Mediating affect in John Pilger’s Utopia: ‘the good life’ as a structure of whiteness

ABSTRACT

This article proposes that whiteness should be thought of as an affective structure, theorizing whiteness in terms of optimism, possessive subjectivity and multiculturalism. The article shows how the optimism of ‘the good life’ [Berlant, L., 2011. Cruel optimism. Durham, NC: Duke University Press] is linked structurally to whiteness in the construction of the Australian nation-state. In this context, Utopia [2013. Film. Directed by John Pilger. Australia: Antidote Films] specifically identifies whiteness as an affective structure. The article develops by unpacking this claim. First, I consider how the affective structure of the Australian nation-state is encountered through the mutual mediation of ‘media’ and ‘place’. I focus on the example of the film's journey to Rottnest Island – formerly an island prison, now the destination of holiday makers – to highlight how the optimism of arrival links whiteness to the present. Second, I develop an analysis of the affective surfaces of whiteness by analyzing the film's encounter with ‘White Man faciality’ [Deleuze, G. and Guattari, F., 1987. A thousand plateaus: capitalism and schizophrenia. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press] and Indigenous ‘slow death’ [Berlant, L., 2011. Cruel optimism. Durham, NC: Duke University Press]. Through producing a series of faces, Utopia portrays whiteness as a deflective surface that propagates the ‘onto-pathology’ of white Australia [Nicolacopoulos, T. and Vassilacopoulos, G., 2014. Indigenous sovereignty and the being of the occupier: manifesto for a white Australian philosophy of origins. Melbourne: Re.press]. Utopia also portrays whiteness as an absorptive surface in which Aboriginal self-possession – including, in the form of life – disappears. The film emphasizes the loss of Aboriginal life through illness and suicide linked to incarceration, overcrowding and state-induced impoverishment. The article concludes by locating media (including Utopia) within the tension between absorption and deflection as a tension between the different spatial actions of the affective relations that mediate whiteness.     

Social media,temporality, and the legitimacy of protest

ABSTRACT

This article examines how the rise of social media affects the temporal relations of protest communication. Following a relational approach, it traces how regimes of temporality are constructed and transformed through the entanglement between media infrastructures, institutions, and practices. These regimes involve particular ‘speeds’ -the rate at which media content is renewed – as well as ‘temporal orientations’ towards present, past, and future. The article questions how specific temporal regimes enable or complicate protestors’ efforts to gain public legitimacy. A large body of research suggests that it is difficult to gain such legitimacy in the mainstream news cycle, in which protest is primarily covered from an ‘episodic’ perspective, ignoring larger protest issues. The present analysis suggests that despite the participatory affordances of social media, it has not become any easier to generate sustained public attention for structural protest issues. Drawing examples from three case studies, it demonstrates that the dominant mode of social media protest communication reproduces and reinforces the episodic focus of the mainstream news. While other temporal perspectives on protest are certainly developed in the alternative and mainstream news, as well as in activist social media communication, these do not fundamentally challenge the prevailing temporal orientation towards the present, towards the event.     

Digital media and cultural institutions in Russia: online magazines as aggregates of cultural services

ABSTRACT

Focusing on online magazines, this article sheds light on Russian cultural institutions from the perspective of digital media. My analysis concentrates on urban lifestyle magazines, a sub-category of consumer magazines and a media genre, which emerged in Russia in the glossy magazine format and is now experiencing a powerful ‘second rising’ on the internet. My article asks how the adaptation to the digital communication environment by lifestyle publications re-defines the very concept of a magazine and reorganizes the institutional ties between media and cultural industries. This focus enables me to analyse lifestyle magazines as a dynamic field of interaction in which cultural meanings are produced and negotiated. Based on new media studies, I see the cultural transcoding (Manovich 2002) of the networked and automatized information transmission into the magazines’ content as being a significant factor in the development of contemporary culture and media. Ultimately, my article introduces an attempt to analyse new media titles combining qualitative media analysis with the developing theory of ‘algorithmic culture’ (Striphas 2015). My argumentation is based on two case publications: Afisha, established in 1999 as a weekly glossy magazine introducing all cultural events in Moscow, and Inde, a digital-born regional lifestyle magazine focusing on urban culture in the Republic of Tatarstan. Urban lifestyle magazines are important for the institutional organization of Russian culture, as they direct their readers’ attention to a broad selection of arts, products and events; strengthen the link between consumers and cultural entrepreneurs and build on a long tradition of print journalism, thereby transmitting the values of reading and literacy to a popular public. Moreover, my analysis shows that, through their multi-platform publication strategy, online magazines (re)organize as aggregates of digital resources helping to manage cultural decision-making in a consumerist setting.     

Disinformation,performed: self-presentation of a Russian IRA account on Twitter

ABSTRACT

How disinformation campaigns operate and how they fit into the broader social communication environment – which has been described as a ‘disinformation order’ [Bennett & Livingston, (2018). The disinformation order: Disruptive communication and the decline of democratic institutions. European Journal of Communication, 33(2), 122–139] – represent critical, ongoing questions for political communication. We offer a thorough analysis of a highly successful disinformation account run by Russia’s Internet Research Agency: the so-called ‘Jenna Abrams’ account. We analyze Abrams’ tweets and other content such as blogposts with qualitative discourse analysis, assisted by quantitative content analysis and metadata analysis. This yields an in-depth understanding of how the IRA team behind the Abrams account presented this persona across multiple platforms and over time. Especially, we describe the techniques used to perform personal authenticity and cultural competence. The performance of personal authenticity was central to her persona building as a likeable American woman, whereas the performance of cultural competence enabled her to infiltrate American conservative communities with resonant messages. Implications for understanding disinformation processes, and how some aspects of the hybrid media system are especially vulnerable to hijacking by bad actors are discussed.     

Trending Trousers: Debating Kastom,Clothing and Gender in the Vanuatu Mediascape

This paper presents an ethnography of contemporary media practices in Vanuatu, with a particular focus on media narratives and debates around gender equality and women's clothing, exploring how the discourses of kastom, Christianity and ‘modernity’ are being employed and communicated across various media platforms. The use of community media to promote awareness of gender equality through participatory and entertaining content, and the use of mainstream media to communicate a narrative that reinforces existing gendered power structures are each explored. In addition, social media platforms are identified as an emerging communication tool through which users can straddle the line between producers and consumers of media content and narratives, and engage in frank debate around the issue of gender equality.     

Playing with materiality: an agential-realist reading of SethBling's Super Mario World code-injection

ABSTRACT

This article takes inspiration from Youtuber and software developer ‘SethBling’ and his 2016 ‘code-injection’ (Bling, 2016), in which, using only a standard Super Nintendo Entertainment System controller and in-depth knowledge of the console, he ‘injected’ and executed the code of popular mobile game Flappy Bird (Nguyen, 2013) into a running instance of Super Mario World (Miyamoto, 1990), effectively transforming one game into another through play. Drawing from this I propose a performative understanding of videogames (and software in general) to reinvigorate discussions of software's materiality. Though it is possible to contrast Wendy Chun's (2008a) suggestion that one can view software as ‘vaporous’ against Friedrich Kittler's (1995) assertion that ‘there is no software’, I propose a more holistic approach. Academics and users alike should attempt to see software as living a double-life: as simultaneously solid as it is (metaphorically) gaseous. It then becomes possible to embrace software(s) as performative examples of the entangled ‘phenomena’, suggested by Barad (2007), that produce everyday reality through quantum activity. I explore SethBling's code-injection suggesting that actions clearly reveal software's double existence as both tangible ‘thing’, locatable on magnetic memory, and as a vaporous non-entity. Accepting these propositions together, software can be understood as continuously re-emerging through shared activities. Following Barad, I conclude that this quality is not unique to software, but software – and videogames above all – are a useful tool for understanding a vision of reality that favours activity over materiality as the basis of our existence.     

Making Sense of Social Change: Observing Collective Action in Networked Cultures

This article presents an overview of rising trends in the study of networked interactions conveyed by social media technologies and the emergence of new meanings associated with social change. In recent years, a healthy amount of studies has focused on ICT uses within collective action, considering social media tools to have become crucial components of many transnational movements and social change projects. Crossing boundaries between social movements theories, political science, and communication studies, literature suggests that ‘online activism’ and increasingly networked interactions may have transformed the meanings and definitions associated with ‘collective action’ and ‘social change’. To make sense of these meanings, we identify three approaches used by scholars, which focus on (i) the actual networking of actors, (ii) the diffusion of new repertoires and frames through networks, and (iii) making sense of new meanings conveyed within networked cultures. We conclude by suggesting the need for more comprehensive research to better observe and make sense of how's actors define collective action and how they use social media tools when striving to convey social change.     

‘Can you get more American than Native American?’: drag and settler colonialism in RuPaul’s Drag Race

ABSTRACT

Many scholars argue for an epistemological shift from romanticizing marginalized politics and praxis to understanding them within a spectrum of resisting and reproducing normative and dominant power structures. Scholarship on drag demonstrates that drag as a performative practice that seeks to challenge gender and sexual normativities is often not beyond the logics of hegemony and normativity. Drawing on these critiques, this paper contends that drag as an art form can reproduce the racial and colonial logics of the settler state. The paper traces the workings of settler colonialism that shape drag creativity through the TV show RuPaul’s Drag Race. To do so, I theorize how Raja, the winner of season 3, performed, imitated, and appropriated indigeneity. I argue that Raja’s act as the ‘Native,’ after Lumbee drag queen Stacy Layne Matthews’s elimination from the show, demonstrates how queer people of colour can become complicit in settler colonial processes. The paper is a call to rethink drag creativity beyond assumed transgressive aesthetics, and to critically engage with racial and settler colonial formations.     

From state-bound subjects to global subjects: notes toward an Althusserian theory of globalized subjectivity

ABSTRACT

This article puts Louis Althusser's conception of subjective production via ideological interpellation in dialogue with contemporary Global theories – especially those of Saskia Sassen and Manfred Steger. It does this to offer a more robust framework for understanding subjective production that captures subjective transformations in the age of globalization. The article looks at how Sassen's work captures transformations of social and institutional structures in globalization and then looks at Steger's account of subjective transformations. It then turns to the ways in which Althusser's understanding of the intertwining of subjectivity with institutions and social practices can help bridge the gap between Sassen and Steger and can also help us understand the rise of what I call ‘global subjects’ and a ‘global subjectivity’ that can be in conflict with more traditional ‘state-bound’ subjects. I use the example of globalized regimes of care work in order to help make sense of these distinctions.     

Mothers behaving badly: chaotic hedonism and the crisis of neoliberal social reproduction

ABSTRACT

This article focuses on the significance of the plethora of representations of mothers ‘behaving badly’ in contemporary anglophone media texts, including the films Bad Moms, Fun Mom Dinner and Bad Mom’s Christmas, the book and online cartoons Hurrah for Gin and the recent TV comedy dramas Motherland, The Let Down and Catastrophe. All these media texts include representations of, first, mothers in the midst of highly chaotic everyday spaces where any smooth routine of domesticity is conspicuous by its absence; and second, mothers behaving hedonistically, usually through drinking and partying, behaviour that is more conventionally associated with men or women without children. After identifying the social type of the mother behaving badly (MBB), the article locates and analyses it in relation to several different social and cultural contexts. These contexts are: a neoliberal crisis in social reproduction marked by inequality and overwork; the continual if contested role of women as ‘foundation parents’; and the negotiation of longer-term discourses of female hedonism. The title gestures towards a popular British sitcom of the 1990s, Men Behaving Badly, which popularized the idea of the ‘new lad’; and this article suggests that the new lad’s counterpart, the ladette, is mutating into the mother behaving badly, or the ‘lad mom’. Asking what work this figure does now, in a later neoliberal context, it argues that the mother behaving badly is simultaneously indicative of a widening and liberating range of maternal subject positions and symptomatic of a profound contemporary crisis in social reproduction. By focusing on the classed and racialised dynamics of the MBB – by examining who exactly is permitted to be hedonistic, and how – and by considering the MBB’s limited and partial imagining of progressive social change, the article concludes by emphasizing the urgency of creating more connections between such discourses and ‘parents behaving politically’.     

Shame and the city – ‘looting’, emotions and social structure

The sociology of violence is an emerging field but one in which there remains a tension between structural explanations and phenomenological‐situational ones that focus on the micro conditions of violence. This article proposes an analytical framework for connecting these levels through a critical appropriation of Scheff's theory of the shame‐rage cycle. It argues that while shame is a significant condition for violent action, Scheff does not have a theory of violence in itself but treats the connections between shame‐rage and violence as largely self‐evident. While emotions such as shame have agental properties, as Scheff and others argue, these need to be situated within structural and cultural conditions that are likely to evoke shame. Moreover, to develop Scheff's approach further, violence needs to be understood as being communicative and invoking normative justifications, which mediate the effects of shame‐rage. This analysis is developed with reference to recent instances of collective disorder, especially the English riots in August 2011, which is based on published research and media accounts from participants. The acquisition of consumer goods through ‘looting’ was public performance in spaces where a ‘moral holiday’ permitted a brief revaluation of the social order. Through this example the article shows how an underlying configuration of inequality, exclusion and shame coalesced into events in which the violence was a form of performative communication. This articulated ‘ugly feelings’ that invoked normative justification for participation, at least at the time of the disturbances. The discussion provides an integrated account of structural‐emotional conditions for violence combined with the dynamics of situated actions within particular spaces. It aims to do two things – to provide a framework for analysing the structural and affective bases for violence and to offer a nuanced understanding of ‘violence’ with reference to public disorder.     

Deconstructing organizational communication for (productive) dissensus

Abstract

The metanarrative of ‘crisis’ is now often present in communication constructing an organization’s identity and culture. Processes by which certain interpretations of circumstances predominate over others have been theorized by Gramsci’s notion of hegemony, enriching communication research. Here, I develop an argument for an approach based not on normative and interpretive discourses, but instead on those that are critical and dialogic, an approach urgently necessary in researching the increasingly complex communicative situations of workplaces. I outline a methodology, an ethnography of a communication site (an Australian organization), which could be piloted to solicit a sample of employees to express their own views towards quotidian organizational communication.     

The future is plastic: refiguring Malabou’s plasticity

This article investigates Catherine Malabou’s claims to have produced some form of beyond of deconstruction with her reworking of the Hegelian concept of ‘plasticity’ (Plastizität). In the light of Malabou’s critique of the unsuitability of the Derridean non-concept of ‘text’ as metaphor for neuronal functioning in her Plasticité, I turn this question back on Malabou’s own work; that is to say, this article will examine what the implications of the metaphorics of plasticity are for Malabou’s own oeuvre and its relationship with neuroscience and her critique of connexionist capitalism. To this end, this article is particularly interested in the political claims made for plasticity and how some of the ‘everyday’ meanings of plasticity, and Malabou’s decision not to incorporate them into her conceptual working through, might threaten this enterprise.     

What is platform governance?

ABSTRACT

Following a host of high-profile scandals, the political influence of platform companies (the global corporations that that operate online ‘platforms’ such as Facebook, WhatsApp, YouTube, and many other online services) is slowly being re-evaluated. Amidst growing calls to regulate these companies and make them more democratically accountable, and a host of policy interventions that are actively being pursued in Europe and beyond, a better understanding of how platform practices, policies, and affordances (in effect, how platforms govern) interact with the external political forces trying to shape those practices and policies is needed. Building on digital media and communication scholarship as well as governance literature from political science and international relations, the aim of this article is to map an interdisciplinary research agenda for platform governance, a concept intended to capture the layers of governance relationships structuring interactions between key parties in today's platform society, including platform companies, users, advertisers, governments, and other political actors.     

Caring by Silence: How (Un)documented Brazilian Migrants Enact Silence as a Care Practice for Aging Parents

ABSTRACT

While existing work on transnational aging and care has largely focused on the substance of transnational communication and what is being said, this article examines what is being ‘silenced’ during transnational exchange. I argue that to better understand aging and intergenerational caregiving we need to pay careful attention to what is not being said during transnational contacts, suggesting that silence and ‘communication voids’ are often formulated and enacted as a care practice. Drawing on ethnographic research with Brazilian migrants in the United States whose aging parents live in Brazil, I illustrate how migrants curate their lives abroad and sieve their lived experiences as an act of care for their aging parents back home. In so doing, I reveal the significance of faith as a coping strategy in the process of silencing and concealing emotions and as a means to fight loneliness, cope with adversity, and protect family exchanges.     

Un-imagining the local/future: cinematic engagement with the absence of hope

ABSTRACT

With reference to the 2014 Umbrella Movement and Hong Kong’s uncertain fate come 2047, I ask how one un-imagines the cultural future of inhabiting the locality. As people take prompts from the present predicament to cope with real possibilities about the future, they realize that a strong embodiment of local consciousness permeates the sociocultural space. I discuss how such engagement takes place through cinematic experience, and examine tactics of the spectator’s critique centring around the erosion of hope at the core of everyday, intellectual and affective imagination. I trace the ways in which postcolonial subjects engage with hope and with the shock of hopelessness in a lived social imaginary. Examining in detail three differently representative recent films, namely, The Midnight After (2014. Dir. Fruit Chan, The Midnight After Film and One Ninety Films), Overheard 3 (2014. Dir. Alex Mak and Felix Chong, Sil-Metropole, Bona Film and Pop Movies) and Ten Years (2015. Dir. K. L. Ng (‘Local Egg’, Boon-deh dan), J. Au (‘Dialect’, Fong-yin), K. Chow (‘Self-Immolator’, Jee-fun jeh), F. P. Wong (‘Season of the End’, Dong sim), and Z. Kwok (‘Extras’, Fau gua), Ten Years Studio), I depict the modes in popular imagination that invoke people’s engagement with the ‘local’, albeit in its affective state. Accordingly, in the context of ‘externalized’ social realities, I identify three interlocking modes of cultural engagement, which I characterize as figurative, performative and prefigurative, respectively. In their ‘future’ imaginary, I look for ordinary people’s ways to face the absurdity of the status quo and the performativity of local struggles with the self.     

Is computer gaming a craft? Prehension,* practice,and puzzle-solving in gaming labour

ABSTRACT

This article applies sociological theories of ‘craft’ to computer gaming practices to conceptualise the relationship between play, games, and labour. Using the example of the game Dota 2, as both a competitive esport title and a complex game based around a shared practice, this article examines the conditions under which the play of a computer game can be considered a ‘craft’. In particular, through the concept of ‘prehension’, we dissect the gameplay activity of Dota 2, identifying similarities with how the hand practices craft labour. We identify these practices as ‘contact’, ‘apprehension’, ‘language acquisition’ and ‘reflection’. We argue that players develop these practices of the hand to make sense of the game’s rules and controls. From this perspective, it is the hand that initiates experiences of craft within computer gameplay, and we offer examples of player creativity and experimentation to evidence its labour. The article concludes with a discussion on the need for future research to examine the quality of gaming labour in the context of esports.