Islamism Revisited: A Lacanian Discourse Critique

The aim of this article is to highlight the relevance of Lacanian psychoanaly-sis for an understanding of Islamism, unfolding its discursive-ideological complexity. Inan attempt to reply to Fethi Benslama’s recent exploration of the function of the fatherin Islam, I suggest that Benslama’s argument about the ‘delusional’ character of Islamismand the link he envisages between the emergence of Islamism and the crisis of ‘tradi-tional’ authoritative systems, should be further investigated so as to avoid potential risksof essentialism. A different reading of Islamism is proposed, which valorizes ‘creative’attempts by Islamist groups to re-organize the social imaginary within the realm of a sym-bolic economy, thereby positivising the desedimenting effects of the real in different ways.Notions such as capitonage, fantasy, desire, and jouissance are essential for us to under-stand how Islamist trajectories diversify as distinct discursive formations, thereby reveal-ing the psychoanalytical significance of Islam as a master signifier

Playing Games with Art: The Cultural and Aesthetic Legitimation of Digital Games

Like other popular cultural forms before them, digital games are undergoing a process of cultural and aesthetic legitimation; the question of digital games’ legitimacy as art is being raised with increasing urgency in a variety of different contexts. Mobilizing a conceptual framework derived from media studies, the sociology of art, and certain traditions in philosophical aesthetics, this dissertation proposes that art is constituted in a complex, historically-contingent assemblage made up of many diverse elements and sometimes called an “art world.” The legitimation of a cultural form as art is achieved through a process of collective action and interaction between not only art makers and art objects but also thinkers, talkers, watchers, and players, as well as ideas, organizations, places, and objects. The central question of this dissertation, therefore, is not “Are games art?” but rather “How are games being reconfigured as art, where, and by whom?” In order to understand the legitimation of games as art, it is necessary to attend to the specific social-material processes through which it is taking place in different contexts. This dissertation focuses on the historical period between 2005 and 2010, and is made up of several case studies, including the highly public debate precipitated by popular film critic Roger Ebert’s derisive comments about games as art; the cultural reception and canonization of blockbuster “prestige games” that pursue artistic status within the boundaries of the commercial industry, such as Bioshock; and at the opposite end of the spectrum, the construction of independently-produced “artgames” such as Passage as a gaming analogue to autobiographical indie music and comics. Each of these overlapping contexts represents a particular conception of games as legitimate art, mobilizing different elements and strategies in pursuit of cultural and material capital, and establishing the terms and stakes for more recent developments

Stillborn: The Libidinal Economy of Gadgetized Mediation in the Era of Socialization for Consumption; An Explanatory Political Project

This project captures an attempt to politicize one aspect of Western middle class youth’s everyday experience growing up and living in postindustrial consumer society—the replacement of experiential, material, and libidinal gratification with that of ideological satisfaction. The dissertation takes up problematic adolescent gaming as a site to interrogate the ways and means of technologically-backed consumer socialization, and draw out the implications for subject-formation and possibility of self-determination. Developing new ways to conceptualize politics of youth, the project re-reads existing academic research on youth and gaming. Its main goal is to create a theoretical framework that can sustain an understanding of the importance of consumerizing gadget-mediated self-self cultivation across the dimensions of political economy and its strict materiality, psycho-sociality and its relational concreteness, and the realm of the mind in which ideology meets consciousness. Under the guise of critiquing the banality of gaming studies, the project excavates ideas from various critical theory, phenomenological and psychoanalytic traditions to raise political questions of social reproduction and clarify a concretely political path beyond the present circumstances. I am interested in exploring how it is that generation after generation young people born in the compromised consumption-rendered centers of global capital do not revolt against the seemingly repressive institutions shaping their lives. In this question, there is an intergenerational politics, a politics in which the question of youth and their otherness is crashed into the structuration of political economy and social reproduction within it. This is ultimately the theme of my inquiry. The present work is a study of gaming as a site where we should expect to see the manifestations of this kind of intersection, but instead what we see is a single-minded preference for celebrating the gaming industry and securing the ideologically soothing reproduction. I want to address the politics signaled by the changing role of play in advanced consumer economy, where in the site of gaming, through controlled bursts of traumatization and regularization, prediction of subjective experience is commodified into the global capitalistic circuits

The Retro-Futurism of Cuteness

Is it possible to conceive of a Hello Kitty Middle Ages or a Tickle Me Elmo Renaissance? The Oxford English Dictionary dates the first reference to “cute” in the sense of “attractive, pretty, charming” to 1834. More recently, Sianne Ngai has offered a critical overview of the cuteness of the twentieth-century avant-garde within the context of consumer culture. But if cuteness can get under the skin, what kinds of surfaces does it best infiltrate, particularly in the framework of historical forms, events, and objects that traditionally have been read as emergences around “big” aesthetics of formal symmetries, high affects, and resemblances? The Retrofuturism of Cuteness seeks to undo the temporal strictures surrounding aesthetic and affective categories, to displace a strict focus on commodification and cuteness, and to interrogate how cuteness as a minor aesthetics can refocus our perceptions and readings of both premodern and modern media, literature, and culture. Taking seriously the retro and the futuristic temporalities of cuteness, this volume puts in conversation projects that have unearthed remnants of a “cult of cute”—positioned historically and critically in between transitions into secularization, capitalist frameworks of commodification, and the enchantment of objects—and those that have investigated the uncanny haunting of earlier aesthetics in future-oriented modes of cuteness

Change blindness: eradication of gestalt strategies

Arrays of eight, texture-defined rectangles were used as stimuli in a one-shot change blindness (CB) task where there was a 50% chance that one rectangle would change orientation between two successive presentations separated by an interval. CB was eliminated by cueing the target rectangle in the first stimulus, reduced by cueing in the interval and unaffected by cueing in the second presentation. This supports the idea that a representation was formed that persisted through the interval before being 'overwritten' by the second presentation (Landman et al, 2003 Vision Research 43149–164]. Another possibility is that participants used some kind of grouping or Gestalt strategy. To test this we changed the spatial position of the rectangles in the second presentation by shifting them along imaginary spokes (by ±1 degree) emanating from the central fixation point. There was no significant difference seen in performance between this and the standard task [F(1,4)=2.565, p=0.185]. This may suggest two things: (i) Gestalt grouping is not used as a strategy in these tasks, and (ii) it gives further weight to the argument that objects may be stored and retrieved from a pre-attentional store during this task

Actor & Avatar: A Scientific and Artistic Catalog

What kind of relationship do we have with artificial beings (avatars, puppets, robots, etc.)? What does it mean to mirror ourselves in them, to perform them or to play trial identity games with them? Actor & Avatar addresses these questions from artistic and scholarly angles. Contributions on the making of "technical others" and philosophical reflections on artificial alterity are flanked by neuroscientific studies on different ways of perceiving living persons and artificial counterparts. The contributors have achieved a successful artistic-scientific collaboration with extensive visual material

The Dissolution of the Body Image: Immersive Environments and Sensory Experience

This thesis attempts to provide a reading of the body image in immersive space. Since this is a subject that has not been explored in architectural discourse, it is important to examine the implications of the architectural immersion on the body image. The research first analyzes the term ‘body image’ and uses the theories by Sartre, Lacan, Merleau-Ponty and Schilder to produce an understanding of its formation and development. The body image appears in tandem with subjectivity and this occurs through the identification of what constitutes the self and what is outside the self. This understanding of subject-self and object-other is a result of sensory perception. Synthesizing these theories, the thesis places the body image in the context of the immersive environment arguing that any space that manipulates sensory perception to some degree is immersive- hence the importance and relevance to architecture. The immersive environment, through the affectation of the senses, causes a disorientation and re-orientation of the body image. It is a cyclical process of subjective experience influencing perception and the new perception influencing the subject resulting in a continual evolution of the body image. These concepts are then examined through a range of case studies that span history and media originating from 2-dimensional immersions, progressing to 3-dimensional ones. There has been little evolution in the way that architects take advantage of something that is inherently architectural. Consequently, the precedents expose a lack of development in understanding the implications of immersivity in architecture. The immersive has been and is still being used in ways that harbor on the gimmicky and illusionistic instead of assessing, with subtle nuances, the sensory effects of their spaces on the subjectivity of their users. The thesis provides a critique of architecture’s use of immersion and intends to begin a larger architectural discourse on the body image in the immersive environment

I, Posthuman:embodying entangled subjectivities in gaming

We live in an era where the fundamental principles of what it means to be human are being reconsidered and reconceptualised, and we are moving towards a more entangled and relational understanding of the human’s ontology. The “boundaries” of what constitute a human as separate from both its surroundings and human and non-human others are being problematised. How do you separate “the human” from its contexts? In an age where advanced technology often constitutes these contexts, how can you separate the human from technology? Whilst we have always been entangled, today this occurs in a context that is more technologically driven, and this has provoked further debate on the status of the “posthuman”. This PhD thesis is concerned with what it means and how feels to be posthuman, by exploring how posthuman subjectivities are enabled and embodied. What we are capable of doing emerges contextually: it is profoundly dependent on our environments. In my view of the posthuman, the stable “human” self is disrupted, giving way to a subjectivity where our interactions in the world are more intra-active. But how might we consider the emergence of posthuman subjectivities in more depth? I suggest using a particular example of posthuman subjectivity, the MMORPG avatargamer, to demonstrate how the humanistically separated entities of “avatar” and “gamer” can provide a context to explore how “other” and “self” are not ontologically distinct. In doing so, I ask: what specific practices enable or provoke this ontological entanglement? Engaging in an autoethnographic inquiry, I use my intra-action with my avatar Etyme in the MMORPG World of Warcraft as one example of posthuman subjectivity. This methodology in itself is intriguing to explore the multiplicity of selves we experience, and negotiates the humanistic overthrows of “selfhood” whilst experiencing the self as entangled. Through my construct of the posthuman, where the human cannot be meaningfully separated from its environment, we are nevertheless still drawn to speak of an “I” and have a desire to understand ourselves as independent agents. However, the fieldnotes analysed in this thesis disrupt the “I”, and instead reflect on the shifting sense of self with and through an entity that is experienced as both me-and-not-me. Whilst an autoethnographic posthumanism might seem contradictory, I argue that it is a fundamental step in acknowledging our humanistic tendencies and beginning to reflexively engage with, and critique, these ideals. To do so, this thesis “posthumanises” traditionally humanistic constructs: acting and empathy. To widen this concept further, a third analytic re-interrogates different aspects of subject formation to consider how these too could be “posthumanised”. This suggests a broader application of posthumanism, demonstrating how previous notions of mastery, autonomy, and individuality can be critiqued and destabilised in order to view our practices and “selves” as emergent and entwined