Monsters in cyberspace cyberphobia and cultural panic in the information age

This paper explores popular attitudes toward the Internet (and computer-mediated communication more generally) by mapping some of the more threatening, transgressive and 'monstrous' images associated with cyberspace. An account of risk consciousness is developed in three parts: (1) comparisons with earlier information technologies reveals similarities and differences with regard to public attitudes toward cyberspace and its risks; (2) the development of a model of contemporary teratological space derived from images of boundary-dissolving threats, intrusive alterities and existential ambivalences created by the erosion of binary distinctions and hierarchies; and (3) possible historical and sociological explanations of cyberpanic drawing on recent theorizations of globalization (capitalism/information society theory, risk society theory, reflexive modernization theory, and alterity theory).     

Richmond Barthé: Black Homoeroticism and the Raptures of the Hermaphroditic Body

ABSTRACT

African American sculptor Richmond Barthé (1901–1989) conjoined issues of sexuality and race in works that foreground the aesthetic worth of Black bodies. While exposing Western figuration practices that exclude Black people from artistic visibility, Barthé also targeted the African American distaste for the explicit treatment of nudity. Barthé’s androgynous sculptures have by now become the trademark of his art, but Barthésian scholarship still neglects the significance of a small group of statues, which de-emphasize the aura of same-sex desire, in order to explore the intricacies of corporeal ambisexuality. In view of his homoerotic depictions and the presence of the hermaphrodite at the core of his disruption of the sexual dichotomy, the frequent assumption that Barthé remained “closeted all his life” does not stand critical scrutiny. Instead of taking refuge in the sexual closet, Barthé debunked the man/woman binary as the foremost epistemic construct that prompts the societal need for sexual self-misrepresentations.     

The myth of everyday life: Toward a heterology of the ordinary

The aim of this paper is to contribute to the rethinking of everyday life as a central, if highly diverse and problematic, theme of modern philosophy and social theory. The focus of the essay concerns the uncertain ontological status of ‘the everyday’ within the human sciences. An initial exploration of the ambiguity of the expression ‘everyday life’ points to a more consequential type of undecidability once it is fully recognized how the ideology of ‘everyday life’ functions to suppress the materiality, contingency, and historicity of human experience. This can be seen in the contrast between powerful atemporal conceptions of everyday life and more critical understandings of the lifeworld framed in temporal categories. The distinction between everyday life and lifeworld proves useful as a marker for two very different approaches to the ordinary. The paper claims that the ordinary has been systematically denigrated in the very act of being theorized as ‘everyday life’. A tradition of binary and dichotomous theorizing is uncovered as one of the fundamental sources of the myth of an ahistorical, unmediated everyday life. After mapping a range of more reflexive perspectives toward the investigation of ordinary life, the paper concludes on a positive and reconstructive note by suggesting that any attempt to go beyond the dualisms and antinomies of contemporary theory must first abandon this mythology to reveal the histor(icit)y and alterity of lifeworlds in their rich natural, incarnate, political, and reflexive imbrications.     

Ethical encounters: Spivak,Alexander and Kincaid

This essay seeks to engage with the idea of the possibility of meaningful ethical encounters with another. It does not attempt to engage with the broader discourse of ethics. Its purpose is simply to read a few of Gayatri Spivak’s discussions about ethics and alterity and offer a reading of three postcolonial texts in the context of that reading.     

The roads of immanence: infrastructural change in southern Chile

In southern Chile, the building of roads has triggered profound socio-material transformation in indigenous worlds. In this article, we attempt to comprehend and conceptualize the capacities of roads to reconstitute radically a relationally constituted world, a world that is therefore in itself contingent. We suggest that the material alteration of indigenous worlds produce uncertain results, including possibly its own destruction. The arguments raised in this article indicate that the analytical and political problem of ontological self-determination can be advanced once reshaped in infrastructural terms.     

Keeping open by re‐imagining laughter and fear

Speaking to the debate on the nature of critique, this article is about the struggle to produce an account when listening to and retelling stories. It begins with the disconcertment over listening to a coherent story that emerges in interviews about the development of performance indicators for Dutch hospital care. The indicators are presented as solutions to the problem of unruliness in the healthcare world. Drawing on Helen Verran's work on generative critique I slow down the ‘problem‐solution‐found’ plot. Instead of contrasting the apparently coherent stories with the complexities of an ‘underlying’ practice of healthcare, I hold on to my initial disconcertment so that ‘fleetingly subtle’ interruptions become entry points for generative critique. Taking Eduardo Viveiros de Castro's understanding of the relation that fear and laughter have to alterity, I show how fear and laughter permit generative critique within seemingly coherent stories. In the case of indicator development, the interviewees ‘laugh away’ what they consider alter from quality and safety in healthcare: having no control over what is going on, polyglotism instead of a common language, and inaction as opposed to taking one's time. Paying attention to disconcerting interruptions generates sensitivity and questions rather than yet another set of (critical) problem‐solution‐found answers. How can ridiculed (laughed away) subjectivity be acknowledged as important entry points for including alterity in supervision? And how to position the acknowledgement, not as an antidote, but as a way of rendering the fear of alterity generative? Nurturing sensitivities is crucial for keeping open, which means resisting both the sticky tendency of normalizing accounts and the fallacy of misplaced concreteness. I conclude that keeping open by re‐imagining critique resonates with the creativity of collective life in actual times and places. Thereby it offers a promising potential for doing worlds differently.     

Work(ing) out

The recent marketing of new genetic tests for popular genealogy is one significant interface between the science of new genetics and public culture in the West. These new commodities offer to situate individuals within global patterns of human genetic diversity, locate genetic origins and sort out true biological relatedness from practised kinship. Taking two cases of recent attempts to popularize genetic tests in popular genealogy, this paper considers how ideas of gender, reproduction, nation, ‘race’ and relatedness are being shaped by and deployed within their discourses of genetic kinship. In these efforts to geneticize genealogy, the idiom of kinship and the gendering of narratives of reproduction and descent are used to make these tests meaningful and to distance them from ideas of ‘race’ and ethnicity. Discourses of family relatedness provide a grammar for translating the complexities of new genetics into public culture. At the same time, geneticized genealogy produces new versions of genetic kinship, in the form of Y-chromosome genetic brotherhood, Mitochondrial DNA clan membership and global genetic kinship. Yet, notions of genetic kinship also provide cultural resources for the making of personal and collective identities in a myriad of ways and with diverse implications for the politics of ‘race’ and national belonging.     

The Politics of Temporality: An Analysis of Leftist Youth Politics and Generational Contention

Based on focus groups and in-depth interviews with young leftist political party activists in Uruguay, this article analyzes the dilemmas faced by young people as they use images from the past to interpret and orient their situation in the present and their aspirations for the future. They are the heirs to a highly romantic image of what it means to be a political activist on the Left; in this sense, the shadow of the radical Sixties and the omnipresent image of armed struggle and military dictatorship define them. But the reality of politics in contemporary democratic Uruguay is that of pressing for incremental and routine social reform inside a ‘Broad Front’ where ideological definitions for the future have become hazy. This paper explores the various ways that young Uruguayan Leftists work to reconcile these different senses of time and how these mediate their relationships with ‘significant generational others’. In so doing, I place the concept of time, of the perceived and socially constructed sense of acting in the current of a particular historical time, at the center of analysis.     

列维纳斯他异性伦理中美学的位置

列维纳斯致力于他者,认为他者之他异性是绝对的。这一伦理筹划势必影响其美学论述。美善之争弥久,以伦理形而上学为第一哲学的列维纳斯关于美学的论述回应应答其伦理筹划。美学应当在列维纳斯的伦理中占有根本性位置。     

COSMOPOLITAN CODIFICATIONS: ELITES,EXPATRIATES, AND DIFFERENCE IN KATHMANDU,NEPAL

Globalization has been the site of many renegotiations of identity, both at the supra- and subnational levels. Yet, there is an interstitial zone of communication between the global and the local in which distinct processes of boundary-making and translation take place. This essay examines mediators of internationalization, elite nationals and expatriate employees, as they negotiate the form that difference can take in the global marketplace. The contentious politics of Nepalese nationalism as well as South Asian colonial delineations of difference provide precedents for the current social practices of a cosmopolitan population that establishes a hierarchy of difference while also excusing themselves from demarcation and restricting the purview of the concept of culture. The result is a zone made safe for the operation of neoliberal business (a practice seen to be without history or geography) with alterity only allowed in narrowly commodifiable settings.