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.