Figuring volatility

This article argues that there are parallels between developments in modern science and in art and culture, including the culture of finance, and that these developments can be tracked by a notion of volatility not just as change, but as how change itself has changed. Describing this paradigm shift requires a language that is precise but indeterminate, a language akin to metaphor, understood as figures of volatility. Three such figures are anamorphosis, anachronism, and catachresis. These figures are major instantiations of volatility, though they do not exhaust all the possibilities. What they indicate is not just that our frames of understanding have shifted, but that we are dealing with problematic, multiple, and overlapping frames: anamorphosis problematizes our experience of space, anachronism of time, and catachresis of language. These figures are not all in play at the same time. In literature, catachresis may be the dominant figure; in dance, anamorphosis; in ‘slow cinema’, anachronism. The aim is less to arrive at a set of defining characteristics than to follow a series of transformations across different cultural fields. Almost every field in our time is volatile each in its own way, and this has consequences for methodology. If figures are tools to think with, not to regulate thought, a necessary method would be to allow these figures to emerge from the material, not from a checklist. The question of volatility is arguably the key intellectual challenge of our time because it allows us to see deviation from a norm not just as an aberration, but as an indication that established norms are losing their normative value

Fashion archive fervour: the critical role of fashion archives in preserving, curating, and narrating fashion

Fashion items and artefacts across the 19th and 20th centuries were once considered unworthy of placement in museums and archives on account of their perishable nature and their association with the shallow pleasures of low culture. The perceived fragile and ephemeral nature of fashion garments and accessories has been reevaluated with material objects now considered worth saving for multiple purposes and uses. Awareness of the high social, cultural, economic, and historic value of physical fashion relics has resulted in the trend for fashion designers, brands, and museums to collate, create, and manage fashion archives. The article analyses the importance for both industry and consumer of preserving and accessing fashion archives in the 21st century in both digital and traditional ways. It highlights the benefits of collating a holistic multi-modal archive by combining material and textual cultural objects in various forms to portray and contextualize the lived social experience. A case study will analyse a selected educational fashion archive based in postcolonial Hong Kong. The contemporary fashion archive’s role is evaluated from the perspective of archivist and user regarding contested issues such as commercialization, curatorial objectivity, or controlled access, while evaluating future directions for the fashion archive as ultimate style repository

Masterclass : Ackbar Abbas = 大師班：記錄香港文化

Among Ackbar Abbas\u27 famous arguments has been one of a strange role of the archives in Hong Kong: the déjà disparu, or the \u27feeling that what is new and unique about the situation is always already gone, and we are left holding a handful of cliché, or a cluster of memories of what has never been’. Abbas\u27 work has drawn attention to a rather special role that the archives possess in Hong Kong: as evidence, then, of what may have been in the face of erasure. His more recent work has been on both the production of fakes and on fraudulent memory

The Ghost in the (Twittering) machine

Starting with The Twittering Machine, a painting by Paul Klee and a possible reference to Twitter, the social media platform. Prof. Abbas raises questions about how digital media is a \u27super-spreader\u27 of information and disinformation, or media-as-virus, and whether the notion of the digital humanities might, like Goya\u27s Sleep of Reason, produce monsters. This talk was originally presented at the online research training workshop Digital Humanities, Pandemic Futures on 24 Oct 2020, co-organised by Centre for Cultural Research and Development, Lingnan University, and the University of California Humanities Research Institute

Posthumous socialism

What is the Socialist Market Economy? Are we dealing with another phase of socialism? Or is China today capitalist in everything else but name alone? Or, even more paradoxically, are we dealing with neither the life nor death of socialism, but with its afterlife? With a posthumous socialism more than a post socialism? Socialism in its posthumous form can have a vitality stronger than ever before. It is not a case of socialism being more alive than dead in China today, but a case of socialism being more alive when dead: just like a preserved building. A socialist past is not just succeeded and replaced by a capitalist present, but coexists with it, and we are forced to inhabit overlapping time frames. Hence, anachronisms of a new and peculiar kind are everywhere. Anachronism does not mean being behind the times; rather, it is a sign of the times, a product of the speed of historical change. However, what we will see in the coming period is not just change in any familiar sense, but rather how change itself has changed. Speaker: Prof. Ackbar Abbas Ackbar Abbas is internationally renowned for his writings on Hong Kong and China. His book, Hong Kong: Culture and the Politics of Disappearance (published in 1997 by University of Minnesota Press) is a path-breaking work in urban studies and cultural theory. His scholarship spans a range of cultural practices, from cinema to architecture to the visual arts. He has been writing on art and visual culture in China, and speaking at important international art events like the Sydney, Venice and Moscow Biennales on Asian art. Before moving to UCI in 2006, he was Professor of Comparative Literature at the University of Hong Kong. He is also currently Adjunct Professor, Department of Cultural Studies, Lingnan University

The politics of hope and love

Moderators: WANG Hui (Tsinghua University, China) Ackbar ABBAS (University of California, Irvine, USA) Speaker (50 mins): Paul BOVE (University of Pittsburgh, USA