Culture^2

How to do cultural studies in the twenty-first century? This essay collection is not a handbook, encyclopedia, or a »state of the field« compendium. Instead, it is a reflexive exercise in cultural studies, featuring fifteen accessible essays on a selection of critical key works published since 2000. The contributors aim to provide readers with a fresh and engaging look at recent criticism, exploring the interdisciplinary traffic of theories, methods, and ideas within the field of cultural and literary studies. This book shows how the work of Lauren Berlant, Rita Felski, Fred Moten, Anna Tsing, and others can inspire new thinking and theorizing for the twenty-first century

From Artist-As-Leader to Leader-As-Artist

Chapter 1 deals with the artistic critique of the 1960s in the Netherlands. It demonstrates that the processes of Boltanski and Chiapello’s theory of The New Spirit of Capitalism in France also apply to the Netherlands. I’ll describe the influence of the Experimental Group in Holland and the Dutch Beats or the Fiftiers on Dutch countercultural movements and artistic critique. In short, it provides a history of the Magical Centre Amsterdam. In the tradition of Boltanski and Chiapello, Chapter 2 is an exploration of one of neomanagement’s key problems: the tension between the demand for flexibility and the need to be a personality with permanency. By examining the concepts of self-identity, self-fulfilment, and practical wisdom, I argue that Vinkenoog strikes a balance between ‘being flexible’ and ‘being someone’, or adaptability and authenticity. In Chapter 3, I explore the symbolic representation of the homo ludens by Simon Vinkenoog, not only based on the ideas of Huizinga of the homo ludens as the playing man, and the ideas of Constant of the homo ludens as the creative man, but also by using the representation of the homo ludens in contemporary managerial ideologies. Here the emphasis lies on play, playfulness and creativity. I consider the complete turnaround of the perception of the homo ludens, from being viewed as subversive, destructive and a challenge to societal productivity, to being the focal point in an emerging management literature for which the creative man is the central source of management. By looking at poetry as a play-function and Vinkenoog’s creativity of playing games with words, I discuss the key role of the leader in setting the boundaries for playful creativity. For the leader in contemporary organizations, who takes the artist as the model for his/her leadership, creating a happening (like a performance artist) is an important possibility. In Chapter 4, I’ll show that this idea is reflected in DBMC’s company texts. Based on the idea that the word ‘performance artist’ refers to the theatre-metaphor approach to performance in organizations and that the word ‘happenings’ refers to events of the artistic critique, I’ll examine the happening, based on Bakhtin’s concept of Carnival, de Certeau’s concepts of tactics and strategy, and Lyotard’s idea of performativity. By discussing the idea of the happenings of Simon Vinkenoog, I argue for an artistic understanding of the idea of performance and performativity within contemporary organizations. In Chapter 5, I discuss the fixed and rational meanings of the leader in contemporary organizations. I problematize the image of the leader, defined via ‘the art of leadership’. Language that attempts to create an image of the leader as always aesthetically pleasing requires critiquing. The characteristic powers of the artist can bring the leader outside of any rational discourse, and therefore can be seen to champion irrationalism. By introducing the paradoxes of Artaud’s ‘double’ – creativity and its ‘shadow’ of madness – and with the help of Artaud’s idea of theatre, Derrida’s interpretation of Artaud’s subjectile, and the ideas of Simon Vinkenoog, I draw attention to the tensions in this ‘double’ within the idea of contemporary leadership. In the Chapter 6, I combine the former chapters in order to deliver a contribution to an alternative of the image of the leader in contemporary organizations. Where the previous chapters have been concerned with drawing the threads of the analysis together and using them to create a critique of neo-management discourse and its idea of leadership, it is in this chapter that a coherent story emerges. In the final chapter, I’m reflexive upon my findings. With the help of metis or ‘cunning intelligence’, I begin to understand my role within DBMC. But at the same time, metic intelligence reframes the role of Simon Vinkenoog and the leader in contemporary organizations

Virtual Reality Games for Motor Rehabilitation

This paper presents a fuzzy logic based method to track user satisfaction without the need for devices to monitor users physiological conditions. User satisfaction is the key to any product’s acceptance; computer applications and video games provide a unique opportunity to provide a tailored environment for each user to better suit their needs. We have implemented a non-adaptive fuzzy logic model of emotion, based on the emotional component of the Fuzzy Logic Adaptive Model of Emotion (FLAME) proposed by El-Nasr, to estimate player emotion in UnrealTournament 2004. In this paper we describe the implementation of this system and present the results of one of several play tests. Our research contradicts the current literature that suggests physiological measurements are needed. We show that it is possible to use a software only method to estimate user emotion

Critical Programming: Toward a Philosophy of Computing

Beliefs about the relationship between human beings and computing machines and their destinies have alternated from heroic counterparts to conspirators of automated genocide, from apocalyptic extinction events to evolutionary cyborg convergences. Many fear that people are losing key intellectual and social abilities as tasks are offloaded to the everywhere of the built environment, which is developing a mind of its own. If digital technologies have contributed to forming a dumbest generation and ushering in a robotic moment, we all have a stake in addressing this collective intelligence problem. While digital humanities continue to flourish and introduce new uses for computer technologies, the basic modes of philosophical inquiry remain in the grip of print media, and default philosophies of computing prevail, or experimental ones propagate false hopes. I cast this as-is situation as the post-postmodern network dividual cyborg, recognizing that the rational enlightenment of modernism and regressive subjectivity of postmodernism now operate in an empire of extended mind cybernetics combined with techno-capitalist networks forming societies of control. Recent critical theorists identify a justificatory scheme foregrounding participation in projects, valorizing social network linkages over heroic individualism, and commending flexibility and adaptability through life long learning over stable career paths. It seems to reify one possible, contingent configuration of global capitalism as if it was the reflection of a deterministic evolution of commingled technogenesis and synaptogenesis. To counter this trend I offer a theoretical framework to focus on the phenomenology of software and code, joining social critiques with textuality and media studies, the former proposing that theory be done through practice, and the latter seeking to understand their schematism of perceptibility by taking into account engineering techniques like time axis manipulation. The social construction of technology makes additional theoretical contributions dispelling closed world, deterministic historical narratives and requiring voices be given to the engineers and technologists that best know their subject area. This theoretical slate has been recently deployed to produce rich histories of computing, networking, and software, inform the nascent disciplines of software studies and code studies, as well as guide ethnographers of software development communities. I call my syncretism of these approaches the procedural rhetoric of diachrony in synchrony, recognizing that multiple explanatory layers operating in their individual temporal and physical orders of magnitude simultaneously undergird post-postmodern network phenomena. Its touchstone is that the human-machine situation is best contemplated by doing, which as a methodology for digital humanities research I call critical programming. Philosophers of computing explore working code places by designing, coding, and executing complex software projects as an integral part of their intellectual activity, reflecting on how developing theoretical understanding necessitates iterative development of code as it does other texts, and how resolving coding dilemmas may clarify or modify provisional theories as our minds struggle to intuit the alien temporalities of machine processes

Enterprise Culture in Higher Education and the Creative Arts: A Study in the Sociology of Critique

This thesis engages with Luc Boltanski and the sociology of critique to provide an account of the role of enterprise culture within the areas of Higher Education and the Creative Arts. In this regard, it makes a case for the ongoing relevance of Luc Boltanski’s work to sociological scholarship and therefore makes an original contribution in this area. In drawing on the conceptual vocabulary developed through On Justification, The New Spirit of Capitalism and On Critique, I explore the state of Higher Education before considering the way discourses of managerialism and entrepreneurialism are enacted through public policy and University mission statements. In focusing attention on a specific area of Higher Education, I work through the consequences of Boltanski and Ève Chiapello’s The New Spirit of Capitalism in so far as it relates to the artistic critique. Here I explore the proliferation of an enterprise culture within the Creative Arts and how this is transforming the kinds of critique that exist within the art world, how these critiques are directed at art and art education, and how artists are formulating critiques of capitalism which constitutes a bridge between the social and artist critique