POSTMODERN CULTURE

Jennifer Wenzel (bio)Columbia University “The mouth of this river forms the best harbour I have yet seen; being wide, deep and free from shoals, with a fine situation for a town and fortifications where ships may lie close along the shore, the land high, with a good air and fine streams of water”: so observed […]

A Conversation with Brent Ryan Bellamy, Stephanie LeMenager, and Imre Szeman Brent Ryan Bellamy (bio), Stephanie LeMenager (bio), and Imre Szeman (bio)University of Alberta “The world itself writes oil, you and I write it.” —Stephanie LeMenager, Living Oil I sat down with Stephanie LeMenager and Imre Szeman to talk about “Resource Aesthetics,” the topic of […]

Jonathan Beller (bio)Pratt Institute Abstract The selfie and fractal celebrity have become the obverse of what Sylvia Federici calls the system of global apartheid. These results of a financialized attention economy index a shift in the character of both labor and the commodity form towards screen mediated code-work and networked valorization. We can thus rewrite […]

Jeff M. Diamanti (bio)McGill University Abstract This essay isolates the relationships between energy deepening, economic elasticity, and social plasticity as the key matrix driving a petroeconomy otherwise imagined as free from material constraints, and claims that energy deepening establishes itself in spatial forms, or the physical setting, of a fully saturated fossil fuel society. By […]

Carolyn Elerding (bio)The Ohio State University Abstract This essay interprets digital petroculture’s aesthetic of invisibility in two ways. First, the ubiquitous intangibility of software simulation in everyday life is framed in terms of the Marxist concept of “realization” in circulation. Second, the “cloud’s” remote storage and processing of data is understood as a system of […]

Amanda Boetzkes (bio)University of Guelph Abstract This essay argues that efforts to recuperate the ecological damage of industrial waste as a profitable resource obscure the broader procedures by which human bodies, substances, energies, and desires are also yielded as resources in an economic model of indefinite expansion. The “cradle-to-cradle” proposition for a zero-waste society thus […]

Brent Ryan Bellamy (bio), Michael O’Driscoll (bio), and Mark Simpson (bio)University of Alberta On May 10, 2016, as the May Day wildfires ravaged the city and environs of Fort McMurray, Alberta, and neighbouring municipalities swelled with the 90,000 residents forced to flee their homes, Postmedia News (Canada’s go-to media source for neo-liberal spin) ventured to […]

Nicole Shukin (bio)University of Victoria Abstract After Fukushima, a tiny handful of “refuseniks” defied the government’s orders to evacuate a twenty-kilometer zone around the damaged reactors in the region. Rather than relocating to temporary shelters, several refuseniks remained in the zone to care for livestock who had been abandoned, and whose market value had been […]

ELLIE ANDERSON is Visiting Assistant Professor of Philosophy at Muhlenberg College. She is co-author of “Feminist Perspectives on the Self” in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy and has previously published on Simone de Beauvoir in the Journal of Speculative Philosophy. BRENT RYAN BELLAMY is a Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council Postdoctoral Fellow at Memorial […]

Timothy Bewes is Professor of English at Brown University. He is the author of Cynicism and Postmodernity (1997), Reification, or The Anxiety of Late Capitalism (2002), and The Event of Postcolonial Shame (2011). He has co-edited several collections of essays, including Georg Lukács: The Fundamental Dissonance of Existence (Continuum, 2011), and a special issue of […]

Emilio Sauri (bio)University of Massachusetts Boston A review of Rey Chow, Entanglements, or Transmedial Thinking about Capture. Durham: Duke UP, 2012. In the introduction to Entanglements, or Transmedial Thinking about Capture, Rey Chow draws our attention to two senses of the word “entanglement.” While the “most obvious sense” is that of a “relativization” or blurring […]

Cristin Ellis (bio)The University of Mississippi A review of Ian Bogost, Alien Phenomenology, or What It’s Like to Be a Thing. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 2012. It is reported that, while out on a stroll with friends one day, the Transcendentalist Elizabeth Peabody walked into a tree limb. Picking herself up, she explained to […]

Jeff Menne (bio)Oklahoma State University A review of Johannes Von Moltke and Kristy Rawson, editors, Siegfried Kracauer’s American Writings, Berkeley: U of California P, 2012. Nothing has marked the maturity of cinema studies as much as its reckoning with Siegfried Kracauer’s writings. The discipline’s nominal adjustment, from “cinema studies” to “cinema and media studies,” signals […]

Leigh Claire La Berge (bio)City University of New York Dehlia Hannah (bio)Arizona State University Abstract This article considers the “debt visualizations” of social practice artist Cassie Thornton. Thorton’s works use a combination of photography, performance art, sculpture, non-fiction narrative, text, and hypertext to explore the cost and consequence of the accumulation of student loans. The […]

Krista Geneviève Lynes (bio)Concordia University Abstract This essay examines the role played by political and activist media, as well as media infrastructures and platforms, in creating solidarity or continuity between the Arab Spring, the Occupy Movement, Indignados and the ‘Printemps Erable,’ among others. It critiques the overvaluation of social media in organizing protests and creating […]

Michael D’Arcy (bio)St. Francis Xavier University Abstract This essay argues that Theodor Adorno’s reflections on the novel form respond to a problem that is focused in his commentaries on the cinema: how to develop forms of aesthetic rationality at a historical moment in which medium-specific aesthetic reflection may be obsolete. Adorno’s commentaries on novelistic and […]

Nicholas Brown (bio)University of Chicago at Illinois Abstract Beginning from an analysis of the anomalous position of music within Hegel’s system of aesthetics — a position that brings forth the peculiar quality of music as a medium — this essay asks how we are to conceive of musical meaning in an era when music’s relation […]

Timothy Bewes (bio)Brown University Abstract This essay discusses the central historical proposition of Gilles Deleuze’s cinema books, the “sensorimotor break” that separates the classical cinema of the movement-image from the modern cinema of the time-image. That proposition is more or less in line with dominant accounts of the politics of periodization in twentieth-century aesthetics. Jacques […]