of the Screen Hito Steyerl 
@ E-flux journal - September 2012
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In Hito Steyerl’s writing we begin to see how, even if the hopes and desires for coherent collective political projects have been displaced onto images and screens, it is precisely here that we must look frankly at the technology that seals them in. The Wretched of the Screen collects a number of Steyerl’s landmark essays from recent years in which she has steadily developed her very own politics of the image.
Twisting the politics of representation around the representation of politics, these essays uncover a rich trove of information in the formal shifts and aberrant distortions of accelerated capitalism, of the art system as a vast mine of labor extraction and passionate commitment, of occupation and internship, of structural and literal violence, enchantment and fun, of hysterical, uncontrollable flight through the wreckage of postcolonial and modernist discourses and their unanticipated openings.

With Introduction by Franco “Bifo” Berardi

Edited by Julieta Aranda, Brian Kuan Wood, Anton Vidokle

Contents

Preface

Introduction

In Free Fall: A Thought Experiment on Vertical Perspective

In Defense of the Poor Image

A Thing Like You and Me

Is a Museum a Factory?

The Articulation of Protest

Politics of Art: Contemporary Art and the Transition to Post-Democracy

Art as Occupation: Claims for an Autonomy of Life

Freedom from Everything: Freelancers and Mercenaries

Missing People: Entanglement, Superposition, and Exhumation as Sites of Indeterminacy

The Spam of the Earth: Withdrawal from Representation

Cut! Reproduction and Recombination

Alfabeta - n°29 – maggio 2013

G.B. Zorzoli
Il vero golpe
Carlo Formenti (leggi)
Il mistero buffo della rielezione
Letizia Paolozzi
Ma è il vecchio che avanza (leggi)
Paolo Fabbri
Est iniuria in verbis (leggi)
Cristina Morini
Il maternage delle istituzioni (leggi)
Beatriz Preciado
Noi diciamo Rivoluzione

■ ★★★★★
Nicola Casale, Raffaele Sciortino
La critica al di là della protesta
Ingovernabilità della crisi
Federico Campagna
La Crociata dei Fanciulli di Beppe Grillo
Il primo movimento millenarista di massa del XXI secolo
Andrea Cortellessa
Ordine Nuovo a Cinque Stelle
Alberto Capatti
Grillismo gastronomico
Ovvero critica alle convergenze parallele

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Massimo Campanini: Longing for democracy: A new way to political transformation from an Islamic perspective @ Philosophy & Social Criticism, April 2013

Massimo Campanini: 

Longing for democracy: A new way to political transformation from an Islamic perspective 

@ Philosophy & Social Criticism, April 2013

The Arab revolts of 2011 raised new questions regarding democracy. On the one hand, a new kind of democracy is apparently born: the democracy of the multitude. On the other, Islam has been a major actor in the Arab revolts and presumably will play a growing role in the future. The article investigates if there is a new political model put forward by the foreseeable Islamic developments of the revolts. If we take for granted that there is not only one kind of democracy and that there is much more space for Islamic organizations in the present and future political arena of the Muslim countries, then it will not sound like a heresy to ask whether there is an Islamic way to democracy. In order to demonstrate this original point of view, it is necessary to deal with the principles of Islamic political thought. The Arab revolts promise to renew and update these principles. The article will try to peruse this revision from the point of view of Antonio Gramsci and his theory of hegemony.

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Picblog: A general view shows Egyptian anti government protesters praying at sunset on Cairo's Tahrir Square, on February 7, 2011, on the 14th days of protests calling for an end to Hosni Mubarak's regime. (MOHAMMED ABED/AFP/Getty Images/Getty)

Krisis - Orientation - n.2 - It, 2013

Krisis | Orientation

Krisis | Orientation is the second volume of Krisis Magazine, a publication curated by Unità di crisi, between design, communication, art, visual culture and new languages.
Krisis | Orientation is dedicated to disorientation and to the crisis of orientative models.

Disorientation is today a common experience, affecting people, communities, institutions and entire societies. The most visible effect is a tendency to the fragmentation, to the individualisation, to the selection, to the separation, to the monetisation of the social and environmental context.

The acceleration and the complexity of the phenomena make today difficult to build a personal orientation starting from experience, increasing the need of information and indications coming from the outside. This operation of framing complexity has been carried in time by linear language (such as narrations and myths), by systems of classification (mainly of taxonomical type), by visual representations (atlases, guides and maps), etc. 

These models of orientation have now become confined, limited and unable to build wide and shared visions. 

In this scenario, it becomes crucial to rethink disorientation as an experience that could be a source of renovation for new practices of orientation.

For the volume we have involved international artists, designers, theorists and critics, which have contributed with texts, images or visual essays in order to face the subject from specific point of views.  

Krisis | Orientation will see the partecipation of:
Art is Open Source, Ruedi Baur, Bavo, Cantiere per Pratiche Non Affermative, Piera Chiuppani, DetroitUrbex, Hal Foster, Foundland, René König, Letra, Silvio Lorussoand Sebastian Schmieg, Enrico Manera, Michele Metelli, Yana Milev, Filippo Minelli, Sosaku Myiazaki, Bruno 9li, Serena Osti, Merijn Oudenampsen, Paolo Patelli, Daniela Piscitelli, Marco Quaggiotto, Wolfgang Scheppe, Pavel Maria Smejkal, Société Réaliste, Unità di crisi, Utilità Manifesta, Müge Yilmaz, Evert Ypma.

The volume will be printed in 500 copies, both in Italian and English, and it will be co-published with Aiap Edizioni, publisher of AIAP, the Italian association for visual communication design.

What is Unità di crisi?

Unità di crisi is a research collective composed of designers and theorists in the field of visual communication.
The collective was born with the objective of developing a practical and theoretical discourse concerning the permanent crisis that, since decades by now, characterises modern societies, and the willing to highlight what it means to operate as a designer within this context.

With permanent crisis we indicate the situation of increasing instability that is typical of the contemporary world.
In the contemporary world, reference points that traditionally founded, supported and justified lifestyles, ideologies, institutions, hierarchies, have gradually crumbled, because of the speed with which changes in the technical-scientific, economic, social and cultural envioronment have occured.
In this "liquid modernity" the experience of the individual, as well as that of a more or less extensive community, is no longer given or based on a stable system of values or on a shared memory, instead it is continously wandering, continuously looking for new reference points.

Within this scenario, the role of the designer has become increasingly important, enough to say that the world we live in today is a world shaped by design: most of the things we do every day (work, move, eat, communicate, have fun) is in fact mediated by design.
Designers are those who in one way or another plan and shape things, both tangible and intangible ones, and thereby create new standards and value systems, they create new guidelines.

For this reason we are convinced of the importance that there is today of investing energy and resources in researching design. Investigating ways that determine relationships between people and between people and things; investigating the possibilities that modern systems of communication open to the people and those that are instead denied; imagining new communication approaches that give way to an idea of participatory and shared democracy; all of this goes through a research and critics of design and communication.

What does Unità di crisi do?

The research activities of Unità di crisi is made public and divulged (as well as on the web, through our website and social networks) through the publication of a non-periodic thematic volume, Krisis magazine. Each volume is dedicated to a subject related to the world of design, which today is in a critical position; around this specific emergency are thus collected documents and reflections.
Krisis magazine is designed in the form of the archive, or a folder that hosts contributions, specific projects, interviews and research. Each publication seeks to create a path and a discourse between heterogeneous and multiform elements in reference to the main topic of the publication, with the aim of building constellations of meaning, starting from a multitude of particular elements, and thus offering new perspectives and possibilities of interpretation.
In addition, each publication maintains a multidisciplinary approach, collecting contributions ranging from communication design to journalism, from art to photography, from architecture and spatial design to the transmission of culture, trying to reach an heterogeneous and diverse audience.

The first volume, Krisis | Identities, was published in October 2010. Subject of the book was the crisis of identity, or rather the crisis of representation models of identity, a vast and complicated subject that sees the participation, among others, of Experimental Jetset, Metahaven, Wu Ming, Evert Ypma, Jonmar Van Vlijmen, Yana Milev, Stewart Home, Brave New Alps, Nicolò Degiorgis, Collectif_fact, Sosaku Myiazaki.
Krisis | Identities was self-published and partly self-funded. The volume has received excellent feedback both in the academic context and in that of contemporary art.

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MUTE VOL. 3, NO. 3 - BECOMING IMPERSONAL - Uk, 2012

MUTE VOL. 3, NO. 3 - BECOMING IMPERSONAL

The ways in which the personal can be grasped as political is an exponentially productive legacy of second wave feminism. This idea connects the arguments made by many of the writers in this issue: Clinical Wasteman considers the all too personal experience of impersonal systems of exploitation but equally, and against communitarian fantasies, the need to think all imaginable futures as only socially, not privately, producible; in Occupy, Nick Thoburn discovers a collective exposure and deprivatisation of the privatised hells of living through austerity; and P. Valentine exposes the social function of the intimate ordeal of sexual violence. Maintaining conceptual and experiential distinctions, or f ire walls, between the personal and the impersonal, the domestic and the political, both within the mainstream and on the left, is exposed as actively constitutive of the system as a whole.

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Adbusters no.105 - The Big Ideas of 2013 - Jan/feb 2013 -

Adbusters: We are a global network of culture jammers and creatives working to change the way information flows, the way corporations wield power, and the way meaning is produced in our society.

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Vertigo - No. 43 - Fins de mondes - Editeur: Lignes-Vertigo, Fr, 2012

Contributeurs: Hervé Aubron, Jennifer Verraes, Stéphane du Mesnildot, Catherine Ermakoff, Anthony Brinig, Zeynep Jouvenaux, Fabienne Duszynski, Sophie Charlin, Jean-Michel Durafour, Tariq Teguia, Joachim Lepastier, Dario Marchiori, Emeric de Lastens, Emmanuelle Demoris, Aaron Cutler, Émile Breton

De Melancholia aux films de Ciprì et Maresco, des vidéos réalisées au lendemain de la catastrophe de Fukushima à Take Shelter, du dernier film d’Abel Ferrara aux Derniers Jours du monde, du cinéma de Tariq Teguia à Attenberg, on pourrait ébaucher la carte des signes et symptômes, bouleversements, aventures, libérations et angoisses que n’en finissent pas de produire les fins diverses dont nous sommes les contemporains. Comment l’un et l’autre de ces films, et quelques autres, parviennent à restituer l’expérience à laquelle nous livrent les épuisements qui affectent le présent, à nous renseigner sur les manières dont nous en sommes à la fois les acteurs et les témoins, telle est la question que ce numéro entend explorer. Nous ne pouvions par ailleurs résister à la force d’appel de Mafrouza, d’Emmanuelle Demoris, chronique au long cours d’un bidonville d’Alexandrie et de quelques-uns de ses habitants, que la réalisatrice a accompagnés et filmés sur plusieurs années. Comment en effet ne pas avoir le désir de revenir sur le travail impressionnant, le souffle et l’énergie dont témoigne ce film-monde ?

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