Social Text

Adriana Michele Campos Johnson

Visuality as Infrastructure

This question opens on to others: How are the technologies that are being developed to combat “terrorism” departures from or transformations of older technologies of heteronormativity, white supremacy, and nationalism? In what way do contemporary counterterrorism practices deploy these technologies, and how do these practices and technologies become the quotidian framework through which we are obliged to struggle, survive, and resist? Sexuality is central to the creation of a certain knowledge of terrorism, specifically that branch of strategic analysis that has entered the academic mainstream as “terrorism studies.” This knowledge has a history that ties the image of the modern terrorist to a much older figure, the racial and sexual monsters of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Further, the construction of the pathologized psyche of the terroristmonster enables the practices of normalization, which in today’s context often means an aggressive heterosexual patriotism. As opposed to initial post–September 11 reactions, which focused narrowly on “the disappearance of women,” we consider the question of gender justice and queer politics through broader frames of reference, all with multiple genealogies—indeed, as we hope to show, gender and sexuality produce both hypervisible icons and the ghosts that haunt the machines of war. Thus, we make two related arguments: (1) that the construct of the terrorist relies on a knowledge of sexual perversity (failed heterosexuality, Western notions of the psyche, and a certain queer monstrosity); and (2) that normalization invites an aggressive heterosexual patriotism that we can see, for example, in dominant media representations (for example, The West Wing), and in the organizing efforts of Sikh Americans in response to September 11 (the fetish of the “turbaned” Sikh man is crucial here).1 The forms of power now being deployed in the war on terrorism in fact draw on processes of quarantining a racialized and sexualized other, even as Western norms of the civilized subject provide the framework through which these very same others become subjects to be corrected. Our itinerary begins with an examination of Michel Foucault’s figure of monstrosity as a member of the West’s “abnormals,” followed by a consideration of the uncanny return of the monster in the discourses of “terrorism studies.” We then move to the relationship Jasbir K. Puar and Amit S. Rai Monster, Terrorist, Fag: The War on Terrorism

Jasbir K. Puar

Amit S. Rai

Monster, Terrorist, Fag: The War on Terrorism and the Production of Docile Patriots

Micaela di Leonardo

White Ethnicities, Identity Politics, and Baby Bear's Chair

L'A. compare l'ethique et la situation professionnelle des musiciens et des universitaires. Ces deux categories semblent rencontrer des difficultes similaires. Elles doivent faire face a une veritable depreciation de leur statut et a un phenomene de «deprofessionnalisation». Universitaires et musiciens semblent cultiver un meme sens du sacrifice. Les economistes de l'art envisagent la creation artistique comme une activite productive ordinaire. Ils montrent qu'elle ne beneficie pas des gains de productivite comme les autres secteurs malgre une augmentation des couts. L'A. estime que les politiques culturelles permettent d'ameliorer la situation sociale des artistes. Il montre qu'il est tres difficile d'analyser le statut professionnel et le niveau de remuneration des artistes. Bon nombre d'entre eux exercent en effet une double activite. Il s'interroge quant a l'impact et a la persistance de l'ideal romantique au sein des communautes artistiques. Il souligne que le statut de mercenaire au service d'interets commerciaux diminue le prestige de l'artiste et amoindrit la valeur de son travail. Cet ideal parvient-il a survivre au developpement des industries culturelles ? Pour bon nombre d'artistes le rejet de la richesse les rapprochent des plus pauvres. Pour autant, les rappers recherchent la gloire et l'argent. Certaines personnalites du rock s'efforcent de preserver cette dimension propre a l'ethique bohemienne. L'A. decrit la situation des artistes lors de la crise economique de 1929. Ceux-ci comme les membres des autres categories furent contraints d'adopter une strategie de survie. L'A. porte ensuite son attention sur le statut profesionnel des universitaires. Comme les artistes, ils doivent, pour pouvoir exercer leur profession, accepter de bas salaires et une grande precarite de leur statut. Il montre que les politiques de privatisation de l'enseignement et de la recherche ont considerablement aggrave ce phenomen

Andrew Ross

The Mental Labor Problem

Jodi Melamed

The Spirit of Neoliberalism

DOI 10.1215/01642472-3607564 © 2016 Duke University Press Many of the black carpenters were freemen. Things seemed to be going on very well. All at once, the white carpenters knocked off, and said they would not work with free colored workmen. Their reason for this, as alleged, was, that if free colored carpenters were encouraged, they would soon take the trade into their own hands, and poor white men would be thrown out of employment. . . . My fellow apprentices very soon began to feel it degrading to them to work with me. They began to put on airs, and talk about the “niggers taking the country,” saying we all ought to be killed. —Frederick Douglass, Narrative of the Life (1845)

Nikhil Pal Singh

On Race, Violence, and So-Called Primitive Accumulation

Born in Minden, Westphalia, in 1858, Franz Boas was clearly an extraordinary figure, not only a teacher, but a maitre in the grand sense, whose students became disciples, and, in several cases (Kroeber, Mead, Sapir, Benedict, Radin), virtual masters themselves. Boas published extensively on linguistics, on folklore, art, race, and, of course, ethnography, a fabled "five foot shelf," of materials on the Kwakiutl. Yet, Boas did not, like his contemporaries Sigmund Freud and Ferdinand de Saussure, found what Foucault refers to as a field of discursivity, a written discourse which gives rise to the endless possibility of further discourse, or a discipline, like psychoanalysis or structural linguistics. The exact nature of Boas' achievement remains to be specified. In 1888, Boas went to Clark University where he taught anthropology until 1892. He held positions with the World's Columbian exposition in Chicago and at the American Museum of Natural History in New York before moving, 1896, to Columbia University as a lecturer in physical anthropology. He received promotion to a professorship in 1899, a position which he held until his retirement in 1936. Boas died-in the arms of Ievi-Strauss-in 1942. Boas' influence from his academic base at Columbia was enormous. By 1926, for example, as George Stocking has noted,1 every academic department of anthropology in the United States was headed by one of Boas' students. That the Winnebago were studied by Paul Radin or the Pawnee much later by Gene Weltfish, that Edward Sapir, and later, Melville Jacobs gathered Native texts is largely due to Boas. Both Boas' admirers-who are many-and his detractors-they have been fewer-have agreed only on the issue central to their disagreement, the question of Boas' contribution to a science of culture. Shortly after his death, for example, Ruth Benedict declared that having "found anthropology a collection of wild guesses and a happy hunting ground for the romantic lover of primitive things; [Boas] left it a discipline in which theories could be tested."2 Alfred Kroeber, the first to take a doctorate in anthropology with Boas at Columbia, wrote that Boas had "found anthropology a playfield and jousting ground of opinion; he left it a science."3 In

Arnold Krupat

Franz Boas

Anthropology in the Ironic Mode: The Work of Franz Boas

Comparaison des brassages de genres dans la musique populaire aux Etats-Unis au cours des periodes 1960-1970 et 1982-1986, et du role joue par les musiciens afro-americains; analyse des strategies de metissage culturel propres a ces derniers dans la culture americaine, et de la manipulation de l'identite « Black » et du metissage dans et par l'industrie de la communication

Phillip Brian Harper

Synesthesia, "Crossover," and Blacks in Popular Music

Working in the digital media industry is not as much fun as it is made out to be. The “NetSlaves” of the eponymous Webzine are becoming increasingly vociferous about the shamelessly exploitative nature of the job, its punishing work rhythms, and its ruthless casualization (www.disobey.com/netslaves). They talk about “24–7 electronic sweatshops” and complain about the ninety-hour weeks and the “moronic management of new media companies.” In early 1999, seven of the fifteen thousand “volunteers” of America Online (AOL) rocked the info-loveboat by asking the Department of Labor to investigate whether AOL owes them back wages for the years of playing chathosts for free.1 They used to work long hours and love it; now they are starting to feel the pain of being burned by digital media. These events point to a necessary backlash against the glamorization of digital labor, which highlights its continuities with the modern sweatshop and points to the increasing degradation of knowledge work. Yet the question of labor in a “digital economy” is not so easily dismissed as an innovative development of the familiar logic of capitalist exploitation. The NetSlaves are not simply a typical form of labor on the Internet; they also embody a complex relation to labor that is widespread in late capitalist societies. In this essay I understand this relationship as a provision of “free labor,” a trait of the cultural economy at large, and an important, and yet undervalued, force in advanced capitalist societies. By looking at the Internet as a specific instance of the fundamental role played by free labor, this essay also tries to highlight the connections between the “digital economy” and what the Italian autonomists have called the “social factory.” The “social factory” describes a process whereby “work processes have shifted from the factory to society, thereby setting in motion a truly complex machine.”2 Simultaneously voluntarily given and unwaged, enjoyed and exploited, free labor on the Net includes the activity of building Web sites, modifying software packages, reading and participating in mailing lists, and building virtual spaces on MUDs and MOOs. Far from being an Tiziana Terranova Free Labor

Tiziana Terranova

Free Labor

Abstract This article theorizes how femme sociality and world-making provide a counterpoint to a politics that aims for neutrality or innocence, arguing that neutrality or innocence are hallmarks of different forms of patriarchy. Instead, the authors offer embracing complicity as a concept that structures practical ethics centered in abolitionism and nondisposability. Complicity is formulated as a mode of self-understanding that guides action, evading the social hierarchies demanded by a claim to innocence, uprooting (neo)liberal attitudes that look to evade friction by doling out punishment and exclusion. The proposal to embrace complicity is followed by a proposal for solidarity based on openness. Rather than being “right” or “solving problems,” a turn to the sensuous provides a form of world-making that can hold difference—without reducing life to the single organizational forms characteristic of liberalism. As a key part of this form of solidarity, the authors show how trans femmeness emphasizes possibilities for social and sensorial transformation. Practices of care and solidarity allow one to entangle with different forms of life. Instead of reforming the structures of oppression, femme practices encourage us to unlearn and uproot institutional forms that reproduce social and material oppressions, and to take agency in (re)constructing and nourishing one's own worlds—to collectively plant the rose garden of struggle for liberation.

Mijke van der Drift

Nat Raha

“They Would Plant the Rose Garden Themselves”

Abstract Through an analysis of the 2014 video game Dragon Age: Inquisition, this essay brings two contemporary problematics into dialogue—the neoliberal gamification of society and the logic of queer liberalism—to suggest that they converge upon a common, long-standing animus: the figure of the massified Oriental. The massified Oriental haunts Asianness, and retains East and Southwest Asia as its primary cultural referents, but the deterritorialization of Orientalism as an epistemic apparatus locates Orientalism in the realm of affect rather than geography. Thus, this paper proposes a heuristic of “actional Orientalism,” which draws attention to the procedural and discursive production of agency and the consequent narrative validation of that agency, contrasting agentic players against their objectified, thingified, and massified gameworlds. Whereas in Tara Fickle's “ludo-Orientalism,” wherein racialization is premised upon the otherness of the type of risk-taking and play, actional Orientalism draws on whether the racialized figure is capable of agency at all, finding within the Oriental the complete absence of the bounded, liberal, choosing subject. Dragon Age: Inquisition deploys actional Orientalism on full display, offering liberal transgender representation contingent upon acceptance of an individualist affect, requiring the full abjection of massified, Orientalized, queer others to enable this representation to survive.

Takeo Rivera

Actional Orientalism

“Chernobyl Exclusion Zone”

Abstract Composed of diptych photographs stitched together in a poetic travelogue through nuclear-infused (Indigenous) lands, annie ross's Pots and Other Living Beings reenvisions social and ecological relations, value structures, and knowledge frameworks in its encounter with violated landscapes of the American Southwest. In its embrace of the blighted remainders of nuclear testing, industry, and consumerism, Pots and Other Living Beings is not a typical “environmental” text. Like ross's weaving and visual installations, this work is alive to relations of reciprocity and kinship with more-than-human worlds in what one could best describe as a spiritual engagement with the abandoned, unremarked leavings of nuclearization, industrial capitalism, and waste cultures.

Deena Rymhs

Putting Back Together

Abstract Seeds always presuppose cooperative arrangements of tending and care. Seeds are useful to think with because they connect the past, present, and future, carrying old biologies and inherited histories as well as genetic transformations and new possibilities. This essay traces a history of botanical classification in herbariums, photographs, and seed libraries in Palestine that stretches back to the nineteenth century. Through individuation and taxonomic ordering, colonial botanical archives isolated plants and people from history and vanished Palestinians from their land. The colonial archive's formal organization and orientation to preserving dead or disappearing objects also opens space to investigate the proliferation of archive-based artworks by contemporary Palestinian artists such as Larissa Sansour and Jumana Manna. Sansour and Manna's artworks demonstrate that the value of seeds lies in their cultivation, transformations, and local adaptations. The seed is an alternative archive that maintains the vitality of being in the world. The seed is well-suited to planting Palestinian futures that are living, growing, and changing.

Pooja Sen

The Seed Keepers

Abstract Sophie Lewis coined anthrogenesis as “the production of human beings” and, using this unfamiliar term, calls for the radical reimagining of gestational politics, as an alternative to liberal feminism's focus on choice. Revivisng Shulamith Firestone, for feminists like Lewis and Helen Hester this reimagination takes shape within a techno-utopic communist framework. While enticing, such a framework relies on a modernist understanding of institutions that has been critiqued by decolonial and abolitionist theory and risks undervaluing the fugitive underground work of radical care and mutual aid that already exists today. In this article, two strategies at play in the contemporary Marxist reimagination of anthrogenesis are differentiated: (1) a communist approach focusing primarily on fundamentally restructuring the commons of reproductive care on a grand societal scale and (2) an “undercommons” approach that aims to fugitively abolish public institutions through small-scale mutual aid and radical care practices that are already constituting otherworlds of reproductive justice through transnational coalitions. Highlighting abortion and birth networks in the Netherlands (the Abortion Network Amsterdam and the Geboortebeweging, a loose collaborative network of midwives) who transnationally and fugitively care for anthrogenesis, the second strategy is proposed as the more promising one for the anthrogenesis of human beings otherwise. The author develops another possible outcome of Firestone's revolutionary thought: not a gestational communism but an anarcho-abolitionist fugitive undercommoning of anthrogenesis, through the work Stefano Harney and Fred Moten, Marquis Bey, and Chiara Bottici.

Rodante van der Waal

Undercommoning Anthrogenesis

Abstract Neferti X. M. Tadiar discusses her book Remaindered Life with Erica R. Edwards, Paul Nadal, and Jasbir K. Puar.

Erica R. Edwards

Paul Nadal

Neferti X. M. Tadiar

On <i>Remaindered Life</i>

Abstract This article argues that, by looking to the generalization of a certain kind of artistic or creative character in paradigms of work, there is a view onto a different kind of relationship between culture and militant action and fugitivity. Here, the term destituent art is proposed to sketch out a form of cultural production that does or might lay waste not only to institutional targets of critique but also to the structurally immanent belief in institutional reform that underlies the aesthetics of that critique. It is an invitation to reconsider some key myths that structure art discourse (even if they appear as objects of critique) and an appeal to read that discursivity as not just productive but potentially destituent. To do so, the author reads operaismo's rereading of Marx against Marxism alongside theorizations of destituent insurrection through the subject of the artist. Some recent social movements in New York City targeting art institutions are analyzed to consider this connection. Like Colectivo Situaciones’ discussion of destituent insurrection as a grammar that unifies surplus populations through their expressions of refusal (the riot, the strike, the commune) that are simultaneously modes of reorganizing forms of life, a destituent art would not signal a turn to a productive pessimism—that all creative work is already subsumed—but that the cultivation of destituent power actualizes and is actualized by the aesthetic production of places of action.

Andreas Petrossiants

Preliminary Notes toward a Destituent Art

Abstract On November 23, 2022, three original core members of the all-woman art collective DISBAND—Ilona Granet, Donna Henes, and Martha Wilson—sat down to discuss the therapeutic effects of collaborative performance, the role of comedy in addressing traumatic topics, and the activist potential of feminist collectivizing. Between 1978 and 1982, DISBAND performed in a diverse cultural circuit in downtown New York City where the burgeoning performance art, no wave, and feminist art scenes collided. The multidisciplinary backgrounds of the women in DISBAND matched the hybridity of this cultural circuit; other members included Barbara Kruger, Ingrid Sischy (former editor in chief of Artforum), Diane Torr (performance artist, drag king, and gender activist), Barbara Ess (photographer and member of the no wave band Y Pants), and Daile Kaplan (photographer and drummer of The Gynecologists). The women of DISBAND approached the song format fluidly, combining hymn, anthem, cheer, and protest movement (stomping, chanting, clapping) with rapid-fire improvisation. DISBAND's songs reflected the members’ personal and collective political concerns, often focusing directly on female oppression. The women's use of costumes, role-playing, and DIY instruments brought levity and playfulness to what they describe as an apocalyptic moment.

短名
Journal Impact	1.23
国际分区	CULTURAL STUDIES(Q2)

ISSN	0164-2472, 1527-1951
h-index	11

涉及主题	政治学社会学法学哲学历史艺术政治地理心理学经济考古
出版信息	出版商: Duke University Press，出版周期: ，期刊类型: journal，开源期刊: 非开源
基本数据	创刊年份: 2019，原创研究文献占比: 100.00%，自引率:0.00%， Gold OA占比: 0.00%

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