Cultural_Theory

During a series of protests in Hong Kong about a leadership transition widely perceived to give Mainland China greater political influence, the Hong Kong Museum of History held a Special Exhibition of the Terracotta Warriors of Xian, China. Sponsored by “The Leisure and Cultural Service Department,” the exhibit featured the first emperor of the Qin Dynasty who ushered in “an epoch-making era in Chinese history that witnessed the unification of China” (Museum Exhibition). This essay explores the multi-media aspects of the exhibit, arguing that encounters with dramatic music and fully immersive digital experiences are examples of an embodied, affective form of constitutive rhetoric. Put differently, the museum’s multi-media elements demonstrate how Maurice Charland’s theory of a constitutive rhetoric can be informed by recent work on affect and can provide one point from which to engage affect theory and the “affective dimension of politics.”

"Für den französischen Juristen und Psychoanalytiker Pierre Legendre („La passion d´être un autre. Étude pour la danse,“ Paris 1978) ist die christlich-abendländische Disziplinierung des Tanzes absolut. In jeder aufrechten Haltung der Tanzenden und in jeder Ordnung der Choreographie perpetuiert sich ein „Gesetz“, eine allgemeine Regulierung der Körperlichkeit, die im Gegenzug das Nicht-Normierte als illegitim ausschließt. Was nicht sein darf – das Sich-Wälzen von Körpern auf dem Boden, der Genuss der Horizontalen, der Kontrollverlust der Ekstase – wird als Symptom von Krankheit und Wahnsinn diffamiert.
Dabei ist das Gesetz auf versteckte Weise der Produzent des Ausgeschlossenen, indem das Verrückte durch den Ausschluss zuallererst hervorgebracht wird. Das gesetzeskonforme Ballett auf der Bühne und die Zuckungen in der Psychiatrie stehen so in einem wechselseitigen Zusammenhang: Nur weil die Körperbilder des Zappelns und Zitterns, der Tics und wilden Ausbrüche in der Psychiatrie konzentriert und weggesperrt werden, ist die Feier des Schönen und vorgeblich Gesunden, Nicht-Wahnsinnigen möglich.
Legendres Ansatz steht so in Beziehung zur Verhältnisbestimmung von Gesetz und Tanz bei Daniel Sibony („Le corps et sa danse,“ Paris 1995). Beide Theoretiker teilen die Nähe zur Psychoanalyse Jacques Lacans und gewinnen von ihr die Denkfigur eines allgemeinen Gesetzes („la loi“). Während aber Legendre das Gesetz vorwiegend negativ als Striktion und Verhinderung wilder Körperlichkeit zu konzipieren scheint, sieht Sibony das Gesetz in einer noch umfassenderen Paradoxalität, die neben der Bindung auch die Ermöglichung von Subjektivität beinhaltet. Der Wahnsinn („la folie“) ist kein Residuum gesetzesfreier Naturalität, sondern ereignet sich wie der Tanz immer „devans la loi“.
Von wenigen kurzen Paraphrasierungen abgesehen (Gerald Siegmund, „Abwesenheit“, Bielefeld 2006) ist Legendres und Sibonys Denken bisher kaum im deutschsprachigen Bereich der Tanzwissenschaft rezipiert worden. Eine genaue relecture dieser Gedanken im Hinblick auf das besondere Verhältnis von Wahnsinn, Tanz und Gesetz steht daher noch aus und wird hier erstmals zusammen mit einer differenzierten Kritik der Grundannahmen und Konsequenzen erarbeitet."

Interes za kulturu obilježio je Nietzscheovu filozofiju do te mjere da bismo u tome interesu mogli situirati logiku njezine koherencije. Simptomatičan je za to „Schopenhauer kao obrazovatelj“, jedno od Nietzscheovih „nesuvremenih razmatranja“. U njemu Nietzsche razmatra kulturu kao takav kritički pogon kakav osigurava neprekinutu transfiguraciju physisa. Naravno, „ja“ je instrumentalno za kultivaciju takve transfiguracijske inteligencije i racionalnosti; ipak, upravo zato „ja“ u kulturi svodi se na scenu nasilja, jer kultura nije skript njegova održavanja (čak i kad zadovoljava njegove potrebe). Pozivajući se na Emersona, Nietzsche kulturu stoga opisuje kao revolucionarnu; iz toga proizlazi da revolucija označava političko kulture, ono u kulturi što je fundamentalno politično, i obratno, da se u revoluciji vrijednoj toga imena pokazuje ono što je u politici fundamentalno kulturno. Istina, revolucionarnoj kulturi Nietzsche suprotstavlja kulturu i politiku koje nisu združene i ne pridonose transfiguracijskoj kritičkoj praksi, niti su u njoj utemeljene; ako naoko i služe održavanju ega, one to čine po cijenu represije njegove transfiguracijske inteligencije, pa je „ja“ i opet primarno scena nasilja. U tome okviru zanimaju me dvije pozicije. Prvo, želim postaviti hipotezu da je revolucionarna kultura kod Nietzschea metonimijski kompleks, za razliku od kulture koja ne pridonosi transfiguraciji physisa, a utemeljena je u metafori. Drugo, želim pokazati kako se, refrakcijom kroz Nietzschea, Emersonov projekt Amerike nameće kao prascena za Freudovu teoriju sebstva u kulturi.

"In what follows, I will discuss different conceptualizations of the relationship between a state of exception and the rule of law.

I begin with Bruce Ackerman who in “The Emergency Constitution” tried to demarcate an unmistakable threshold between the normal functioning of a constitutional democracy and its exceptional suspension. After having separated these two realms, Ackerman concerns himself with determining the actor who should have the authority to switch from normality to exceptionality (and vice versa). From this perspective he argues for the necessity of a statutory reform that would unmistakably preserve the legislature au- thority over the exception threshold, and therefore prevent the executive from turning a transitional emergency regime into a permanent police state. However imperative or praiseworthy such an attempt may be, I argue that Ackerman’s legalist framework fails to notice that the exception is not something that—sometimes and somewhere, in a local and transitory context—needs to be enforced in order to deal with national emergencies. Following Adrian Vermeule, my first critical intervention consists in showing that any defense of classic legalism overlooks the inevitable existence, within a system of rights, of legal black and grey holes that always allow for negotiations with the rule of law. Against Vermeule, I claim that these loopholes are not created by the judicial discretion inscribed in administrative law, but provoked by the naked formality of laws, i.e., by the very form of law. Inspired by Jacques Derrida’s description of the textual structure of our relation to law and Agamben’s identifying the state of exception as the paradigm of government, I argue that spectacular exceptions granted to the executive when emergencies transpire should not distract us from the micro-exceptions that are produced every time the meaning of a certain law is decided upon. In other words, the executive’s reactions to national crises should not prevent us from acknowledging that, for certain segments of the population, freedom is normally, and strategically, negated. After highlighting the structural affinities between Derrida and Agamben’s topologies of the exception, I will show why, according to Agamben, deconstruction’s eternal and tactical negotiation with a law recognized to always be in force without any fixed meaning is insufficient. In order to improve our position in the struggle against an emergency that has always been the rule, the task before us is the creation of truly extra-juridical spaces that might function as real exceptions to sovereign power.
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"This article argues that the terms of identity claimed by and ascribed to Africans and their descendants in the Americas during the era of the trans-Atlantic slave trade functioned less as claims of provenance than as complicated, shifting and highly contested languages of political logic. Focusing on the ‘Kromanti’ identity associated with all major acts of resistance and maroonage in the eighteenth-century British- and Dutch-
colonized Caribbean, this article connects a strategy developed by the Asante state for coping with a particular moment of beheading of the body politic in 1717 to oath-taking strategies employed by maroons of diverse origins to reconstitute viable communities. Examining the ways in which political claims were made through a language of Obeah, or social health and healing, this article argues that ritual practices comprised the discursive field of political action for eighteenth-century Africans and their descendants in Jamaica and beyond."

In the wake of the postmodernist challenge to the humanist values of the Enlightenment and, more effectively perhaps, due to the extraordinary advances in computer technology and biomedical engineering, the category of the human and its analogues – humanism, humanity, humane – are undergoing profound transformations. These changes raise the greatest hopes and deepest fears within contemporary human beings with regard to their individual identity as well as with regard to the future of the human species. 
With the growing intersections between human, animal and technology, there are no longer any clear answers - if ever there were - to questions such as what it means to be 'human' and where 'humanness' or 'human nature' is to be found. Instead, 'we' witness the death of the liberal-humanist subject as a coherent and autonomous being and the concomitant artificial birth of what has been referred to as 'the posthuman' or 'cyborg', an amalgam of various organic and non-organic components, an entity whose boundaries undergo continuous (de)construction and reconstruction. 
The project focuses on the category of the post/human as constructed primarily in contemporary science fiction written in English but also as 'imagineered' in theoretical and philosophical writings as well as in (popular) scientific texts on reproduction in a wide sense. The research starts from the premise that the popular genre of science fiction is an important cultural resource for dealing with those changes and, in turn, shapes developments in information and biomedical technology in crucial ways. Because of my contention that the hitherto separate spheres of science fiction, science and social reality are collapsing and in order to emphasise the narrative nature of scientific writings, I consider all the selected types of text as 'science/fiction' to be subjected to a careful narratological analysis which is theoretically and methodologically informed by gender studies, bioethics, deconstruction and the cultural studies of technoscience. 
My main research interests lie in the investigation of how human beings are 'built' textually and how 'human' is differentiated from other organic and non-organic entities. Special emphasis is given to the relationship between different 'imagineerings' of the post/human and prevailing structures of inequality and discrimination: what/who does the term 'human' include or exclude, and in whose advantage or disadvantage are such inclusions or exclusions?

"The Topological Media Lab, is an atelier and academic research center for the experimental study of gestural, performative, and embodying expression in responsive media environments.    Established in Atlanta USA in 2001 and transplanted to Montreal Canada in 2005, the atelier amalgamates the collective practices of an art atelier, a theatre company, and an engineering research lab.  Over the past 6 years, a delicate, ungainly ecology of practices has flourished that may resemble the cosmopolitical conversation of which Isabelle Stengers has written. Its experiments constitute stammering empirical, ethico-aesthetic ventures into questions such as the spectra of intentional and accidental, or collective and solo corporeal movement, and the relation between movement and body-memory or room-memory. One fundamental stream of inquiry that this atelier has sustained over the decade is a topological, material, poetic, humane but non-anthropocentric approach to the question of novelty.  I consider some working ethos constituted in the institutional economics of "recherche-création".
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"El fantasma comporta un estatuto dual al comienzo del siglo XXI: una evanescencia fascinante que, sin embargo, mantiene su capacidad perturbadora, aun cuando sólo haga uso de ella en ocasiones especiales. Me atrevo a sugerir que esa dualidad del fantasma contemporáneo está directamente relacionada con dos fenómenos. En primer lugar, la consagración a finales del siglo XVIII de la razón moderna a expensas de otros saberes, otras formas de conocer y otras posibles relaciones del saber con el poder. A partir de ese momento, se hace posible señalar ciertos saberes como producto de la superstición, el mito, la ignorancia; todos, la contracara oscura de la razón luminosa. No en vano durante una buena parte del siglo XVIII la razón victoriosa, optimista, se cree capaz de dominar los más íntimos secretos de la naturaleza y de expulsar los más terribles fantasmas de la historia.
En segundo lugar, aparece, sin embargo, la necesidad de reubicar las fuerzas inquietantes que acompañaban esos otros saberes, de encontrarles otros espacios menos amenazadores, de domesticarlos. Nacen los teatros de sombras, las cajas fantasmagóricas y otros espectáculos similares. El belga Etienne Gaspard Robert combinaba “experimentos ópticos […] y efectos de teatro para seducir a un público impresionable […] [y generar] un efecto macabro, terrorífico y fascinante a la vez” (en Roca, J. (c) 2007). Fantasmagoría que cada vez pierde más de lo terrible y gana en espectáculo, en muchos casos difiriendo su potencial inquietante. No obstante, como señalan Slavoj Zizek y Jacques Derrida, los desarrollos modernos en tecnologías y telecomunicaciones en vez de disminuir el ámbito de los fantasmas aumentan su poder y su capacidad de asediarnos. Tal vez por eso encuentran un hogar propicio en el cine y —quizá en los momentos más lúcidos, precisamente cuando no pierde su dimensión terrorífica— también en el arte y la literatura. No se explica de otro modo el que algún perturbado — y no lo digo en el sentido patológico, aunque también admite esa acepción— se acercara a los espejos de Óscar Muñoz, para borrar con sus manos los rostros crispados que llegan del más allá. Esto no es un acto ingenuo ni gratuito; al contrario, en un país donde la figura del ‘desaparecido’ constituye una devastadora inscripción rutinaria de lo espectral en lo social, el borrón sólo puede entenderse como una salida desesperada. "

The abundance of the references to the past in the present causes some theoretical problems. In other words, usually analysing different manifestations of the past in e.g. computers games, Hollywood films and so on to much attention is paid only on content (what is presented). Formal aspects of each film, computer game and so on are omitted. I want to explore this problem a little bit in this short text by taking as an example a historical re-enactment movement of the Viking Age.