Brett Nicholls

Everyday Modulation: Dataism, Health Apps, and the Production of Self-Knowledge

The clear message of the health app industry is that health app technology offers the optimum conditions for empowering selves to manage and improve their everyday lives. The celebratory tone of this message is built upon new developments in mobile technology and experiments in the somatechnical mediation of bodies and data. In this chapter I will consider how health motivation app technology reconfigures everyday practices around new somatechnical arrangements. My contention is that wearable biometric devices are new capillary technologies that connect, via an ideology of dataism, the everyday, mundane practices of individuals to processes of governmentality and control. Drawing specifically on the nuances of Deleuze’s discussion on societies of control, the chapter outlines how health motivation technology modulates everyday practices. I conclude that health apps occupy contradictory social and cultural spaces within contemporary capitalism.

East West 101 as edgy text: Television police drama and Australian multiculturalism

East West 101 is a television show that bears the traces of the highly charged social and cultural fields in which it is embedded. At one level, the show bears the traces of recent events such as the war on terror. At another interrelated level, we also find traces of a more long-standing and deeply embedded fantasy of White supremacy that marks Australian culture, even the official policy of multiculturalism. These traces are also entangled with yet another level, the industrial and political context of the shows production through the SBS network. My aim in this paper is to explore these complex entanglements in order to reveal how the challenge to the vilification of Muslims in the show is limited by the production context. Put another way, my aim will be to temper the celebration of the show as ‘edgy text’.

Hardt, Negri and Antagonism: Media and Communication Studies in the Context of Empire

At first glance, Hardt and Negri.FN”s brief excursion into the sociology of media in Empire is hardly earth shattering; in fact it is quite disappointing. In Empire the media occupies a fraught and complex space between the past (civil society) and the emergence of the neoliberal consensus in which capitalism is considered the only social and economic option. Popular instrument or lackey for corporate capital, this is the tension that marks institutional forms of media. But by looking more closely at Hardt and Negri’s diagram of Empire, we find that there is a second and more expansive sense of the operation of media. Media works as the glue that holds the heterogeneous components of Empire in place. This glue (media operation), however, serves a double function. On the one hand, it works as communication that connects and information is exchanged, but, on the other, it connects in such a way that it maintains heterogeneity and distance. The double function of media as communication, the article contends, should be understood in terms of the logic of connection without connectivity. This logic is central in mechanisms of control in the context of Empire, and, the article maintains, crucial for any analysis of contemporary media today.

Postcolonial Interventions: Gayatri Spivak, Three Wise Men and the Native Informant

Abstract This article responds to Terry Eagletons claim that Spivaks latest book, A Critique of Postcolonial Reason, works against the intent of postcolonial criticism. Reading the work as a search for a just representational strategy, we explore the implications of Spivaks engagement with philosophy - Kant, Hegel, and Marx. As a disciplinary machine, philosophy produces Western subjects who are engendered by simultaneously including and excluding the other. Working through this production of the double location of the ‘other’ we suggest that systematic thought is inhabited by an absence that is present within, a disturbing otherness that ultimately questions authority and stability, and opens up the question of politics and representation. Drawing Spivak into the representational problematic opened up by Lyotard, we suggest that a responsible postcolonial intervention can be performed in the difficult exergue between representability and unrepresentability. In this account, representation is open to invention, to finding new idioms for articulating otherness.

A contaminated critique

art from the USA, the first art from outside Europe that was accepted as part of the European tradition. What has been accepted as modern is not the history of art in the USA, but post-war US art which, in Europe, is exhibited and explained in terms of previous Eurocentric practices. Despite the abundance of post-war US paintings purchased by European galleries and incorporated into a history of Eurocentric modernism, there are virtually no paintings by 18, 19 or early-20 century US artists in European collections. European galleries have the most parochial and xenophobic collections in the world. Their cultural arrogance is unmatched. All national art galleries I have visited throughout the world provide a more global and more generous view of modern art history (whether we take this to be the post-Renaissance or post-19th century periods) than their equivalent European galleries. Despite their often relative poverty to European art galleries, non-European art galleries contain more examples of European art than European art galleries contain of non-European art. For this reason, the most skewed histories of modern art are found in European art galleries. If European art curators can not recognise the full contribution of US art to modern art, what hope does the rest of the world have of gaining any recognition in Europe. It is the poverty of art historiography in Europe today, be it about contemporary or more traditional practices, that is the main reason for Third Text to exist.