Rey Chow

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

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.

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'

Rey Chow edited issue of differences

2011-12-21T12:16:00.000-08:00

Rey Chow edited issue of 'differences' - out now:

http://www.dukeupress.edu/Catalog/ViewProduct.php?productid=51464

Monograph on Rey Chow

2011-12-05T07:11:00.001-08:00

I'm pleased to say that I have just signed a book contract to write a monograph on the importance of Rey Chow's work :-)

Watch this space.

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/

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

Futures of Chinese Cinema: Technologies and Temporalities in Chinese Screen Cultures

2011-11-10T04:12:00.000-08:00

This looks good:

Futures of Chinese Cinema: Technologies and Temporalities in Chinese Screen Cultures:

'via Blog this'

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

2011-10-17T01:46:00.000-07:00

JOMEC Journal is now on Twitter:

#JOMECjournal

New Journal, coming soon: JOMEC

2011-10-14T12:02:00.001-07:00

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

Studentships in Comp Lit and Cultural Studies

2011-10-03T01:23:00.000-07:00

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

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

Draft of a paper which also uses Rey Chow:

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

'via Blog this'

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'

Post-Cinematic Effects

2011-07-26T04:17:00.000-07:00

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.

Paul Bowman

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.

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 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 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.

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…)

Seminar at UVA, Amsterdam

2011-01-19T22:22:00.001-08:00

Rey Chow will be participating in this (27-28 May 2011):

In the wake of poststructuralist theory, the past two decades have seen disciplines such as postcolonial theory and cultural studies strongly committing themselves to the project of questioning the production of academic knowledge. Part of that questioning has been directed towards the Euro- and Anglocentrism of the university. Today, such a questioning remains as urgent as ever, given that in the global production of knowledge, the hegemony of the West, in particular the U.S., remains by and large uncontested. And yet, this production is taking place in a world that is very much in flux.

In recent years there has been much talk, both in popular as well as academic discourse, about the alleged rise of Asia. Whereas the 19th century is claimed to be the European century, and the 20th century as belonging to the U.S., the 21st century is often billed as the Asian century. Notwithstanding the dangers of such totalizing narratives, the alleged shifting geopolitical power balances do require critical theorizations that dare to walk the tightrope of building on "Western" theory while trying to avoid Eurocentrism. We hence take the title of the seminar as double edged. We aim to look after Europe, in the sense of being concerned with what Europe, and more in general, "Western theory," has to offer in this conjuncture. We want to take care of Europe as, so we think, Europe is not well. We also aim to look after Europe, in the concomitant sense of looking at a world after Europe, and seek what trajectories outside of Europe are possible, desirable and feasible. How to look after Europe?

This seminar aspires to think through possible tactics to look after Europe on three different levels, namely, in terms of theory, of cultural production and, finally, in terms of politics. We aim for papers that probe into connecting these three levels of inquiry, taking "Asia" as its point of reference.

First, the theoretical: What are the possible tactics to question the hegemony of the West in the production of knowledge? Does a move towards "local knowledge" or "indigenous theory" always run the danger of cultural essentialism that is complicit with today's rise of different nationalisms? What are the possibilities of comparative research, what constitutes the notion of "the comparative," based on what parameters do we select our criteria to compare?

The second level engages with the cultural: how do popular culture and art – such as cinema, literature, television, music, contemporary art – engage with a world in flux, what aesthetic strategies are employed, or can be employed, to look after Europe?

Thirdly, politics and activism: How can we translate research back to society, how can we reach a public, and what are the possibilities of aligning the production of knowledge to political activism? Who constitutes our public, or do we only write for other academics? How to counter the increased parochialism in academia, a parochialism that is so often disguised by a rhetoric of alleged multidisciplinarity?

The Point of the Arts and Humanities

2011-01-12T02:58:00.001-08:00

In the context of only one of the debates that has been provoked by the Con-Dem Government’s vandalism of everything we all hold dear (there urgently need to be more debates about more of the vandalism, including the scrapping of free swimming for children and the elderly, the scrapping of ‘book start’ to encourage a love of reading, the demolition of the public sector, the removal of funding for Access courses and for teenagers as such, the selling of British forests and woodlands to private interests and companies [including, of course, logging companies], and – oh yes – the privatization of the public university system), there have recently been numerous suggestions that *if* the Arts and Humanities even think that they have a case to expect public funding of any kind then they must now make a case for themselves. Justify or die.

I didn’t want to do this all over again, but people have been hassling me to do it; so before I get back to the important tasks of the day (which include writing about the way that Donnie Yen’s recent films are constituted and haunted by the absent presence of Bruce Lee and are to be best understood as part of Hong Kong’s self-writing in the wake of the post-1997 return of Hong Kong to China; writing module outlines, and phoning BT to complain about their doubling of my monthly repayments for no good reason), let me make a few propositions about “the point” of the Arts and Humanities.

1. Any ‘point’ of or for the Arts and Humanities is bound up with the question of ‘the point’ of the university as such.

2. Any answer about ‘the point’ of the university itself is bound up with the answer to the question of what kind of society we are or ought to be living in or striving to construct.

3. The history of the debates about what the university is ‘for’ and what society ‘is’, ‘is like’ or is ‘for’ are entrenched and hundreds of years old.

4. Some of the ‘points’ of the university have involved arguments about ‘improving’ society through investments in different sorts of ‘truth’: religious truth, cultural truth, factual truth, scientific truth, political truth, and so on.

5. Some ‘points’ have therefore been explicitly ‘theoretical’, while others have been explicitly ‘practical’. Utilitarians like Jeremy Bentham were deeply against ‘useless theory’ (art, philosophy, religion, etc.), and all for practical application. Hence institutions like Imperial College were founded and organised with an eye to practical training in matters of business, management, and Indian languages (note the name: Imperial. What does that signify? Anyone? Anyone?). Here learning Indian languages is ‘useful’ and ‘beneficial’ and ‘justified’ because it constitutes practical training for Colonial and Imperial programmes of social and economic domination. (Today language learning is more often than not part of ‘arts and languages’ – ‘less’ useful. Arabic, however…)

6. “Utilitarian” rationales have led ineluctably to one dominant definition of ‘useful’/’practical’: profitable.

7. The argument that knowledge should be ‘practical’ and that ‘practical’ means immediately and obviously linked to the ‘profitable’ is currently in the ascendant. The problem with it is that it is very wrong. Ask any scientist which is more important: ‘fundamental’, theoretical, speculative, ‘disinterested’, open-ended research or technical, project-based, aim and outcome-oriented, corporate or military funded or sponsored science. But it need not be this venerable old example. What else is useful but not profitable? What else is useless but invaluable? Music. Pictures. Laughing. Masturbation. Grooming. Walking the dog. Dancing. Stretching. Riding a bike. Teaching. Listening. Talking. I don’t know. Thinking. Think about it.

8. The belief that anything have “a point” is flawed. Nevertheless, many things do have rationales. Certainly, all things in the university do. Many activities are based on a theory, even if those involved in this or that activity aren’t necessarily aware of or interested in articulating the underlying theory of their own activity or practice.

9. If people are genuinely interested in establishing ‘the point’ of this or that Arts or Humanities subject, degree programme or disciplinary field per se, then the discussion would not remain a discussion about “the” Arts and Humanities in general. History programmes will have a different rationale in different departments in different universities in different countries in different times, and these will be different from each other as well as different from the rationales for art, art history, philosophy, media studies, and so on. No two syllabi will (or ‘should’) be identical.

10. No Arts or Humanities or any other subject will be likely to define itself as useless or lacking in a practical or useful “point”. Media studies, for example. This is the most caricatured and ridiculed subject that we have. Yet, whilst there *may* be programmes in media studies which claim that media studies is important because TV is great fun to watch and celebrities are just so cool, I have yet to encounter this. Rather more often, the rationale for media studies is that the media is socially, culturally and politically ubiquitous, important and consequential. The media is biased. Programming is orientated and organised certain ways, ways that could be different. Society is informed or misinformed or uninformed in ways which affect people’s beliefs and thinking and actions and orientations, and so on. So one practical point to media studies is that it is ethically and politically important to understand the workings of such a complex and dominant set of interlocking institutions which permeate everyone’s everyday lives, thoughts and actions. Does studying media studies mean that you will get a job in the media? No. Should that be the rationale for media studies? No. Do students often enter into degrees in media studies and leave feeling embittered because they are not immediately employable in a precise profession? Yes. Whose fault is that? It depends. But certainly the perspective which holds that you go to university to get a degree and that degree is your ticket to a job is on conflict with what universities actually offer. But should universities only offer vocational degrees?

11. It is true that there is a mismatch between students’ hopes and dreams when they undertake something like media studies (a job on the telly!) or film studies (I will be the next Tarantino) or journalism (move over, Kate Adie) or fine art (Damien who?), and those of their lecturers and professors, most of whom will most likely want to disabuse the students of their misconceptions of the subject and seek to transform them into critical and politically engaged members of a democratic citizenry. Students may enter identifying with presenters on TV, but the academics spend three years trying to transform that into an identification with Noam Chomsky. And what is the point of Noam Chomsky?

12. The contemporary marketization of the university has been taking place for a long time now. Read Lyotard. Read Bill Readings. The question is whether we want UK universities to be private universities. As the more astute commentators have pointed out, the privatization of UK universities will not transform UK academia into US academia. The entire funding structure of the universities and of the country is completely different….

13. I could go on. But I will stop on unlucky thirteen by referring you to some key points. The logic of the thinking which underpins the rationale for the cuts is flawed. The research upon which its justification is based is shockingly poor. (As one academic wrote under a link to the research methods and practice of the Browne Report: “Clear Fail”.) The consequences of the cuts are likely to be devastating for the UK – not just for universities, but for the UK as such. The claim that the cuts are necessary for financial reasons is nonsense. The rationale is, rather, blatantly ideological – neoliberal, to be precise. There is loads of money around. It’s just that on neoliberal thinking, it has to stay in the hands of the very wealthiest very few. Somehow people are accepting of this rationale, even as they grumble a little about bankers’ bonuses… Shouldn’t it be these people who have to justify their existence, rather than historians and philosophers? What about the politicians who justify their existence and their point on a set of election promises that are then systematically and completely reneged upon? … And so on. Any ‘point’ of or for the Arts and Humanities is bound up with the question of ‘the point’ of the university as such. Any answer about ‘the point’ of the university itself is bound up with the answer to the question of what kind of society we are or ought to be living in or striving to construct.

Defending/Demeaning: de Botton

2011-01-10T22:28:00.000-08:00

In the face of unprecedented UK government cuts to the funding of UK University Arts and Humanities programmes, the media-friendly philosopher ‘lite’, Alain de Botton, has mounted a ‘defence’ of the importance of ‘culture’. You may think that this is good news. However, as the wonderful film Old Boy demonstrated so clearly, one should never make the mistake of thinking that “my enemy’s enemy is my friend”. Alain de Botton is not our friend. Nor is he the enemy of the enemy. Here is merely one tiny excerpt from his article on the BBC website:

"right now, at this difficult moment in the history of British universities, there is a need to acknowledge that at least some of the woes that have befallen academics is [sic] squarely their own fault. To put it at its simplest, academics in the humanities have failed to explain why what they do should matter so much. They've failed to explain to the government, but this really only means "us" – the public at large" [Alain de Botton]

After ranting and raving with colleagues and friends about this article and the BBC radio programme with which it is connected, one of my more astute colleagues (who shall remain nameless for now, unless he says he is happy to be named and famed for this) emailed me saying that he had lodged an official complaint with the BBC about Alain de Botton’s “defence” of the “value” of “culture”. He suggested that perhaps you all do the same.

So, come on people, let’s all lodge our complaints about the BBC’s broadcasting of this malformed stool. This could also be an important time to air some views on the cuts to university funding and the death warrant issued to the public university, plus the risks of a privatized education system in which “philosophers” who can barely string a correct sentence together feel they can arrogate the right to “teach us how to live”. Please read de Botton’s article and then listen to the podcast and then read the complaint drafted by my friend and then lodge your own.

Here is what my colleague wrote:

I have just used the BBC online complaints system for the first time - to complain about Alain de Botton. I did through this page - https://www.bbc.co.uk/complaints/forms/ - defining the complaint as 'other' and naming it 'Covert Commercial Promotion'. I then wrote this:

"The programme 'A Point of View: What the Humanities Should Teach' was not a piece of public service broadcasting in the form of journalistic provocation. It was a subtle and subliminal advertisement for the commercial educational services of the programmes presenter.

In the programme, and in the context of current cuts to the funding of university Humanities departments, the presenter Alain de Botton criticized the way in which, he claimed, universities presently teach culture, philosophy, literature, history etc. He then proposed an alternative in which universities "should be required to identify the problematic areas in people's lives and to design courses that address them head on" adding that "There should be classes in, among other topics, being alone, reconsidering work, improving relationships with children, reconnecting with nature and facing illness. A university alive to the true responsibilities of cultural artefacts within a secular age would establish a Department for Relationships, an Institute of Dying and a Centre for Self-Knowledge".

What Mr. de Botton and the BBC did not make clear was that Mr. de Botton has a direct commercial interest in rubbishing the teaching of public universities while promoting this particular alternative. He runs 'The School of Life' (see his website here http://www.alaindebotton.com/pages/about/index.asp?PageID=199 and the website of the School here http://www.theschooloflife.com/).

This school provides courses such as those de Botton described in his broadcast – for instance 'How Necessary is a Relationship', ‘How to Face Death’ or 'How to balance work with life'. The school also provides (for a fee of £70.00) one-on-one ‘bibliotherapy’ (i.e. advice on what to read).

Mr. de Botton is – at present – not in competition with public universities for the provision of undergraduate degrees. But his School is in competition with universities which provide a variety of extra-mural, part-time, one-day and evening classes to the general public, on subjects such as literature, history, culture and philosophy. Mr de Botton is of course at liberty to promote his pedagogical theory at the same time as putting it into practice on a commercial basis. He is also entitled to use the media to promote that product by indicating ways in which the alternatives may be imagined to fail. However, if he is to do so through public broadcasting then the fact that he has such a pecuniary rivalry (one which may be thought to explain his otherwise inexplicably misleading and unsourced caricature of university teaching) ought to be mentioned within the programme. Because, in this case, it was, and thus the fact that the one delivering this ‘point of view’ had an interest beyond the purely intellectual.”

Maybe you can get others to write complaints?

A Book For Christmas - but it'll cost you

2010-12-24T02:32:00.001-08:00

Guess what, readers: the Con-Dem government are not only scrapping the pittance of an allowance for 16-18 year olds, and not only scrapping funding for Arts, Humanities and Social Sciences Teaching at universities, and not only cutting front line services and jobs galore in the public sector in order to produce this “Pig Society” that Thatcher never managed to finish creating, but they are now playing a really long game: scrapping the “book start” programme.

Book Start is a simple idea to help society: a nice little A4 sized folder is given to parents and their toddlers in local libraries, shopping centres or nurseries; folders which contain a couple of little books and pens and pencils, designed to encourage an interest in reading at an early age. Lovely gesture. Nice touch. Just the thing to get littlens interested in reading – a folder of their very own.

But the Con-Dems are scrapping this, because investing a small amount in encouraging toddlers to read is clearly something that needs to be cut as a necessary and unavoidable part of the painful process to reduce the government deficit. There is no alternative, is there? And of course it’s just an unfortunate coincidence that the socio-economic demographic that is going to suffer most dramatically and unequivocally is the poorest in society.

All I want for Christmas is the overthrowing of this contemptible disgrace of a Pig Society government that has no mandate for any of the things it is doing.

If you can help me to work out a way to do this, I will be happy.

(Where is Labour in all of this, by the way?)

Police Violence, Media Violence

2010-12-14T03:16:00.001-08:00

Police Violence

· It is eminently possible to understand the much publicised excessive and preemptive police violence at the anti-cut Demonstrations in London last week (and previously).

· It is also easy to understand the government’s desire to recast the police violence as the violence of the protestors.

· What is mystifying is the sustained and ongoing media violence. This violence is of a different order.

The police violence makes perfect sense, even if it perplexed me at first.

· At first I could not understand why the police were using such barbaric tactics. I could understand that individual policemen were going to be violent. (I know people who joined the police, and they joined the police for precisely that reason: the chance to be allowed to be justifiably violent. All of them the same: this was their rationale. And these were people I knew at university, by the way; students taking their degrees without having to pay fees, just like me. Indeed, I remember clearly one of them saying to me “Oh, I really want to be an accountant for the money, but I really want to be a copper for the aggro”. ‘Thankfully’ he became an accountant. I say ‘thankfully’, though I worry about his clients…)

· What I could not believe was why the orders from above seemed so brutal. The police on the lines are of course surely merely following orders and instructions, which is why rage directed against them seems so counterproductive and distracting (shifting, as it does, attention away from the issues, away from ‘politics’ and onto issues of ‘policing’). And it took me some time to get beyond my shock at what I was seeing.

However, thanks to a conversation with my colleague Kerry Moore, I now realise that:

· The police pawns on the front line are of course ‘merely’ following orders and implementing a strategy.

· The most obvious strategy hinges on the decisions about where to kettle people. It has become clear that the kettles were often set for the most dramatic media effect. The logic is as follows: ‘Kettle them there, so that when they start to boil, they graffiti on this monument, light fires with this treasured material and smash these particular windows. Perfect for demonizing the freezing, frustrated, angry protestors, showing them to be violent vandals.

· This is similar to the much publicised event of the police abandoning a police van right in the middle of the demonstration. The idea here is obvious: let the demonstrators smash it up, so that there is plenty of footage of the protestors attacking the poor old police and vandalising the police van. (Thankfully, even sixteen year old schoolkids saw through this feeble tactic and actually started protecting the police van from vandalism.)

· The strategists behind the police pawns are quite clear about what they intend to do, which is to maintain the status quo. In this the ends justify the means.

· So, it obviously makes sense to deter protests and protestors. It helps therefore to make sure that protests are construed as scary, violent and associated with criminality, irrationality and badness. This will help to deter potential challenges in future and also to pre-empt and undermine future protests.

· From the policing point of view, there is never enough and can never be enough policing. There are always ‘threats’. So it makes sense – even at the risk of attracting some bad press – to test the boundaries of what is acceptable policing practice. Push the envelope; punch the invalid.

· Each demonstration is equally a demonstration of police power, and therefore also an experiment in what can be practiced and normalised.

· For strategists in charge of policing there is a logic: there can never be enough security. Therefore, for them demonstrations mean exceptionalism. Anything constructed as a ‘state of exception’ can be used to try to justify any exceptional violence.

· As a footnote to this “police logic” or “police perspective” we also need to note: the police force is also facing budget cuts. Anything that they can do to demonstrate their necessity and the need to expand investment in the police force rather than cut it back is surely understandable. The police force need criminals, and plenty of them – good, dramatic, visible ones too; ones that need lots of police to police them.

· This police logic is already working. Already the Home Secretary has given explicit approval for the use of water canon on future protests – of which there will doubtless be many.

· Finally, perhaps, it needs to be clear that the intensive physical policing we have seen has always operated as a means to enable lots of information gathering, surveillance and scrutiny. Everyone who wants to leave a kettle (i.e., everyone) is only allowed to leave after being photographed and definitively ID-ed.

What remains inexplicable is the sustained media violence – the persistence in representing the protests as ‘riots’, riots that were simply spontaneously ‘caused’ by the violent intentions of the protestors; the persistence of framing the protests as inherently violent; of focusing on minor acts of vandalism rather than the simple reasons for the protestors being stuck there in the first place; the violence of representing the protests as purely student-interest, as selfish, as merely a matter of self and selfishness; and the complete ignoring of the political logic of the shocking responses, on the streets, in Parliament and, worse, in the media itself.

It's the Final Countdown: For a New Blitz Spirit

2010-12-03T04:04:00.001-08:00

It’s The Final Countdown: For a New Blitz Spirit

Paul Bowman

People are (~~Stupid)~~ [~~People]~~ Media

I have a greeting card from Tesco which features a picture of George ‘W’ Bush smiling smugly on the front; and underneath, the legend (attributed to the ex-President himself): ‘You can fool some of the people all of the time… so those are the ones you want to concentrate on’. I have a soft-spot for this sort of Gump-esque anti-wisdom. Another favourite of mine was delivered by Tommy Lee Jones in Men in Black. Will Smith cannot believe that people simply accept at face value the preposterous lies and misinformation that the MiB feed to the public. Will Smith argues: surely, people are cleverer than that. In reply, Jones says: ‘A person is clever. People are stupid’.

Now, I’m sure we could all say some clever things about this. And some stupid things, no doubt. But what I first want to say is that these two quotations have been bouncing around inside my head quite a lot recently; and what is worse, they are playing, looped, over an equally looped ‘ear-worm’: a soundtrack fragment provided by none other than the 1980s ‘melodic metal’ band, Europe; and specifically, the very end of Europe’s hit single ‘The Final Countdown’... So you can imagine how unpleasant it is in my head: ‘You can fool some of the people all of the time’; ‘people are stupid’; ‘it’s the final countdown’.

But it is the final countdown. And people are stupid. And, worse, a person is stupid. For it is not generic or general ‘people’ who write this and then that and then the next utterly moronic, ill-informed, embittered and wizened comment at the bottom of online newspaper articles about the student protests of the proposed government cuts; nor is it ‘people in general’ who phone in to TV and radio shows with their deranged ramblings about greedy, lazy, selfish students, who ‘want something for nothing’, and ‘why should the taxpayer pay’, and all the rest of it. Nor is it abstract ‘people’ who decide to frame a whole debate about the very nature of the provision of not just education but also – and I quote from a recent email I received from activists at Glasgow University – but also ‘Legal aid, the NHS, the Citizen’s Advice Bureau, Social Services, Public Transport, the Royal Mail, Education, Health Services, Asylum Seekers, even The Sandyford Sexual Health Clinic, everything…’. Everything. The paragraph ends: ‘everything is being attacked, much is being scrapped. This is our society. And we are not to blame, we want a different world’.

So who am I saying is stupid, here? The journalists? Of course! (print and other media.) The BBC? Yes! ITV? Why not! the Today Programme? Perhaps in particular… (I know nothing of Sky: I wouldn’t have it in the house.) But these and all the rest of the people and agents and agencies and institutions who are framing this debate myopically as if it is only about some students who don’t want to pay more money for a certain service are at fault, I think. Seriously at fault.

Aside from the fact that the majority of the students who are protesting today are not the actually the people who will have to pay more for their education (so how can they be ‘selfish’?) and aside from the fact that today’s students already pay for their education anyway and (moreover) have to work (often up to full time hours, often on the minimum wage) in order to live whilst trying to study – aside from all of this and everything like it, it needs to be said: this struggle is about so much more than student fees. Or rather: it should be about more than this. And we are also stupid if we think that the fundamental issue here is how much debt your little brother or sister or child ends up in.

We are stupid if we cannot see clearly that the student protests and the issue of fees is merely one struggle – perhaps it is the symbol, perhaps the metonym, perhaps the voice, perhaps because the students have come together most vociferously, more than other potential or immanent group – but it is merely one struggle, one issue, among many. True, it is one that sums up the nature of the sea-change or landscape change or genetic mutation or tectonic shift that we are facing and fighting. But it is only one part of something larger. And we have failed – and we will fail – if we cannot urgently and immediately persuade other people that the student protest is just an example – an exemplary example – a stark example – but just one among many examples – just one example of the ‘everything’ that ‘is being attacked’, the everything that ‘is being scrapped’.

This ‘everything’ includes the very idea of the public university, but it is more and other than the university. As the polemic from the Glasgow activists puts it: ‘The University is a factory, the school is a factory, the office is a factory, the factory is abusive. Banks and finance made this crisis, we will not pay for it, student, worker, lecturer, the unemployed. The poor, the hard worker. We are not against bankers or politicians, we are against the system they refuse to change’.

In a sense, this is about democracy. But before democracy, it is about the framing of the argument.

The KPunk blogger, aka the writer and theorist Mark Fisher, argues that the refusal to change anything to do with the financial status quo is part of a general mentality. This is a mentality characterized by refusal and denial and rejection and foreclosure, and it structures contemporary political sensibilities today. It rules with an iron rod what is allowed and what is excluded from so-called ‘sensible’ political debate today.

Fisher calls this mindset or worldview ‘capitalist realism’. Capitalist realism refers to the belief that the way things are is the way they have to be – as if were from God or from our DNA, and not from neoliberal economic theory and short-sighted government policy, that the contemporary the banking system or the state of the railways or the lack of post-offices, or the crisis in foster carers and post-adoption support or mental health social workers was created. But neither God nor our genes decreed that is need be this way. And that’s what we need to see and understand.

But this is what it may be hard to see and understand, because the dominant ‘realist’ idiom, the dominant ‘realist’ style, the tropes about ‘reality’, the languages and language games that determine what is discussed and how it is discussed blur this essential point, across too many scenes and contexts: everyday, media, political, common sense, and even scenes and discourses of protest.

In other words, the problem is not just the position which argues that cuts are ‘necessary’ and ‘inevitable’. Rather, the problem is the structuration of the frames and terms of the debate(s), the implicit rationales, tacit assumptions and overarching paradigm which conditions the very definition of what is sensible and what is preposterous – or indeed, what we are even talking or struggling about in the first (and last) place.

In this sense, it is the hegemony of capitalist realism which is structuring and guiding ‘media debate’ and the dominant notions of what is supposedly ‘necessary’ (cuts) and what is sensible (mass unemployment and double-dip recession), and what is preposterous (taxing the rich, making the banks repay their debt). It is capitalist realism which leads so many to insist on the necessity of cuts and to reject at the outset the plausibility of robin hood taxation, or cannot see the simple sense of the syllogism: ‘bailing out the banks caused this mess; so if you make the banks pay then the mess is gone’. Capitalist realism cannot see the warped perversity of the logic which runs: the big markets have failed; what we need is more marketization; or: in response to market failures what is needed is more marketization.

But people are beginning to see through this. Allow me to quote at length from the blog called ‘Lenin’s Tomb’:

The parliamentary vote on tuition fees is scheduled to take place on 9th December, folks. Roll up, roll up, come one, come all – that’s the day to be on the streets raising hell. I spent the afternoon talking to the very pleasant and thoughtful students occupying at UEL. The sense that we can win it, that we’re in it to win, not merely to protest, is palpable. We can break this government. Look at them retreating already. Lib Dems talking about ‘abstaining’ on a policy devised by their own government. Cable saying he will abstain for the sake of ‘party unity’ – as if he isn’t scared of his party members finding a spine between them and chucking the Orange Book crowd out of the leadership. The government saying they will delay the introduction of changes to Housing Benefit. Look at Ed Miliband in the Evening Standard today, trying to hitch a ride on the back of the student protests.

This movement is already leading, forcing others to adapt, and leaving those who don’t adapt eating the dust trails – and in its present form it’s only a few weeks old. Imagine what it can do if it keeps growing, and keeps going. Imagine what it can do in coalition with the organised labour movement. And that’s something to think about, by the way, if you’re a public sector worker facing the sack. These students can shake things up this much in such a short space of time. They’ve shown that militancy, commitment, imagination and tactical flexibility can do wonders. Trade unions have operated cautiously, conservatively for some time, based on a pessimistic meta-induction from the outcome of the miners’ strike, which says that the militancy never wins. But the workers have the power to bring this country to a standstill. The workers have the power to break this government if they want to. The workers have the power to put an end to a system that rewards bankers and spivs, and punishes the people that keep this country going.[i]

Rousing stuff. And, yes: we can win this. But the point is: this is not simply about students or fees. In fact, whether it’s three grand a year or nine grand a year, all students have long been paying the same flat-rate poll tax for what used to be regarded as a public service, a public right. But the poll tax that is student fees crept up on us, was initially a botch job, a quick fix, and it snuck through. It’s only now that they’re talking about tripling it that people seem finally to have noticed. But it is a poll tax. And it was the poll tax that brought down Thatcher.

But this is the problem: people are not saying ‘Hey, this is another poll tax!’ People are saying ‘Hey, I don’t want my family to have to pay nine grand a year, plus the rest’. And this is the logic of individualist consumerism. Don’t think like that!

And worse, worse, worse by far are the depressing comments posted beneath all of the articles about the student protests that I have read so far: people talking about lazy, greedy, whining, whingeing, selfish students; people thinking that student life is still essentially paid for; people thinking that a non-vocational education is a luxury, rather than something that is ‘critical’ in all senses of the word.

And we are stupid if we can’t quickly persuade more and more people in more and more places that this is not just a student protest. And the student protesters need to be persuaded of this too. This is a critical matter about the very idea of civilized, social, communitarian, interlinked, humane, human, civil, democratic, free society. Is this Britain-dot-co-dot-UK, Britain plc, Britain where only the shareholders reap dividends; or is it actually Great Britain? Never mind the University funding bit of the Browne Report. Point out to everyone that the Comprehensive Spending Review is a comprehensive death warrant. The universities are just the tip of the iceberg.

And this is the final countdown. The vote for or against the proposed cuts takes place on Thursday 9^th December; this meeting here today is taking place on Monday 5^th of December. In other words: we have Tuesday and Wednesday . . . . To do what? At least three things:

Persuade the public: We Are You. Our struggle is the same as yours – the one that affects you: the one that touches on your job, your department, your social services, your family, your health, your everyday life.
Point out to everyone: Those Lib-Dem MPs must vote ‘against’. The idea that abstaining is somehow a vote against needs to be corrected. If the Lib-Dems merely abstain, this is as good as a vote for the cuts.
Correct people’s viewpoints. Individual people. A person. And people. Counter arguments with counter-arguments. All rationales for all of these cuts are all factually and morally and ethically and politically wrong. Show this. Clearly.

And how can we do these things? These are desperate times. Desperate times call for desperate measures. We are in the midst of an impending Blitz. So let’s construct a new Blitz Spirit. Let’s even invoke nationalism, patriotism. Gayatri Spivak once argued for the value of what she called the ‘strategic essentialism’ in forwarding a political project. The Right do it all the time. Why don’t we? A new Blitz Spirit. For we are under attack. We have been condemned by the Con-Dem-Nation Coalition government. They are trying to Blitz everything we all hold dear. But they have no right; no authority. We can counter-attack – now – with a new Blitz of our own: an all-out media Blitz. Now. This should be the new Blitz spirit.

Today [On Monday – the date of this talk], we have two days. We need a Media Blitz, please. How can you do that? Bombard your MPs with emails. Bombard all of the newspapers with letters. Comment on every asinine comment underneath every article about anything remotely related to this or these issues. Tweet your MPs. Tweet the Guardian, The Daily Mail, The Times, The Daily Telegraph, The Daily Show.

Argue this: these students, these protestors, anyone who now needs to start to protest and speak out and stand and be counted is in no way ‘the enemy of the state’. These people are appealing to the state, for the state. The enemy of the state is the ConDemNation coalition government, who are condemning untold numbers of young, old, poor, unemployed, migrant, invalid, commuter, householder, parents, children, taxpayers, community workers, communities themselves, communication networks, support systems, social and psychological stabilities – condemning us all, in different ways. And this condemnation of this multitude is what must be condemned.

But this multitude, the ‘demos’, does not have one voice. But it has, as one writer put it, ‘One No, Many Yeses’. So what we need, now, is a media blitz. Because it’s the final countdown.

[i] http://leninology.blogspot.com/

Send Me Your Links!

2010-12-02T03:06:00.000-08:00

A few of us are now working to produce a Culture Machine / Liquid Books online book – essentially a collection of articles, arguments, information and links designed to help to further the struggle against the Con-Dem-Nation Coalition Government.

So, please SEND ME YOUR LINKS! I need links to articles, comment, information, ideas, events, etc, focusing on strategies and tactics for beating this terrible undemocratic government’s insane proposals and policies.

With each link please tell me what the link leads to: what is it about and why is it useful. Then I can upload them to the Liquid Books site.

Email them to: BowmanP@cf.ac.uk

9th of December, Parliament Votes on Fees and Education

2010-12-02T01:56:00.001-08:00

http://www.gla.ac.uk/centres/mediagroup/

From: Glasgow Against Education Cuts [mailto:glasgowagainsteducationcuts@gmail.com]
Sent: 01 December 2010 22:10
Subject: ANNOUNCED: 9th of December, Parliament Votes on Fees and Education

Dear all,

on the 9th of December 2010 Parliament will vote on student fees. The country now knows how to march, the country now knows what they want, and they are learning quickly what politics looks like.

On the 9th Glasgow will protest alongside those across the country, in England, Wales, Northern Ireland and Scotland. With those in Europe. We need to take our education back.

The University is a factory, the school is a factory, the office is a factory, the factory is abusive. Banks and finance made this crisis, we will not pay for it, student, worker, lecturer, the unemployed. The poor, the hard worker. We are not against bankers or politicians, we are against the system they refuse to change.

Legal aid, the NHS, Citizen's Advice Bureau, Social Services, Public Transport, the Royal Mail, Education, Health Services, Asylum Seekers, even The Sandyford Sexual Health Clinic, everything is being attacked, much is being scrapped. This is our society. And we are not to blame, we want a different world.

Apologies for the polemic, but we must support those who take to the streets to defend their services and their society. Please spread this information. The basic rally point is:

10am, 9th December, Buchanan Street. Put it in your diaries.
May change at short notice, stay aware, stay updated.

Emergency mass meetings will be organised and called tomorrow.

Remember the phrase "general strike". Learn new songs.

See you on the streets.

Glasgow Against Education Cuts

Review of Rey Chow Reader

2010-11-27T07:52:00.001-08:00

http://www.estadao.com.br/estadaodehoje/20101127/not_imp645884,0.php

Why not send this letter to your MP?

2010-11-26T02:53:00.001-08:00

Dear ,

I hope you are very well. I am a member of your constituency, and I hope you will be able to represent not only me but also many other of your constituents, as well as their children, and ultimately the broader society at large.

My concern is with the proposed cuts to the funding of Higher Education. Like yourself, I’m sure, I have read a lot about these proposals – a lot of media and social commentary, as well as responses from academics and such bodies as the Institute of Fiscal Studies, etc. – and all of these people and institutions are worried about the consequences of the proposed cuts. So I know I am far from alone in believing that these proposals are not only morally wrong but also potentially destructive of English and British university education, and damaging for our society as a whole.

The arguments against the proposed cuts come from both sides: both from the side of potential students (who will be lumbered with mortgage-sized debts to simply attain a degree) and from the side of the universities (many of which may struggle to provide not only arts and humanities subjects but also science subjects). Not only that, but there is a strong possibility that the funding cuts will make the delivery of all financially viable degrees into ‘production lines’, with massive staff-student ratios and formulaic and generic formats for (inferior) teaching and learning. So graduates will have a mortgage-sized debt for a generic McDegree (even if that degree is allegedly ‘vocational’).

There are many other concerns and worries, of course. And I know that the Coalition Government is trying to argue that ‘because of the deficit’ these radical cuts are ‘necessary’. Of course, as I am sure you are well aware, they are not “necessary”. They are rather political *decisions*, and there are of course many other options available for balancing the books (books which are not too far out of balance anyway), and which do not involve the wholesale destruction of institutions that are the very fabric of our society – the university being just one such institution.

So I hope I can count on you to vote against the proposed cuts. Such a right-minded and responsible decision will of course not only help to ensure the future stability and prosperity of our country, but will be welcomed by the vast majority of present and future voters in this country generally and your constituency specifically.

With best wishes and hopes that you will vote morally, responsibly, and correctly,

Review of The Rey Chow Reader

2010-11-22T06:28:00.001-08:00

Here is a very pleasing review of The Rey Chow Reader:

http://www.darkmatter101.org/site/2010/11/21/the-rey-chow-reader/

Re: [cultstud-l] What is to be Done After the Protests Yesterday?

2010-11-12T07:03:00.001-08:00

Sorry Paul, that link doesn't seem to work. I think Martin's piece has a full HTML ellipsis in the title... This link should work:

http://www.thelondongraduateschool.co.uk/thoughtpiece/what-is-to-be-done%E2%80%A6-after-the-storming-of-millbank/

Richard

On 12 November 2010 12:54, Paul Bowman <paul.bowman@gmail.com> wrote:

Important article by Martin McQuillan on the outrageous UK University
Funding scandal:

http://www.thelondongraduateschool.co.uk/thoughtpiece/what-is-to-be-done.-af
ter-the-storming-of-millbank/

_______________________________________________
CULTSTUD-L mailing list: CULTSTUD-L@lists.comm.umn.edu
http://lists.comm.umn.edu/mailman/listinfo/cultstud-l

What is to be Done After the Protests Yesterday?

2010-11-12T04:54:00.001-08:00

Important article by Martin McQuillan on the outrageous UK University Funding scandal:

http://www.thelondongraduateschool.co.uk/thoughtpiece/what-is-to-be-done…-after-the-storming-of-millbank/

The Age of the Whirled Target

2010-11-06T12:14:00.000-07:00

Here’s a link to the paper that I’ve just given at the Babel conference at the University of Texas, Austin.

http://cardiff.academia.edu/PaulBowman/Papers/329398/The_Age_of_the_Whirled_Target_Post-Babelism

The Privatization of the Humanities

2010-10-17T00:19:00.001-07:00

http://www.thelondongraduateschool.co.uk/thoughtpiece/if-you-tolerate-this%E2%80%A6-lord-browne-and-the-privatisation-of-the-humanities/

If you tolerate this… Lord Browne and the Privatisation of the Humanities

By Martin McQuillan

The pithily entitled ‘Independent Review of Higher Education Funding and Student Finance’ was published on Tuesday. In short, for those not parochial enough to be concerned by this, it was a committee set up by the previous Labour government, chaired by ex-BP boss John Browne (as one of the many sinecures offered to him, including Chair of the Tate Trustees, in compensation for the homophobia that chased him out of the oil industry, otherwise it would have been him and not Tony Hayward taking the rap for the Deepwater Horizon disaster) charged with considering future funding arrangements for universities and their students in England. The headlines from the report are that 1. The current cap of £3,290 on student tuition fees should be scrapped in favour of potentially unlimited fees set by universities themselves, 2. The current teaching grant distributed to English universities should be cut by £3.2billion with a 100% reduction for the arts, humanities and social sciences. In effect Browne’s committee (which included the Chief Executive of Standard Chartered PLC, the Head of McKinsey, and two Vice-Chancellors) has at a stroke privatised the arts and humanities in England. The committee recommends that the state should no longer have any investment in these areas and that private individuals who wish to pursue such things at their own cost should pay for them.

It is hard to know where to begin with this. There are no workarounds, no accommodations to be made, no temporary crisis to be endured; this is the nuclear option, total and irreversible wipeout. Now, there is a difference between the publication of a so-called ‘Independent’ Review (Browne has now moved on to his next job advising the coalition government on Whitehall job cuts, and his review has clearly been hijacked to feed the ideological attack on the state currently being pursued by an administration that no one voted for) and how it translates into legislation through the torturous process of what Washington would call ‘the pork barrel politics’ of buying off a Lib Dem back bench revolt. However, there would seem to be little to be hoped for in this regard. What is striking here is not that higher education (and the arts, humanities and social sciences in particular) have been targeted but that they have been the first thing to be attacked and in such a spectacularly ruthless manner. The calculation must be that the news agenda will have moved on next week when everyone is more concerned by the fate of ‘useful things’ like hospitals and fire stations in the Comprehensive Spending Review. And of course, if the ConDems cannot be bothered to fund humanities teaching any more there is very little prospect that they will continue to fund humanities research. ‘The future has been cancelled’, as Graham Allen, writing in the context of Irish cuts, put it recently.

Most people will blame the Conservatives; the Conservatives will hope that most people will blame the LibDems. I do not blame either; I expect nothing else from the guardians of class privilege and their unscrupulous carpet-bagging associates. The people who are to blame for this are the Vice-Chancellors of UK universities (with one honourable exception) who have consistently pressed for an increase in tuition fees in order to maximise the return to their institutions. Tuition Fees used to be called ‘top-up fess’ because they were additional to state funding which had fallen behind the real costs of running universities. However, the short-termism of Vice-Chancellors failed to understand that as soon as fees were introduced the university sector would not only lose its place in the queue for, but its claim entirely on, the public purse. The Browne Report hits Vice-Chancellors with a sucker punch: you can have unlimited fees but you can no longer have public funding.

While science and ‘priority’ subjects will continue to receive a teaching grant the rest of us must fend for ourselves. The people who will be most affected by this is not so-called ‘teaching-focussed universities’ but those so-called ‘elite’, so-called ‘research-intensive’, so-called ‘universities’. Dear reader, I spent 10 years directing research in a Russell Group university, I know how much mediocrity there is out there, wrapped in snobbery and shrouded in utterly bogus ‘missions groups’ which allow ministers to divide and rule the sector through its own vanity. If there is no public funding and no funding council to distribute it then there will be no cap on student numbers for institutions. Humanities departments in ‘elite universities’ will only survive by piling students high and servicing them at low costs. The Browne Report does not set them free to compete with the world’s best universities, it impoverishes them and turns all of the arts, humanities and social sciences in England into teaching-focussed universities. Lets not even get started on what it means for the Art Schools and monotechnics; all advances made in funding of the humanities over the last thirteen years have been put into sharp and irrecoverable reverse.

I could make a defence of the worth of the humanities but if legislators cannot recognize their value from the outset then no words here will persuade them. Nor will I make the obvious case for the social mobility afforded by a university education—as if a Conservative-lead administration gave two figs for the education of the lower orders. However, the fundamental reason to oppose tuition fees of any kind is that those who benefited from a free higher education as a democratic right should not when in government (as a result of that free higher education) tell future generations that they must now take on mortgage-sized debts to pay for the same privilege. How this is ‘progressive and fair’, as our politicians like to say, is a mystery. One should not just resist this situation; it has to be refused utterly. Distracted by the chimera of RAE results and QAA inspections, academics in the United Kingdom have not had the best track record in saying no to government in the last twenty years, but if this does not rouse us nothing ever will. And if it can happen in England it will without doubt be rolled out across Scotland, Wales, Northern Ireland, Europe, and Australia. This is a culture war in which critical thought is threatened with extinction. It is time to stop writing the monograph on the footnotes of Henry James, drop the myth of ‘research’ and ‘teaching’ institutions, and do something quickly to save everything any academic worthy of the name holds dear.

http://www.thelondongraduateschool.co.uk/thoughtpiece/if-you-tolerate-this%E2%80%A6-lord-browne-and-the-privatisation-of-the-humanities/

Publish with Anthem Press

2010-09-27T01:26:00.001-07:00

Anthem Press, an independent international publisher of academic, educational and reference works would like to welcome submissions of proposals for challenging and original academic monographs and edited volumes, major works, handbooks/companions or course textbooks/readers.

As a matter of course, we pride ourselves in publishing our scholarly monographs and edited volumes in hardback, paperback and e-book international editions. Moreover, if indeed there is demand, we now publish low-cost editions for developing countries.

Should you wish to send in a book proposal or have any other queries, please contact us at: proposal@wpcpress.com.

Our current list includes such works as:

Action! Interviews with Directors from Classical Hollywood to Contemporary Iran
Edited by Gary Morris

''Action!' is a treasure-trove: nineteen rare interviews with a wide variety of film directors, all conducted by writers who are truly savvy about their subjects. The book as a whole adds up to a practical PhD in what it takes to put personal vision up on the screen, both then and now.' —Jeanine Basinger, Chair, Film Studies Department, Wesleyan University

‘Action!’ presents nineteen outstanding interviews with directors past and present, from around the world, working in a variety of genres, budgets and production environments from major studios to indie and DIY. The result is a vibrant group portrait of the filmmaking art, a kind of festival in words that explores everything from the enormous creative and personal satisfactions to the challenges and frustrations of the process.

Paperback | 9781843313298 | July 2009 | 370 Pages

Bollywood and Globalization: Indian Popular Cinema, Nation and Diaspora
Edited by Rini Bhattacharya Mehta and Rajeshwari V. Pandharipande

Commercial cinema has always been one of the biggest indigenous industries in India, and remains so in the post-globalization era, when Indian economy has entered a new phase of global participation, liberalization and expansion. Issues of community, gender, society, social and economic justice, bourgeois-liberal individualism, secular nationhood and ethnic identity are nowhere more explored in the Indian cultural mainstream than in commercial cinema. As Indian economy and policy have gone through a sea-change after the end of the Cold War and the commencement of the Global Capital, the largest cultural industry has followed suit. This book is a significant addition to the study of post-Global Indian culture. The articles represent a variety of theoretical and pedagogical approaches, and the collection will be appreciated by beginners and scholars alike.

Hardback | 9781843318330 | January 2010 | 210 Pages

Drama and Film: A Comparative Approach (forthcoming)
Edited by Bert Cardullo

'Drama and Film: A Comparative Approach' is one of the first books in 35 years to examine the historical, cultural, and aesthetic relationships between the theater and the cinema. In this volume, a variety of writers, directors, and theorists examines the differences between working in—and creating for—drama and film.'Drama and Film' is thus intended to provide a theoretical and practical foundation for understanding the effect that these two media have had, and continue to have, on each other's development.

Paperback | 9780857289773 | January 2011 | 220 Pages

Screen Writings: Partial Views of a Total Art, Classic to Contemporary
Bert Cardullo

'Among my contemporaries, the best film critic writing in English in America is Bert Cardullo, and 'Screen Writings' proves why.' —Dan Harper, American film scholar

'Screen Writings: Partial Views of a Total Art, Classic to Contemporary' offers close readings of individual films intended to explain how moviemakers use the resources of the medium to pursue complex and significant humanistic goals. It fills the middle ground between vague, simple plot summaries and theoretical pronouncements. As such, this book can be considered a call for the return of practical criticism as the best way to understand and appreciate the work of cinematic artists.

Hardback | 9781843318798 | March 2010 | 246 Pages

ABOUT ANTHEM PRESS
www.anthempress.com

Anthem Press is a distinguished independent international publishing house pioneering a distinctive approach to the publishing of serious works across a wide range of subjects that appeal to academics, area specialists, researchers, school and university students, professionals as well as to general readers. Our list is international in scope and consists of leading authors ranging from academics making original contributions in the humanities, social sciences and natural sciences to trade authors, including journalists and experts.

We relish our individuality and the breadth of our interests - being entirely independent, we are free to pursue our ideas and inspirations; we shall continue to build on our reputation for scholarship, innovative publishing and the very highest standards of book production.

Many of our books are published in association with a wide variety of other organisations, including scholarly international institutes, non-governmental organisations, financial institutions and other publishers around the world.

Anthem Press is headquartered in the UK (London) with offices in the USA and India. We have a global profile supported by our team of representatives and agents.

Rey Chow and Postcolonial Social Semiotics

2010-09-23T12:26:00.001-07:00

I’m delighted to announce that this appears to be out now:

http://www.informaworld.com/smpp/title~db=all~content=g927263428~tab=toc

Reading Ranciere: Critical Dissensus: Table of Contents

2010-09-14T02:31:00.001-07:00

Reading Rancière: Critical Dissensus

Table of Contents

Notes on Contributors

Paul Bowman and Richard Stamp: Introduction: A critical dissensus

Jacques Rancière: The thinking of dissensus: politics and aesthetics

Samuel A. Chambers: The Politics of the Police: From Neoliberalism to Anarchism, and back to Democracy

Rey Chow and Julian Rohrhuber: On Captivation: A Remainder from the ‘Indistinction of Art and Nonart’

Jodi Dean: Politics Without Politics

Ben Highmore: Out of Place: Unprofessional Painting, Jacques Rancière, and the Distribution of the Sensible

Suhail Malik and Andrea Phillips: The wrong of contemporary art: aesthetics and political indeterminacy

Oliver Marchart: The Second Return of the Political: Democracy and the Syllogism of Equality

Linsey McGoey: Police reinforcement: the anti-politics of organizational life

Martin McQuillan: Paul de Man and Art History I: Modernity, Aesthetics and Community in Jacques Rancière

Mark Robson: Film, Fall, Fable: Rancière, Rossellini, Flaubert, Haneke

Alex Thomson: On The Shores of History

Alberto Toscano: Anti-Sociology and its Limits

Jacques Rancière: Against an ebbing tide: An interview with Jacques Rancière

Rey Chow: Postcolonial Studies

2010-08-31T00:42:00.001-07:00

An issue of *Postcolonial Studies* focusing on the work of Rey Chow is out now:

*Rey Chow, Postcoloniality and Interdisciplinarity*:

_Postcolonial Studies_, Vol. 13, Issue 3.

It can be found here:

http://www.informaworld.com/smpp/title~db=all~content=g926168935

Postcolonial Studies Issue

2010-07-30T10:03:00.001-07:00

Here are the abstracts for the Postcolonial Studies issue that is forthcoming on Rey Chow in the Autumn:

Paul Bowman

Reading Rey Chow

This article examines some key concerns and problematics that are regularly engaged in the work of Rey Chow, and relates them to the theoretical and political problematics of cultural studies as an ethico-political project. It associates Chow’s work with strong impulses and many of the abiding concerns that define the projects of such thinkers as Stuart Hall and Jacques Derrida, whilst also connecting her interventions to other key problematics in the fields of cultural studies, poststructuralist cultural theory and postcolonial studies. It shows that Chow’s work tests and explores political, theoretical and philosophical interpretive machines and positions by way of very close and yet wide ranging readings of all manner of ‘objects’, unconstrained by contingent disciplinary demarcations (such as those between literature, media, popular culture, film, identity, and so on) in a way that reveals the complex discursive relations, reticulations, implicit and explicit interconnections between as well as gaps, hiatuses, aporias and barriers across putatively separate ‘realms’.

Iain Chambers

Theory, thresholds and beyond

This essay seeks to open up the question of the location of a critical disposition, the worldly conditions of analysis, and the vulnerabilty of languages, exposed to unacknowledged geographies, voices and places. The principal line of argument that the accumulative force of Rey Chow’s work forces us to consider how the rest of the world becomes a target for Euro-American theory. This propels us into the heart of darkness of a political, cultural and intellectual formation specific to the West. Focuses of analysis – whether literary, cinematic or social – turn out to present us with slippery and excessive definitions regarding their disciplinary location: they become the unsuspected sites of unauthorised and often unwelcomed questions. For Rey Chow’s ‘style’ of intellectual work reveals a positionality that persistently stymies the universal and ‘neutral’ pretensions of the abstract knowledge proposed by the humanities. It is this gap, between pretense and positionality, that Chow consistently explores. Our attention is drawn through the details of analysis towards a further, unsuspected and unfamiliar shore from where the finitude of thought, its limits, blindness and epistemological conceits, can be traced. Pushed to confront its location in Occidental privilege, the largely silenced world that the Western academcy nominates here returns bearing uncomfortable, perhaps even unanswerable, questions. It is this profound and unacknowledged provincialism that constitutes what Chow calls a ‘persistent epistemic scandal’.

John Frow

Hybrid disciplinarity: Rey Chow and comparative studies

The question of comparison has been central to all of Rey Chow’s work. She understands it not as an exercise performed upon a common ground, but as the drawing together of incommensurable places and objects of knowledge; its point is not to gain prestige within a dominant cultural field and not simply to reverse the hierarchy obtaining between centre and margin, but to generalise the condition of otherness. The analogy she posits between the stakes of aesthetic reflection and the politics of cultural difference in a field without a stable hierarchy or a normative centre has pay-offs both for the methodology of literary studies and for reflection on cultural politics, and it restores the link between them. This article looks at the grounding of her practice of comparison in the Kantian concept of an ungrounded reflective judgement and in a notion of the heterogeneous ‘field’ which is its condition of possibility.

Marinos Pourgouris

Rey Chow and The Hauntological Specters of Poststructuralism

One of the most persistent themes in Rey Chow’s work is the concept of the ethnic and the ways in which it has been redefined in a poststructuralist context. This essay examines Chow’s critique of poststructuralist theory, particularly as it pertains to the concepts of nationalism, multiculturalism, and cosmopolitanism. Contrary to the predominant definitions of nationalism and ethnicity, Chow’s work challenges the largely unquestioned tendency in contemporary theory to be both humanistic, or cosmopolitan, and to deconstruct any ‘fixed’ meaning. Chow’s theoretical position underlines the fact that such theoretical de-constructions, first and foremost, ignore the social and political problems that are irrevocably linked to the question of ethnicity. It also exposes the ways in which poststructuralist theory’s critique of ethnicity inadvertently serves the Western logocentrism that it originally set out to deconstruct. Finally, this article focuses on the relevance of Chow’s critique to the status of national departments in the University setting and the definition of Comparative Literature as a field.

James Steintrager

Hermeneutic Heresy: Rey Chow on Translation in Theory and the ‘Fable’ of Culture

Translation is a topic that seems to come and go with regularity on the literary theory scene. It has most recently enjoyed a vogue among comparatists, who have positioned translation as a way to renew—yet again—their discipline (see, for example, Emily Apter’s The Translation Zone). Translation has also been discussed in the context of feminism, deconstruction, and postcolonial studies. With respect to the last grouping, the writings of Niranjana, Spivak, and Chow stand out. In this essay, I return to Chow’s discussion of translation and national identity in Primitive Passions. I am particularly interested in showing how Chow, almost alone, attempts in that work to overcome the dominant hermeneutic paradigm that informs other theorists on translation, from the cultural conservatism of George Steiner to the declared radicalism of Spivak and of more recent works such as Bassnett and Trivedi’s edited volume Postcolonial Translation Theory. I argue that none of these writers has taken up the challenge to hermeneutics that Chow posited and explored specifically with regard to Fifth Generation Chinese filmmakers. Chow’s challenge, I claim, resides in her focus on mediation as key to understanding both identity formation and the construction of “culture” itself. Using theorists of media and social systems such as Friedrich Kittler and Niklas Luhmann, I go on to unfold Chow’s discovery and demonstrate that hermeneutics and the translation theory derived from it are largely products of print and that the shift to film in the global marketplace has undermined the conceptual apparatus of both.

Rey Chow

Fleeing Objects

Chow responds to the general discussion of her work, including the five essays in this special issue, by posing the question of the vanishing object of study in the age of boundary-crossing interdisciplinarity.

Postcolonial Studies Cover

2010-07-21T04:19:00.001-07:00

Here’s the cover of the Postcolonial Studies issue on Rey Chow:

http://cardiff.academia.edu/PaulBowman/Books/172770/Rey-Chow--Postcoloniality-and-Interdisciplinarity

Look Inside...

2010-06-29T06:13:00.000-07:00

You can look inside The Rey Chow Reader here:

http://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/reader/0231149956/ref=sib_dp_pt#reader-page

Admire the index. I certainly do. I can take absolutely no credit for it. For the first time ever, I didn’t do the index myself – which accounts for why it is so good.

Reviewing Rey Chow

2010-06-26T01:01:00.001-07:00

I’ve heard that a couple of journals are interested in commissioning reviews of The Rey Chow Reader. If anyone would like to review The Rey Chow Reader, please let me know and I’ll try to get the ball rolling. I’ll need to know a little bit about you, so I can give the publishers some assurances about the likelihood that you will actually deliver a review to a journal and not just run off into the sunset with a free book. I don’t need to know your likes and dislikes, but where you study or work, what sorts of things you have written on before, etc.

If interested, let me know at BowmanP@cf.ac.uk

OUT NOW: The Rey Chow Reader

2010-06-23T02:23:00.000-07:00

I’m delighted to announce that _The Rey Chow Reader_ is out now from Columbia University Press.

Reviews and contents etc are here:

http://cup.columbia.edu/book/978-0-231-14994-5/the-rey-chow-reader/reviews

Suspension of Colleagues at Middlesex University

2010-05-23T22:10:00.001-07:00

Dear Colleagues,

Many of you have heard of the abrupt and unwarranted closure of the highly-ranked program in philosophy at Middlesex University in London.

I'm writing today because the administration's latest action in this case, the suspension of Professor Peter Osborne and Professor Peter Hallward, along with a number of Middlesex philosophy students, is a grave threat to academic freedom.

Administrators at other universities are carefully monitoring this situation and due to a ratcheting effect, if these suspensions are not overturned by international protest, they will become common practice. We must prevent this administrative bullying of our colleagues, who were doing nothing but attempting to present their side of the case to public opinion.

You can read about the suspensions here:http://savemdxphil.com/2010/05/21/philosophy-students-and-staff-suspended/

You can find details on why the original decision has already provoked an international outcry here:http://www.insidehighered.com/views/2010/05/17/protevi.

Today I'm asking you to protect academic freedom and the integrity of the modern university by taking as many of the following steps as you can.

Please forward this email to colleagues and to any listservs you may belong to.

Please sign the online petition at:http://www.gopetition.com/petitions/save-middlesex-philosophy.html. Please include your institutional affiliation and location.

Please write a letter of protest by email, and in hard copy, concerning the original decision, the suspensions, or both. If you have already written in protest of the original decision, please consider writing again to protest the suspensions, which are in some sense an even more serious matter, as they strike at the very heart of academic freedom itself.

a. Examples of previous letters are here:http://savemdxphil.com/category/letters-of-support/

b. Email addresses of the Board of Governors of Middlesex University are here:michael@partridges.org.uk; A.Gajownik@mdx.ac.uk; A.Durant@mdx.ac.uk; thelindens@googlemail.com; andrew.parsons@rlb-law.com; avrobinson1@tiscali.co.uk; l_spence1@sky.com; Bridget.Rulski@guardian.co.uk; colin.hughes@guardian.co.uk; T.Cockerton@mdx.ac.uk; P.A.Johnson@mdx.ac.uk; jritterman@blueyonder.co.uk; dinagray@btinternet.com; j.alleyne@mdx.ac.uk; geoff.lambert2@ntlworld.com; W.Ahmad@mdx.ac.uk; J.Compton-Bishop@mdx.ac.uk; j.mulroy1@btinternet.com; K.A.Bell@mdx.ac.uk; lorna.cocking@btinternet.com; M.House@mdx.ac.uk; M.Keen@mdx.ac.uk; m.driscoll@mdx.ac.uk; PeterCheeseman1@aol.com; Peter.Thomas2@justice.gsi.gov.uk; RS1000@live.mdx.ac.uk; stephen.hand@lr.org; s.knight@mdx.ac.uk; T.Kelly@mdx.ac.uk; T.Butland@mdx.ac.uk; e.esche@mdx.ac.uk

c. Please follow your email with a hard copy letter on departmental letterhead. The postal address is:

Board of Governors
Middlesex University in London
The Burroughs
London NW4 4BT England

d. Personal letters are great; departmental letters are even better.

e. If you agree to have your letter published on the Save Middlesex Philosophy website, you should BCC savemdxphil@gmail.com.

4. If you have a blog, please make a post on the situation and link to http://savemdxphil.com

Rey Chow issue of Postcolonial Studies

2010-05-13T03:50:00.001-07:00

I’ve just submitted the manuscript for the Rey Chow issue of Postcolonial Studies. Here’s the table of contents:

http://cardiff.academia.edu/PaulBowman/Books/172770/Rey-Chow--Postcoloniality-and-Interdisciplinarity

More on Middlesex Philosophy's potential closure

2010-05-06T08:59:00.001-07:00

A video of interviews with those protesting to save Middlesex University Philosophy Department from closure:

http://vimeo.com/11523774

More information about the protest & campaign here:

http://savemdxphil.com/

Save Middlesex University Philosophy

2010-05-05T06:31:00.001-07:00

See whereabouts in the world people have signed the petition to save Middlesex University Philosophy - oh, and sign it yourself:http://www.gopetition.com/map.php?petid=35831

http://www.gopetition.com/petitions/save-middlesex-philosophy/signatures.html

Cultural Translation

2010-04-30T22:23:00.000-07:00

A paper I gave yesterday:

“Translating Bruce Lee: At the Border of Culture and Politics”.

Keywords: Bruce Lee, Rey Chow, cultural translation, Jacques Rancière, Alain Badiou, Slavoj Zizek, Jacques Derrida :

http://cardiff.academia.edu/PaulBowman/attachment/939404/full/Translating--Bruce-Lee---At-the-Border-of-Culture-and-Politics

Rey Chow and Postcolonial Social Semiotics

2010-04-16T03:41:00.001-07:00

Here’s the table of contents for the forthcoming issue of Social Semiotics focusing on the work of Rey Chow:

http://cardiff.academia.edu/PaulBowman/Books/162965/Rey-Chow-and-Postcolonial-Social-Semiotics

preposterous peer review proposal

2010-03-23T03:19:00.001-07:00

Hands up who wants to peer review an entire issue of a journal for me at breakneck speed over a very inconvenient (holiday) period and for no formal recompense at all?

(Didn’t think so!)

Rey Chow in Istanbul

2010-03-19T07:09:00.001-07:00

Rey Chow will be keynote here:

http://internationalconference.dogus.edu.tr/

Seeing and Event: Bruce Lee and the Emancipated Spectator

2010-03-12T12:27:00.001-08:00

A very short paper I gave at Bristol University yesterday at a nice little gathering:

http://cardiff.academia.edu/PaulBowman/attachment/776861/full/Seeing-and-Event--Bruce-Lee-and-the-Emancipated-Spectator

The Rey Chow Reader

2010-03-10T11:03:00.001-08:00

Here’s the Columbia University Press page for The Rey Chow Reader:

http://cup.columbia.edu/book/978-0-231-14994-5/the-rey-chow-reader

(The cover won’t be like that, in the end. We chose a different cover design in the end.)

Reviews in Culture

2010-03-05T22:20:00.001-08:00

This should be good :

http://www.reviewsinculture.com/rss.php

Reading Bruce Lee with Rey Chow

2010-01-14T05:44:00.001-08:00

Here’s a draft article I’m writing, using Rey Chow to read Bruce Lee in terms of ‘cultural translation’ – oh, and queerness:

http://cardiff.academia.edu/PaulBowman/Papers/134285/Sick-Man-of-Transl-Asia--Bruce-Lee-and-Queer-Cultural-Translation

The Society of Scholars in the Humanities

2010-01-14T03:07:00.000-08:00

THE UNIVERSITY OF HONG KONG

The Society of Scholars in the Humanities

(Ref.: RF-2009/2010-405)

The Society of Scholars in the Humanities at the University of Hong Kong is a society of young scholars involved in cutting-edge research. It is designed to encourage critical and creative thought both within and between the disciplines in the Arts and Humanities. There are four research Scholarships for 2010, one in each of the following fields: Comparative Literature (including Film Studies), Linguistics, Music (including Composition and Ethnomusicology) and Philosophy.

Each Scholarship is for two years and is non-renewable. Applicants are invited from all educational institutions across the world. The Scholarships are intended for researchers early in their careers to carry out innovative research. Candidates are expected to be either graduate students in the final stages of their Ph.D. studies, or researchers who have been awarded their Ph.D. degree for not more than two years from the date of application. Details about the Society are available at http://www.soh.hku.hk/ssh/2010/index.html.

Scholars will be provided with free accommodation, office space, airfares for overseas candidates, a research grant of up to HK$14,000 a year, and a stipend of HK$23,000 per month. (Scholars who have not yet been awarded a Ph.D. degree will receive a salary of HK$19,000 per month.) Successful candidates will be appointed as Research Scholar.

Although the Scholarship is primarily designed to encourage original research, Scholars will be expected to teach one course per year, interact with staff and students, present their research in colloquia and conferences, and organize a lecture series. All Scholars are expected to be resident in Hong Kong during the teaching semesters and may carry out research abroad for up to 100 days a year.

The application form along with CV, research proposal (max. 1500 words) and two referees' reports must be received by the School of Humanities by March 31, 2010. All Scholarships begin on September 1, 2010. Further particulars and application forms can be obtained at http://www.soh.hku.hk/ssh/2010/applications.html. Enquiries about the Scholarship can be directed to Ms. Vivian Chu, Secretary of the Society of Scholars (e-mail: scholars@hku.hk). There are no interviews. Successful applicants will be notified no later than June 30, 2010.

On Chow in Spanish

2010-01-13T04:33:00.001-08:00

Interesting review of Chow, in Spanish, by Floriana Bernardi:

http://www.designisfels.net/download/resenas12.pdf

Chow in Differences

2010-01-05T22:53:00.001-08:00

"I Insist on the Christian Dimension": On Forgiveness... and the Outside of the Human

Rey Chow

The question explored in this article pertains to the type ofexchange specific to human relations we call forgiveness. HannahArendt's comments on the subject provide a compelling justificationfor its necessity: "Without being forgiven, released from theconsequences of what we have done, our capacity to act would,as it were, be confined to one single deed from which we couldnever recover; we would remain the victims of its consequencesforever, not unlike the sorcerer's apprentice who lacks themagic formula to break the spell." Yet, precisely the imperativenature of forgiveness may be a source of epistemic conundrums.To elaborate this point, the author begins with a referenceto a striking key episode at the heart of the South Korean filmMiryang [Secret Sunshine] (2007), which stages forgiveness inthe context of Christian evangelism. The article goes on toargue, through a discussion of the writings of Derrida and Auerbach,among others, that the connotations of forgiveness extend considerablybeyond a strictly religious dimension, going so far as to bearon contemporary theoretical questions about translation andthe secularization of representation.

http://differences.dukejournals.org/cgi/content/abstract/20/2-3/224