SPECTRA
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A peer-reviewed, graduate student-run journal of the ASPECT program
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Browsing SPECTRA by Author "Alphin, Caroline"
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- Biocolonialism: Examining Biopiracy, Inequality, and PowerBreske, Ashleigh (Virginia Tech Publishing, 2018-09-19)Colonialism has for centuries been a driving force for territorial expansion and economic gains. In today’s globalized economy, there is a continuation of colonial exploitation in areas with great biodiversity through the act of taking indigenous knowledge and biodiversity for profit, also known as biopiracy. Biopiracy is a practice of economic exploitation by powerful multinational corporations (MNCs). These MNCs taking on the identity and power structures of nation-states, and biopiracy becomes a tool of these transnational corporations. The established laws protect those corporations that obtain patents or intellectual property rights more readily than the original indigenous knowledge holders. Biocolonialism has been established through neoliberal trade practices and the whittling away of indigenous control over indigenous knowledge. This is done on the premise that indigenous knowledge is communal knowledge, and not privately ‘owned’, and therefore available to be used by everyone. These communal intellectual property rights have allowed MNCs to coopt indigenous knowledge for profit. Biopiracy can extend to multiple forms of practice. This paper will look at it in the context of drug patents, agricultural gene manipulation, and genetic cell lines.
- Cloud Watching, 2019Kron, Jillian Eve (Virginia Tech Publishing, 2019-03-28)This piece began as a stream of consciousness drawing. Two rows of sexless faces all looking in the same direction formed what reminded me of a gust of wind. I continued using the face as a repeating unit to create the sky. Cloud Watching was heavily influenced by the Ukiyo-e period of Japanese art and the psychedelic fractalization of objects by the human eye during altered states of consciousness.
- Critiquing Resilience: Interview with Julian ReidAlphin, Caroline; Khreiche, Mario; Ward, Shelby (Virginia Tech Publishing, 2018-08-28)SPECTRA met with Julian Reid at Virginia Tech on September 12, 2017.During the interview, we talk to Julian about his perspectives on resilience, sovereignty, political theory, academic life, writing, and the arts.
- Exploring the Aesthetic Turn: An Interview with Michael J. ShapiroKhreiche, Mario; Shapiro, Michael J.; Ward, Shelby (Virginia Tech Publishing, 2019-03-28)During the ASPECT Conference in April 2017, SPECTRA met with Michael J. Shapiro to discuss his work as a writer, the social sciences, and the inspiration he draws from aesthetic theory, cinema, and the everyday. Mike is a Professor in the Political Science Department at the University of Hawai’i at Mānoa. Among his most recent books are Cinematic Geopolitics (2009), The Time of the City: Politics, philosophy and genre (2010), Studies in Trans-disciplinary Method: After the Aesthetic Turn (2012), War Crimes: Atrocity, and Justice (2015), Politics and Time: Documenting the Event (2016), and The Political Sublime (2018). The keynote address for the ASPECT conference included a piece from this latest work, and can be accessed on YouTube: “When the Earth Moves: Towards a Political Sublime.”
- Failing without Failure in the Design Rationale of an Accelerated SocietyRighi, Céline (Virginia Tech Publishing, 2019-03-28)This article explores the consequences of discourses of “boundless receptivity to failure” in advanced digital capitalism, as illustrated by the Silicon Valley mantras “fail often” and “safe to fail” on the individual-subject formation. The article highlights issues related to the temporal dimension in grappling with personal experiences of failure – as a transitional moment between past, present and future – by drawing on Hartmut Rosa’s theory of the structural modifications of our relationship to time in late modernity, specifically our perception of the “speeding up of life,” and its consequences for subjective forms of selfhood. How has the peculiar relationship to temporality at stake in the subject’s experience of failure been re-shaped by structural modifications of the “materiality of time?” I first argue that the modern-day agenda for fast recovery pathologizes residual emotional attachments associated with the necessary process of “working out a narrative of failure,” as explored by sociologist Richard Sennett. This in turn triggers a greater need to “fix” failure through digital technical procedures. Second, I point to a new design model, the “lean principle,” as a paragon of structural modifications of the “materiality of time.” I show that this new design paradigm, which has been spreading beyond the industrial sector in which it originates to fuel new modes of thinking and subjectivities, strips the experience of failure out from its temporal dimension. Failure can no longer be represented as a temporal rupture between the present and the future. Such a de-temporalized and renewed signification of failure eludes any subjective libidinal engagement in dealing with “unmet expectations” (i.e., failure).
- Hegemony, Ideology, Governmentality: Theorizing State Power after WeberEngland, Christopher (Virginia Tech Publishing, 2019-03-28)Max Weber once claimed that the growth of bureaucratic power in late modernity may henceforth render political revolutions impossible. In this article, I stage a conversation between Weber and several of his later interlocuters on the Left. I suggest that the concepts of hegemony (Gramsci), ideology (Althusser), and governmentality (Foucault) can be read, in part, as responses to Weber. These theorists each develop distinct versions of what I call a nominalist theory of power: by starting from the ground up and showing how the state is supported by granular relationships of power that circulate outside its grasp, they hope to discover new modes of resistance and social change. I explore these distinct theories and trace their interconnections. In the end, however, I suggest that nominalist theories of power have inherent limitations and that Weber’s initial diagnosis retains important insights.
- Iterative PhenomenologyEngel, Sascha (Virginia Tech Publishing, 2019-03-28)This paper argues that a renewed classical phenomenology can complement postphenomenology in exploring the overwhelming influence of contemporary media saturation on the constitution of today’s lifeworlds and the subjects inhabiting them. To make this argument, I interrogate two fundamental concepts of classical phenomenology – lifeworld and intention – and the changes to which these have been subject in the age of ubiquitous electronic illumination. I conclude that an analysis of phenomenological intentionality, combined with an analysis of the codes governing its everyday implementation in applications, such as Whatsapp, Instagram, Fitbit and GPS, can accurately assess the luminous spectrality of today’s lifeworlds.
- Letter from the EditorsAlphin, Caroline; Khreiche, Mario; Ward, Shelby (Virginia Tech Publishing, 2018-08-28)In recent years, the discourse around resilience has generated controversy among activists and scholars.Construed as adaptability and capacity to resist external pressures, resilience has often been rendered an admirable feature of indigenous populations, readily appropriable to neoliberal narratives and practices.In this context, Julian Reid has advanced a critical intervention in the discourse, challenging the pervasive assumption that resilience is an unequivocally desirable quality and, ultimately, questioning whether it remains a useful concept today.SPECTRA decided to dedicate issue 6.2 to the topic of resilience, not so much to resolve the question, but rather to present resilience as a multilayered term interfacing with global struggles, precarious subjectivities, and aesthetic representations.
- Making Sense of Resilient Life at the International Center of Photography Museum in New York CityDebrix, François (Virginia Tech Publishing, 2018-08-28)This critical essay reviews two recent simultaneous exhibits at the International Center of Photography Museum in New York City in order to place the concept of resilience in the contemporary context of human insecurity and violence.It shows how the notion of resilient life is uncritically espoused by some contemporary artists and photographers in a way that renders the concept of resilience commonplace, expected, and unproblematic and, as such, incapable of offering a necessary challenge to various forms of violence against bodies and lives today.
- Reinventing Authoritarianism: The Digital and the DonaldRespess, Shaun (Virginia Tech Publishing, 2019-03-28)In Digital Demagogue: Authoritarian Capitalism in the Age of Trump and Twitter, communication and media scholar Christian Fuchs plunges into the depths of new media with an eye for the reemergence of authoritarianism, albeit in a refashioned form, and armed with a rich tradition of well-articulated critical theory. Fuchs presents a clear and explicit question to arm his analysis, namely: What is authoritarian capitalism and how is it communicated through social media? Using the contemporary parameters of the candidacy and presidency of Donald Trump, along with the complex phenomenon that is its supporting ideology, he explores the relationship between political communication and new nationalism to expose the dangerous marriage between authoritarianism and capitalism in prominent positions of power. This review charts Fuchs’s unique journey through critical theory and digital texts while responding to its ambitions both as a revitalized account of the critical theory tradition and as a cautionary tale of contemporary political movements. I primarily present his book as a sobering examination of the problematic entanglement of radical capitalism, authoritarian politics, and rapid communication strategies while remaining optimistic that it will influence several scholars to apply his theories as a potential strategy for positive liberation and/or contestation moving forward.
- Spinning Anthropocenarios: Climate Change Narratives as Geopolitics in the Late HoloceneLuke, Timothy W. (Virginia Tech Publishing, 2018-08-28)This essay reconsiders research programs in environmental studies as they confront the Anthropocene.While scientific investigations are conducted with a commitment to clarifying the scientific record for geological sciences, the interpretation of their goals, methods, and results have also become more fluid cultural, political, and social narratives with complicated and conflicted implications in today’s economy and society.Anthropocene studies, which have assembled multi-scale projects of multidisciplinary teams, now aspire to steer geoscience analysis, in part, toward planet-wide management of today's rapid climate change events as they propound new objects of study and control.This study poses some questions about these trends.Is the turn to the Anthropocene, which can easily serve be another mystified narrative for the “rise of the West” since the fifteenth century, an attempt to sustain technocratic projects for centers of power and knowledge based in the West?As with all politics, what decisive struggles are at stake between "who, whom" in these shifting geopolitical debates that now are cloaked in the advanced study of physical and social sciences?
- The Stories We Tell: Toward a Feminist Narrative in the AnthropoceneMcKagen, Elizabeth Leigh (Virginia Tech Publishing, 2018-09-19)This paper synthesizes recent criticism of Western ideas of modernity and the Anthropocene to articulate criteria for a feminist narrative that can decenter the human as the key figure of concern in the present and advocate for a more collaborative understanding of existence. I begin with a close reading of Donna Haraway’s argument for multispecies collaboration and storytelling as the only viable response to the crisis of the Anthropocene in her recent book Staying with the Trouble, and then engage with additional critiques of modernity to broaden Haraway’s intellectual argument. While Haraway offers a compelling argument for response to our current era of precarity, I integrate her text with others to articulate nine specific criteria that can craft alternative narratives. Haraway and other Anthropocene critics focuses on interdisciplinary scholarship and local grassroots activism as key strategies for resistance, resilience, and change. Without disregarding those significant arguments, I extend the discussion to narrative frameworks, signaling the potential for more wide-spread awareness of a new narrative that can aid in response to the current environmental crisis. These criteria speak to Haraway’s oft-repeated refrain that “it matters what stories we tell stories with,” and stories of becoming-with through multispecies awareness give us the chance of a possible future wherein some humans and critters survive to tell more stories. This kind of storytelling features voices traditionally lost to narratives of modernity and progress (including the Earth itself) and seeks alternatives to Enlightenment-centered individualism as a significant form of response and reaction to the Anthropocene.
- “Think You Right: I Am Not What I Am”: Dialectical Self-Overcoming and the Concept of ResilienceTaylor, Benjamin (Virginia Tech Publishing, 2018-08-28)In this paper, I argue that “resilience” in some sense of the term is a necessary predicate of all subjectivity, and thus of all political programs subjects could be capable of undertaking.While contemporary political discourses typically call for “resilience” as a way to justify the social formations already in place, this does not mean that the concept of resilience is itself irredeemable.In fact, all subjects must first be “resilient,” i.e., continue to exist as themselves in some sense, before they can aspire to be other than what they are.Consequently, we cannot totally abandon the concept, even as we must continue to examine with suspicion the ways those in authority deploy it to secure their rule.I contend that the term “resilience” embodies—etymologically and socially—the classical tension between “being” and “becoming” that lies at the root of dialectical thought.By framing resilience in terms of dialectical thinking, we can see how it is both necessary for and dangerous to the pursuit of a robust and imaginative politics, as well as to ethical projects of self-mastery and self-creation.
- Undoing the DemosFallon, Jordan Keats (Virginia Tech Publishing, 2019-03-28)This review charts the substantive theoretical import, diagnostic utility, as well as the conceptual and stylistic limits of Wendy Brown’s Undoing the Demos. Brown adamantly charts the destructive effects of contemporary neoliberalism, construed largely as an insidious form of rationality rather than simply an economic system, and the hollowing out of democratic political life which has ensued from its ascension. The account of neoliberalism supplied by Undoing the Demos presents an indispensable tool with which to forge modalities of both analysis and resistance yet also contains important limitations which circumscribe some of the book’s utility and gesture toward the need for critical supplement.