Special Libraries, February 1947

Volume 38, Issue 2https://scholarworks.sjsu.edu/sla_sl_1947/1001/thumbnail.jp

Special Libraries, February 1947

Volume 38, Issue 2https://scholarworks.sjsu.edu/sla_sl_1947/1001/thumbnail.jp

Carbon classified?:Unpacking heterogeneous relations inscribed into corporate carbon emissions

How does a corporation know it emits carbon? Acquiring such knowledge starts with the classification of environmentally relevant consumption information. This paper visits the corporate location at which this underlying element for their knowledge is assembled to give rise to carbon emissions. Using an actor-network theory (ANT) framework, the aim is to investigate the actors who bring together the elements needed to classify their carbon emission sources and unpack the heterogeneous relations drawn on. Based on an ethnographic study of corporate agents of ecological modernisation over a period of 13 months, this paper provides an exploration of three cases of enacting classification. Drawing on ANT, we problematise the silencing of a range of possible modalities of consumption facts and point to the ontological ethics involved in such performances. In a context of global warming and corporations construing themselves as able and suitable to manage their emissions, and, additionally, given that the construction of carbon emissions has performative consequences, the underlying practices need to be declassified, i.e. opened for public scrutiny. Hence the paper concludes by arguing for a collective engagement with the ontological politics of carbon

Laboratory, library, database : London’s avant-garde drama societies and ephemeral repertoire

How did London’s avant-garde drama societies shape the performance repertoire? Dedicated to the discovery of new or sometimes very old plays, these subscription societies were experimental coterie clubs composed of members whose annual fees financed, and secured tickets to, a season of private productions. In 1891, J. T. Grein founded the first such group in Britain, the Independent Theatre Society, in order to stage a performance of Ibsen’s Ghosts, which the Lord Chamberlain had banned from the public stage. Over 140 subscription societies followed; the Stage Society (1899–1939) ran longest and most successfully. This essay begins by quantitatively analyzing a database of over 23,000 London productions from 1890–1959 in order to determine the extent to which subscription societies introduced a modern dramatic repertoire to the public stage, otherwise known as the commercial theater. Then, it argues that subscription societies virtually assembled the very idea of a modern dramatic repertoire using ephemera such as prospectuses, programs, annual reports, and tickets. The methodological aims with respect to the study of repertoire are two-fold: to demonstrate the potentials and limitations of digital databases, and to make a case for integrating them with book history. The essay expands on previous analyses of the relationship between page and stage by articulating the role of ephemera, an under-theorized print genre but one of importance to institutions generally and to theater specifically. It contends that the rise of digital databases further invites us to think about how theatrical collectivity is conditioned by media both new and old

Re-enacting Early Video Art as a Research Tool for Media Art Histories

This paper will discuss re-enactment as a relevant tool for practice-based research to investigate pioneering video performances and video artworks from the 1970s and 1980s from a theoretical, art-historical and curatorial point of view. Since the early 2000s, the re-enactment of artists’ performance has been growing as an art practice internationally and has been investigated in several studies and exhibitions. In this paper, I will pro- pose that the re-enactment of early video artworks can open up critical analysis on the original work—its nature, form and content—as well as on collective and personal memory and mediation. Re-enactment becomes a research tool that investigates the nature of video which was at the time a relatively new medium. Re-enactment informs the research into the original piece, its documentation, the relationships between the artist and the body, the work and the viewer. It investigates the effects of analogue video on the viewer and the artist in comparison with the digital video employed in the re-enactment and its documentation. The paper will analyse case studies from the research projects REWIND, REWINDItalia and EWVA (European Women’s Video Art in the 70s and 80s)

Coding Labour

As well as introducing the Coding Labour section, the authors explore the diffusion of code across the material contexts of everyday life, through the objects and tools of mediation, the systems and practices of cultural production and organisational management, and in the material conditions of labour. Taking code beyond computation and software, their specific focus is on the increasingly familiar connections between code and labour with a focus on the codification and modulation of affect through technologies and practices of management within the contemporary work organisation. In the grey literature of spreadsheets, minutes, workload models, email and the like they identify a violence of forms through which workplace affect, in its constant flux of crisis and ‘prodromal’ modes, is regulated and governed

The Perestroika of Academic Labour: The Neoliberal Transformation of Higher Education and the Resurrection of the ‘Command Economy’.

This paper compares the changing function and organisation of higher education (HE) under neoliberal reforms, with particular focus on the UK, with those introduced by the Stalin regime in the 1930s and developed in the decades that followed. Although ideologically contrasting, many policies developed to subordinate HE and other state enterprises more directly to the accumulation of capital driven by competition are in many respects strikingly similar in each case. The historical development of each is examined, along with the political economy underlying them, highlighting the most important common features and differences. The proletarianisation of HE in the UK is shown to have encouraged the adoption of ‘spontaneous’ forms of resistance reminiscent of those workers adopted in the USSR to protect themselves from bureaucratic pressure. The paper suggests ways in which these forms of resistance might be incorporated into a more general struggle against the encroachment of neoliberalism