Pass it on: towards a political economy of propensity

The paper argues that the work of Gabriel Tarde on imitation provides a fertile means of understanding how capitalism is forging a new affective technology which conforms to a logic of propensity rather than to means-end reasoning. This it does by drawing together a biological understanding of semiconscious cognition with various practical geometric arts so as to re-stage the world as a series of susceptible situations which can be ridden rather than rigidly controlled. The paper examines the advent of technologies which attend to the variable geometry of so-called animal spirits in the realm of business and then, using Tarde's work as a springboard, considers some alternative means of understanding imitative rays which have less instrumental undertones. The paper is an illustration of the way in which biology and culture have increasingly become intertwined

Traumatic pasts, literary afterlives, and transcultural memory : new directions of literary and media memory studies

This article presents new directions of literary and media memory studies. It distinguishes between (1) the study of "traumatic pasts", i.e. representations of war and violence in literature and other media, (2) diachronic and intermedial approaches to "literary afterlives" and (3) recent insights into the inherent transculturality of memory and their consequences for literary and media studies. Keywords: cultural memory studies, literature and memory, media and memory, transcultural memor

Constructing the real-time border: Frontex, risk and dark imagination

The European Border and Coast Guard Agency, commonly known as Frontex, acquired augmented competencies in 2016. Additional operational capacity continues the expansionary trajectory the Agency has travelled since its inception. This paper provides an examination of the security rationalities underpinning and informing Frontex. Frontex is promoted as being ‘intelligence-led’. This claim is reinforced through the pivotal role of Frontex as a producer and distributor of risk analysis for European border control assemblages. The engagement of ‘imagination-based’ techniques in Frontex risk analysis attempts to foresee crises, which in turn mobilises rationalities of precaution, pre-emption and preparedness. The discussion then interrogates the security logics evident in the EUROSUR project, and its aspiration to provide border visualisations in ‘near-real-time’. It is argued that while the EUROSUR project may not represent ‘militarisation’ as such, it is riven with martial rationalities

Media do not exist : performativity and mediating conjunctures

Collection : Theory on demand ; 31Media Do Not Exist: Performativity and Mediating Conjunctures by Jean-Marc Larrue and Marcello Vitali-Rosati offers a radically new approach to the phenomenon of mediation, proposing a new understanding that challenges the very notion of medium. It begins with a historical overview of recent developments in Western thought on mediation, especially since the mid 80s and the emergence of the disciplines of media archaeology and intermediality. While these developments are inseparable from the advent of digital technology, they have a long history. The authors trace the roots of this thought back to the dawn of philosophy. Humans interact with their environment – which includes other humans – not through media, but rather through a series of continually evolving mediations, which Larrue and Vitali-Rosati call ‘mediating conjunctures’. This observation leads them to the paradoxical argument that ‘media do not exist’. Existing theories of mediation processes remain largely influenced by a traditional understanding of media as relatively stable entities. Media Do Not Exist demonstrates the limits of this conception. The dynamics relating to mediation are the product not of a single medium, but rather of a series of mediating conjunctures. They are created by ceaselessly shifting events and interactions, blending the human and the non-human, energy, and matter

Book Review

Book Review of "Mediating Legal Disputes: Effective Strategies for Lawyers and Mediators" by Dwight Golann (Aspen Law & Business).Published in cooperation with the American Bar Association Section of Dispute Resolutio

“If the Engine Ever Stops, We’d All Die”: \u3cem\u3eSnowpiercer\u3c/em\u3e and Necrofuturism

Applying Mark Fisher’s “capitalist realism” and Subhabrata Bobby Banerjee’s “necrocapitalism” to the study of sf, this article reads the post-apocalyptic French comic Le Transperceneige (1982) and its film adaptation Snowpiercer (2014) as critiques of necrofuturist visions of the future. Necrofuturism posits a future that is doomed to continue modern capitalism’s unsustainable and immoral practices even as those practices become more and more destructive and self-defeating; films such as Snowpiercer interrupt this well-rehearsed vision of a world of universal death to open the mind to new possibilities for alternative futures. Key to Snowpiercer’s critique of necrofuturism is its depiction of necrocapitalism as a deliberately constructed thing, rather than a law of nature, reminding us that someone chose to build this world of unhappiness and prompting us to recognize that other sorts of worlds might be built instead