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1.
Iconographic avatars in web-based graphical chat environments work to create a ‘shattered’ sense of self through the use of emblematics (the bringing together of text and image) coupled with a reformulated use of free indirect discourse, a style of indirect address found in the modern bourgeois novel. Free indirect discourse, or ‘middle voice’, is crafted by the novelist but takes on the characteristics of the person described, even as the difference between novelist and character creates an ironic distance directed at both the character and the reader who may be encouraged by the style to identify with the character. Avatar-driven graphical chat suggests a synthesis of the value of an avatar external to oneself and that of the ironic distance provided by free indirect discourse. The ‘middle ground’ of iconographic graphical chat environments exemplifies how images reformulate and seemingly mitigate the tensions inherent in text-based free indirect discourse – with its suggestion of ‘experience without a subject’ – to create greater ambiguity, irony and abstraction of the self and others. This mirrors how various forces of global capital work to reformulate the subject.  相似文献   

2.
This paper examines Duchenne de Boulogne's Mécanisme de la physionomie humaine (1862) as a limit case between Foucauldian epistemes of signification. Electrically inducing ‘expression’ in his subject's face, Duchenne, a neuro-physiologist, claimed to have discovered the true ‘orthography’ of the passions. He photographed and published his experiments to offer the art world a positivist corrective to the historically ‘arbitrary’ representation of emotion. The narrative accompanying the photographs provides the basis for this analysis which focuses on how Duchenne used the image/text idea of an ’orthography‘ to shape his technologically mediated expressions with a Renaissance and Classical poetics of resemblance and representation. Making an analogy with linguistic ‘units’, Duchenne located a scene of writing under the facial flesh where action was ‘transfigured’ into passion. The Classical debate on the origin of language and the Renaissance physiognomic tradition inspired his discourse, which failed to grasp the modernity of his technologically mediated passions.  相似文献   

3.
WAGES OF SIN?     
The ‘global credit crunch’ is only the latest and most virulent among a series of financial crises stretching back to the 1970s and beyond. Yet, more than any of its predecessors, the current crisis is being presented in apocalyptical libidinal terms. Accounts of the crisis and its aftermath tend to be predicated on a sharp contrast drawn between prudent, conservative, risk averse, sober financial practice and a more exuberant, greedy, hedonistic, risky counterpart.

This kind psychosexual analysis is neither new, nor does it represent an accurate depiction of the dilemmas and challenges posed by modern finance. It tacitly suggests, for example, that a return to ‘traditional financial values’ (akin to repeated calls for returns to ‘family values’) would restore calm and normality to a system undermined by the excesses of the perverse few.

This paper argues that although a return to ‘traditional values’ is unlikely to solve any of the current problems, the representation of the crisis and its aftermath is significant. The crisis and its aftermath are embroiled in a wider fundamentalist and puritanical backlash against ‘hedonistic’ capitalism. It represents not a crisis of capitalism as a whole, but a schism within (predominantly) financial communities over the morality and acceptability of ‘risk’. As such, a strongly libidinal language already common within the markets is being adapted and redeployed to create new divisions and exceptions in the context of crisis.  相似文献   

4.
To the extent that ‘classical organization theory’ is seen to possess any enduring interest it is mainly as a historic artefact. The idea that the principles, axioms, adages and devices elaborated by its proponents any longer possess traction in the present is rarely countenanced. In contrast to this customary view, the present article seeks to indicate the continuing significance of classical organization theory, for both analysing and intervening in organizational life. This necessitates a reconstruction of the conventional understanding of this received term, one in which classical organization theory is viewed less as ‘theory’ in the conventional sense, but rather as a geographically dispersed, institutionally disconnected and historically discontinuous ‘stance’, characterized, inter alia, by a pragmatist call to experience, an antithetical attitude to ‘high’ or transcendental theorizing, and, not least, an ethical focus on organizational effectiveness born of a close connection to ‘the work itself’ or ‘the situation at hand’. Deploying the term ‘classic organization theory’ in this way, to refer to a stance, attitude or comportment, and an associated persona that bears it, we are able to highlight the significant differences between this comportment and the increasingly ‘metaphysical’ attitude characterizing many contemporary approaches to organization and organizing, not simply in organization studies, but also more widely in sociology and cultural economy.  相似文献   

5.
This article explores the cultural framings that all too frequently pass un-noticed in standard cost-benefit accounts of development economics. Our purpose is not simply to add our voice to those who argue for the importance of ‘bringing culture back in’, for we assume that in contexts of modern development economics ‘the cultural’ cannot simply be added to the technical or the economic, as these perspectives are explicitly elaborated as an abstraction from the cultural. Rather, we are interested in how an exploration of the cultural dynamics of technical process leads us to a disjunctive (rather than an additive) mode of ‘inclusion’. Building on approaches from science studies and social anthropology, we draw on our ethnographic and historical investigations of road-building in Peru to explore divergent modes of connectivity through which a politics of cultural engagement is played out. Taking the example of a highway under construction in a frontier zone not generally considered of economic importance to the wider national economy, we discuss the historical desire for ‘connectivity’, highlighting the instability of the physical and social environments on the margins of a marginal state. In this context we find that the vital energies of the frontier – entrepreneurial, innovative, experimental and unruly – consistently disrupt the vision of smooth, orderly, technical integration. We argue that this tension between the cultural and the technical, so clearly manifest at the frontiers of capitalist expansion (but characteristic of technological expansion more generally) is a driver rather than an obstacle in the development process. Attempts to produce a political resolution to a perceived lack of integration on the margins of society too often proceed through further attempts at securing smooth continuity (via further technical modes of intervention) rather than building on the diverse (disjunctive) modes of engagement that already exist.  相似文献   

6.
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7.
Cinema marks a profound shift in the relation between image and text – indeed it is the watershed of the subjugation of language by image. Cinema as an innovative shift in both industrial capitalism and cultural practice marks, therefore, the restructuring of language function in accord with the changing protocols of techno-capitalism. The ‘talking cure’, otherwise known as psychoanalysis, is itself a symptom of cinema. As a precursor for TV and computing and Internet, cinema transacts value transfer across the image utilising a production process that can be grasped as founded under the rubric of what I call ‘the attention theory of value’. The deterritorialised factory that is the contemporary image, is an essential component of globalisation, neo-imperialism, and militarisation, organising, as it were, the consent (ignorance of) and indeed desire for these latter processes. Thus ‘cinema’, as a paradigm for image-mediated social production, implies a cultural turn for political economics. It also implies that it is the interstitial, informal activities that transpire across the entire surface of the socius as well as in the vicissitudes of the psyche and experience that are the new (untheorised) production sites for global capital – and therefore among the significant sites for the waging of the next revolution.  相似文献   

8.
The central argument in this paper is that actor-network theory (ANT) does not do ‘cultural economy’ symmetrically: it has had a lot to say about economy but much less to say about culture. This rejection of culture is ontological and epistemological: culture appears in ANT largely as an artefact of modernist thought rather than as an empirical aspect of agents' performances. And yet if ‘economy’ can be critiqued and reinstated as performative, so too can ‘culture’. To explore this, we focus on objects of concern that – unlike the financial markets that have formed the core of ANT-inspired thinking about the economy – are assembled by actors in and through what they themselves understand to be cultural materials, cultural calculations, cultural processes, cultural institutions. In such examples, ‘culture’ is continuously invoked and enacted by actors in constructing their actions, whatever critical sociologists might have to say about its ontological status. It seems paradoxical that a theoretical approach that makes sacrosanct the associations constructed by agents who assemble their own world, generally discusses ‘culture’ only from the point of view of critical epistemology. Bearing all this in mind, we argue that it is time for us to ‘reassemble’ the cultural.  相似文献   

9.
This paper responds to a trend of contracting out subjective well-being econometrics to demonstrate social return on investment (SROI) for evidence-based policy-making. We discuss an evolving ecology of ‘external’ research taking place ‘between’ the academy and commercial consultancy. We then contextualise this as waves of research methodologies and consultancy for the cultural sector. The new model of ‘external between’ consultancy research for policy is not only placed between the University and the market, but also facilitates discourse between policy sectors, government, the media and the academy. Specifically, it enables seductive but selective arguments for advocacy that claim authority through academic affiliation, yet are not evaluated for robustness. To critically engage with an emergent form of what Stone calls ‘causal stories’, we replicate a publicly funded externally commissioned SROI model that argues for the value of cultural activities to well-being. We find that the author’s operationalisation of participation and well-being are crucial, yet their representation of the relationship problematic, and their estimates questionable. This case study ‘re-performs’ econometric modelling national-level survey data for the cultural sector to reveal practices that create norms of expertise for policy-making that are not rigorous. We conclude that fluid claims to authority allow experimental econometric models and measures to perform across the cultural economy as if ratified. This new model of advocacy research requires closer academic consideration given the changing research funding structures and recent attention to expertise and the contracting out of public services.  相似文献   

10.
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11.
The sociologist Bruno Latour has often expressed aversion to immanent critique, framing actor-network theory in terms of focus on visible phenomena. In spite of this, research on financial performativity inspired by Latour’s perspective can still be interpreted in terms of immanent critique and related to Political Economy (a critical discipline), through Kant’s critique of metaphysics as a ‘regulative axiom’. Research on financial performativity has uncovered evidence of the existence of constructive processes that show how an idea (like a financial model) can become something like an ‘object’. This ‘objectivity’ appears to contradict Kant’s critique of metaphysics – that there always remains a gap between our ideas and the world itself. This paper therefore explores financial performativity as a ‘contradiction’, historicizing it to argue that ‘Barnesian performativity’ and ‘financial liquidity’ are ‘immanent’ to one another in the events of recent financial crises. The paper conducts this interpretation to provide a new conceptualization of ‘financial liquidity’ that is more empirically apparent, helping to overcome some of the limits in the discussion of ‘liquidity’ in Political Economy (that Latour might want to highlight), where discussion occurs in metaphysical terms difficult to connect to actual events.  相似文献   

12.
This paper investigates the underlying principle of ‘economy’ in the Greek Orthodox monastery of Vatopaidi, Mount Athos, in complementary relation to the monastic ideal of ‘virginity’ as the means of separating monastic from secular life. In this context, ‘economy’ represents an internal and external dichotomy: an economy within the spiritual self (‘economy of passions’) and the monastery (‘law of the house’), expressed in traditional practices, such as prayer, confession, psalmody, and painting; and an economy of relations between the monastery and the materialist ‘cosmopolitan’ world outside Athos, which is manifested by Vatopaidi's strong financial and political status in the Orthodox world. The material reveals the overlapping connection between the notions of the ‘self’, the ‘monastery’, and the ‘world’, in order to critically evaluate the cultural economy of Vatopaidi in relation to its historical past, and in connection to its present political and economic status within and against the Greek state.  相似文献   

13.
Edward Said is the literary critic most cited by American anthropologists, but there has been relatively little anthropological examination of his concept of culture. Apart from an isolated attempt by Lila Abu‐Lughod to ‘write against culture’, most anthropologists have ignored Said’s approach. In Culture and Imperialism, Said draws on Matthew Arnold’s ‘best of the best’ definition, while American anthropologists owe their holistic culture to fellow Victorian Edward Tylor. Claude Levi‐Strauss is praised by Said, but other major anthropological approaches to culture are ignored. Said assumes anthropology is on the wrong side of the colonial divide, although he holds out hope for those who are now reading the work of literary and cultural critics. In this essay I compare Said’s reading of anthropology, exemplified by Kipling’s Colonel Creighton, to the influence of Bronislaw Malinowski and Franz Boas on ethnographic method.  相似文献   

14.
Financial imagination plays a fundamental, yet ambivalent role in the establishment of hierarchies within and between business schools, and in business life at large. This study examines this process in the ‘middle tier’ of business education: that is, in the social space in which students and instructors understand themselves to occupy a ‘mid-range’ position within an order of excellence and success. Largely articulated through business school rankings, this order strongly relies on the centrality of the financial curriculum, proficiency in which is understood as both a proxy for smartness and a sign of moneymaking capacity. In the ‘middle tier’, this order manifests in the form of an anxiety: an order that, though legitimate, is thought not to be attained, or hardly attainable. The study draws from ethnographic investigation in a ‘middle tier’ business school with attention to how finance is made sense of in relation to an alternative curriculum, and in connection with the aim of ‘making it to the top’. A comparison with a ‘top tier’ business school allows furthering understanding of how the order of business schools relies on the anxiety of finance in order to reproduce an acquiescence to dominant financial imagination.  相似文献   

15.
Branding is an economic and cultural process. Branding endows goods and services with value which corporations protect as their intellectual property, enabling brands to support share prices and be traded as assets in takeovers and mergers, at the same time as they serve to differentiate products competitively in the marketplace. Yet this ‘brand value’ depends on cultural perceptions of the meaning and worth of a brand. More than the unique image or positioning of a brand being maintained relative to others of its kind, such perceptions may involve the expressive and emotional attachment of consumers, and this may be very widely shared. This paper argues that, with certain brands, such shared attachment can occur on a national basis, so that they become symbols of national belonging. Whereas consumers attribute a putative foreign national origin to some global brands – for example, Harley-Davidson is unequivocally ‘American’ – they relate to other brands as expressive of their own national origin. This identification often persists even when national brands are taken over by global corporations, since the brand's association with the nation is a major dimension of its value, or the ‘brand equity’ which the new global owner has paid for, and intends to capitalise upon. The paper examines instances in which this has happened in Australia, such as the traditional brand Vegemite, long ago acquired by Kraft, and also cases where the Australian associations of a brand have been exploited in establishing its global identity, notably Foster's Lager.  相似文献   

16.
In recent years, questions of ‘character’ have become increasingly prominent in a range of policy contexts, from education to social welfare and from business to healthcare. What unites these various contemporary paens is an assumption that building ‘character’ is a crucial component of ethics and that it holds the key to establishing and maintaining virtuous conduct; moreover, that the cultivation of ‘character’ is at best under-valued and at worst actively undermined and denigrated in any number of contemporary economic and organizational practices. In this paper, we seek to interrogate key aspects of this upsurge of interest in ‘character’ as it has been articulated in particular recent and on-going debates about the reform of organizational life. We argue that this ‘turn’ suffers precisely from an abstraction and lack of contextual specificity – not simply in relation to questions of ‘character formation,’ but also in regard to matters of organization, and indeed the relationship of the one to the other – that severely curtails both its ethical reach and explanatory power.  相似文献   

17.
The film Black Swan, directed by Darren Aronofsky, provides a fruitful context for thinking about Deleuze's conceptualisation of structural transformation as a ‘presubjective’ process involving a critical and creative politics of engagement. Nina is a young dancer who has just secured the lead role in the New York Ballet's new production of Swan Lake. This role not only requires her to dance the pure and innocent character of the White Swan – a role that mirrors Nina's character in real life, and for which she is well suited – but also as the seductive and darkly erotic character of the Black Swan, a role quite alien to Nina. The film traces Nina's desperate efforts to meet the demands of this doubled characterisation. Through new forms of engagement with her peers, she enters into a ‘becoming-swan’ that frees her from the restraints and constraints imposed by her existing self. While this transformative process enables her to realise aesthetic perfection in her art, this comes at a heavy price: Nina not only is creatively destabilised, but ultimately is destroyed by the transformation she endures. By considering this work of cinema in light of Deleuze's writings on cinema, on ‘becoming-animal’, and on ‘Porcelain and Volcano’, this essay reflects upon a crucial question underlying much of Deleuze's political thought: how is it possible to privilege radical subjective and social transformation, without these structures of necessary coherence also ‘cracking up’ and being destroyed in the process?  相似文献   

18.
Scholarly attention to new forms of participation on the Internet has proliferated classifications and theories without providing any criteria for distinctions and diversity. Labels such as ‘peer production’, ‘prosumption’, ‘user-led innovation’ and ‘organized networks’ are intended to explain new forms of cultural and economic interaction mediated by the Internet, but lack any systematic way of distinguishing different cases. This article provides elements for the composition of a ‘birder's handbook’ to forms of participation on the Internet that have been observed and analyzed over the last 10 years. It is intended to help scholars across the disciplines distinguish fleeting forms of participation: first, the authors highlight the fact that participation on the Internet nearly always employs both a ‘formal social enterprise’ and an ‘organized public’ that stand in some structural and temporal relationship to one another; second, the authors map the different forms of action and exchange that take place amongst these two entities, showing how forms of participation are divided up into tasks and goals, and how they relate to the resource that is created through participation; and third, we describe forms of governance, or variation in how tasks and goals are made available to, and modifiable by, different participants of either a formal enterprise or an organized public.  相似文献   

19.
Subterranean termites are a serious problem for historical and artistic structures in Italy. Remedial control is difficult because of their large populations and foraging territories. A revolutionary solution comes from using ‘baiting technology’ that incorporates a slow-acting toxicant. The termite bait system tested here is based on Hexaflumuron, a chitin synthesis inhibitor developed by Dow AgroSciences, and ensures an effective, safe, not invasive and environmentally responsible treatment. The research was conducted in Naples, at the church of S. Maria della Sanità, where a Reticulitermes lucifugus infestation has been studied in depth since September 1997. During the pre-baiting survey a monitoring network was established to connect termite populations. Then a baiting program was applied in two zones selected as ‘sample areas’ where live infestations were found; site ‘Transept’ and site ‘Arciconfraternita’. At both sites termite control was achieved in September 1998 by the use of 430 mg of Hexaflumuron within 4 months of baiting. After the baiting procedure, in November 1998, a follow-up monitoring was initiated to confirm control of the infestation at both sites. This phase, which is still continuing, was extended to the whole structure in order to provide continuous protection from new potential infestations. Thanks to the monitoring device-network established also in unbaited zones a new termite invasion was readily detected and a specific baiting program, which is now in progress, was initiated. This work showed that Hexaflumuron baits offer a modern solution against the infestation of subterranean termites in urban locations and confirmed the importance of a ‘monitoring-baiting-monitoring’ approach to termite control.  相似文献   

20.
Reflecting a wider trend in the social sciences, the field of organization studies has adopted an increasingly general and metaphysical vocabulary to guide and frame its analyses of life and dynamics in organizations. Where classic organizational analyses would describe organizations in terms of core objects such as ‘task’ and ‘coordination,’ contemporary organization studies emphasize, much like other social science disciplines, broader topics such as ‘network,’ ‘identity,’ and ‘change.’ The paper argues that this altered focus and vocabulary is accompanied by a diminished ability to specify and intervene into the practical reality of organizations. It further argues that a discipline's core objects are not anachronisms to be discarded with, but crucial for specifying reality in ways that have proven practically relevant and still are.  相似文献   

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