Hope for the future: Cultural studies in the enclave

This article explores the development of cultural studies in the United States as affected in its relationship with the Philosophy of Communication Division of the International Communication Association. It considers both what has been enabled and disabled, with significant implications for the practice of cultural studies now and in the future. © 2005, Copyright Taylor & Francis Group, LLC

Cultural Studies in Black and White

© 2016, © Jennifer Daryl Slack 2016. All Rights Reserved. Political intervention is deeply etched in the history and theory of Cultural Studies. The vehicle of intervention is typically understood as textual and the measure of success as ‘has it changed the world?’ This graphic and textual essay argues for and enacts thinking of and practising intervention more innovatively and more modestly: as equally extra-textual, and as a site for experimentation in the folds among theory, practice, and the quotidian. The author’s original black and white charcoal and pastel images are paired with text to explore the potential for an articulation of the visual and the textual to engage, convey, actualize, and produce concepts and insights of Cultural Studies. In evocative images and accessible language it enacts a new mode of engaging the theory and practice of Cultural Studies, specifically engaging concepts of articulation and assemblage, movement and things, questions of identity, the importance of affect, the power of transformation, youth cultures and resistance, The Black Lives Matter movement and matters of race, the struggles of women, the challenge of overcoming culturally engendered hatred of difference, and the difficulties of negotiating change in the precarious circumstances of contemporary culture

Communication Technologies and Society: Causality and Intervention

184 p.Thesis (Ph.D.)--University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, 1981.This study critiques current notions of and perspectives on communication technologies in order to demonstrate that such are inadequate as bases for critical and comprehensive understanding of the relationship between communication technologies and society and as bases for effective strategies for technological intervention. Out of the desire to control technological growth and the effects--both beneficial and deleterious--of technologies, three approaches have assumed paramount importance: Technology Assessment, Alternative Technology, and Luddism. These three are examined in depth and their failings explained, in part, in terms of the concepts of causality embedded in their analyses and practice. In contrast to inadequate conceptions of causality--simple, symptomatic, and expressive--a theory of structural causality, as developed by the French philosopher Louis Althusser, is explicated. By utilizing a model of causality as structural it is possible to overcome the deficiencies of the previous models and form the basis for a critical and comprehensive inquiry into the relationship between communication technologies and society and subsequent strategies for intervention. By applying structural causality to a concrete instance--the relationship between patent law and the invention and innovation of communication technologies--this study demonstrates the explanatory power of a structural causal approach in analyzing the relationship between the social formation and communication technologies. On the basis of this analysis, the study concludes that the only effective strategy of intervention in the relationship between patent law and the invention and innovation of communication technologies is one that seeks as its goal the abolition of property rights in invention. The study concludes with a discussion of the consequences of using a conception of causality as structural for the concept of communications revolutions, and more specifically for the concept of the information revolution.U of I OnlyRestricted to the U of I community idenfinitely during batch ingest of legacy ETD

Communication Technologies and Society: Causality and Intervention

184 p.Thesis (Ph.D.)--University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, 1981.This study critiques current notions of and perspectives on communication technologies in order to demonstrate that such are inadequate as bases for critical and comprehensive understanding of the relationship between communication technologies and society and as bases for effective strategies for technological intervention. Out of the desire to control technological growth and the effects--both beneficial and deleterious--of technologies, three approaches have assumed paramount importance: Technology Assessment, Alternative Technology, and Luddism. These three are examined in depth and their failings explained, in part, in terms of the concepts of causality embedded in their analyses and practice. In contrast to inadequate conceptions of causality--simple, symptomatic, and expressive--a theory of structural causality, as developed by the French philosopher Louis Althusser, is explicated. By utilizing a model of causality as structural it is possible to overcome the deficiencies of the previous models and form the basis for a critical and comprehensive inquiry into the relationship between communication technologies and society and subsequent strategies for intervention. By applying structural causality to a concrete instance--the relationship between patent law and the invention and innovation of communication technologies--this study demonstrates the explanatory power of a structural causal approach in analyzing the relationship between the social formation and communication technologies. On the basis of this analysis, the study concludes that the only effective strategy of intervention in the relationship between patent law and the invention and innovation of communication technologies is one that seeks as its goal the abolition of property rights in invention. The study concludes with a discussion of the consequences of using a conception of causality as structural for the concept of communications revolutions, and more specifically for the concept of the information revolution.U of I OnlyRestricted to the U of I community idenfinitely during batch ingest of legacy ETD

Culture in-colour

© 2016 Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group. Culture in-colour is a concept that recognizes that culture is always imbricated in relations of colour as form, structure, or system and in relations of colours. These two regimes–colour and colours–fold back onto and interpenetrate one another to constitute culture in complex, multiple, contradictory, constitutive relations that are potentially open to change. Theorizing culture in-colour draws on and beyond the image of the cyborg to insist on in-colour as neither a thing, a property of an object, nor a neurological process, but an active verb, a lived event: of interminglings and articulations, of repetitions, struggles, rearticulations, and becomings. The Dress, a 2015 controversy over the colour of a dress in an image circulated over the Internet, reveals how colour is typically thought of–as surface, artifice, and ornament; as a scientific fact; and as a neurological phenomenon–and how it is lived affectively. The anxieties produced by The Dress suggest a tension between the typical explanations of how colour matters and the less-accessible, but far more consequential, ways that both colour and colours matter. Colour and colours are often used to designate community belonging, but a closer look at the perceived threat in seeing colour differently reveals an underlying trust both in what colour is and in the reliability of colour to negotiate/constitute community in relations of inclusion, exclusion, and hierarchy. Neuroscientific and technological explanations affectively discipline colour by asserting thingness and sameness, and by erasing the traces of the powerful articulatory work of colour. Yet it is the system of colour itself that makes the dismissal of the significance of colour possible. Acknowledging that we live in-colour demands recognition that not only do we live deeply in-colour, but that different cultures in-colour are possible, that different forms or systems of colour are lived affectively, and that the disciplining of colour can be resisted with effects more open to indeterminateness

The politics of the sokal affair

IN SPRING 1996, as part of the backlash against significant changes in the cultural and political climate in the US, New York University physicist Alan Sokal perpetrated a “hoax�? on the journal Social Text, when he submitted an article titled “Transgressing the boundaries: toward a transformative hermeneutics of quantum gravity�? (Sokal 1996c). The Social Text collective included it as the final piece in their spring/summer 1996 special issue on “Science Wars�? (Social Text 1996), which focused on the recent debates in the field of science studies and attacks on it by some members of the scientific community and the political right. Coinciding with the release of Social Text, Lingua Franca, in collusion with Sokal, published another article by Sokal exposing the Social Text article as purposefully fraudulent (Sokal 1996b; herein referred to as the Sokal expose). Sokal explains that he had become convinced of the “apparent decline in the standards of rigor in certain precincts of the academic humanities�? and sought to confirm his conviction (Sokal 1996b: 62). He confessed that his article was “a modest (though admittedly uncontrolled) experiment: Would a leading North American journal of cultural studies - whose editorial collective includes such luminaries as Fredric Jameson and Andrew Ross - publish an article liberally salted with nonsense if (a) it sounded good and (b) it flattered the editors’ ideological preconceptions? (Sokal 1996b: 62). The answer for Sokal, and for many others, has been a simple “yes.�? And the “experiment�? has been taken largely as demonstrating that the humanities - or at least some sectors of it - have become corrupted