CROSSROADS IN CULTURAL STUDIES
Fourth International Conference
June 29 - July 2, 2002, Tampere, Finland
Beneath Representation
Organiser: Tiziana Terranova
Gilbert, Jeremy (University of East
London, United Kingdom) CULTURAL STUDIES BEYOND THE LINGUISTIC TURN
The attempt to theorise 'affect' raises central questions over the
methodological priorities of cultural studies since the 1970s. The 'linguistic
turn' of that decade established a concern with signification as central to
cultural studies which never paid much attention to the critiques of
structuralist notions of signification being made by French philosophers at the
time. More recently, the term 'discourse' has come to be mobilised within
cultural studies in a way which tends to rely on an implicit but almost entirely
under-theorised deconstruction of the distinctions between discursive and
non-discursive, signifier and signified, sign and referent. The implication that
all 'cultural' activity occurs at the level of meaning is at once reinforced and
radically problematised by this deployment of linguistic terminology to describe
the full range of cultural experiences. What routes might we find out of this
impasse, and might they allow us to make unexpected connections between the
ideas of such apparently diverse figures as Deleuze & Guattari, Irigaray,
Austen and Williams? The paper will suggest that following such writers,
'culture' must cease to be equated with 'meaning', while the affective dimension
of culture must be seen as part of a continuum of experience, rather than as
something radically separate from the world of words.
Parisi, Luciana (University of East
London, United Kingdom) THE MICROPOLITICS OF THE DIGITAL BODY
The impact of technologies of information and reproduction on the notion of the
body has been at the core of debates in cybernetic or digital culture. In
particular, the preoccupation with a certain effect of disembodiment and
disentanglement from real matter has characterised the feminist critique of
power relations in digital culture. Such preoccupation rests upon a specific
conceptual tradition that approaches the body and media technology from the
perspective of representation, signification, meaning. The system of
representation establishes a difference in kind and degree between the body and
media technologies. The media and the body are considered as two individuated
and specific systems of communication, one on the side of the natural and the
other on the side of the human knowledge. This paper argues that it is reductive
to analyse the political and cultural impact of media technologies of
reproduction and communication from the sole perspective of representation. It
points out that between media technologies and the body there is not an
individual difference, but a difference of intensity. For example, the
composition between the body and media technologies involves the relationship of
different intensive modes of reproduction and communication of information,
which transforms the forms and the functions of the body and media technologies.
Such process of transformation implies the emergence of a micropolitical
understanding of the relationship or composition between the body and media
technologies. The paper will argue for the importance of micropolitics to map
the relations of power characterising the new alliance between the body, media
technologies and information capitalism.
Gormley, Paul (University of East
London, United Kingdom) CONTEMPORARY HOLLYWOOD AND THE PROBLEM OF MEANING
This paper will engage with the complexity of the relationship between meaning
and the non-signifying elements of cinema. I intend to explore those aspects of
contemporary Hollywood film which are not engaged with by the kind of
semiological analysis which often forms the basis to psychoanalytic and cultural
studies' approaches to film. The paper will discuss this in relation to Gilles
Deleuze's work on cinema, as well as the more recent attempts by writers such as
Barbara Kennedy to approach questions of cinematic affect and sensation in
contemporary film culture. The paper will explore the ways that films like Heat,
Strange Days and The Matrix tend to de-emphasise traditional Hollywood concerns
of narrative centrality, in favour of a cinema which attempts to reanimate
Hollywood cinema as a visual and aural media of sensation. I will suggest that
semiological approaches to these aesthetic shifts are not adequate to
investigate their cultural and political implications. I will also argue that
Hollywood attempts to reanimate the 'cinematic' needs to be thought through in
relation to specific histories of the materiality of cinema if the concept of
affect is to be useful in engaging with a cinema which is full of cultural
meanings and histories. I will suggest that a study of the specificity of
cinematic sensation, as opposed to other forms of affect in the media, is also
necessary in the pursuit of truly rigorous interdisciplinarity within media and
cultural studies
Terranova, Tiziana (University of Essex,
United Kingdom) ON TECHNOLOGICAL AND CULTURAL DETERMINISM: CYBERNETIC
COMMUNICATION AND CULTURAL POLITICS
This paper focus on the 'technological question' within cultural and media
studies. The relationship between media technologies, culture, and society has
assumed new relevance in the context of contemporary transformations in the
technological basis of the media. The paper starts with the original dismissal
of Marshall McLuhan's work under the charge of technological determinism by
Raymond Williams (and Fredric Jameson) and maps the ways in which such
accusations have hindered a more productive approach to media technologies as
material agents of re-composition of the collective body politics. It will then
proceed to an exposition of the anti-representational approach to communication
of cybernetic thinkers such as Norbert Wiener, Gregory Bateson, and J.C.R.
Licklider and explore the usefulness of their understanding of cybernetic
communications to the contemporary cultural politics of digital media.
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