J. Macgregor Wise

HOME: TERRITORY AND IDENTITY

Beginning with a story from Deleuze and Guattari of a child in the dark who hums to comfort himself, this essay presents a spatial theory of everyday life through an exploration of the idea of home. The song the child sings brings order out of chaos, a space of comfort amidst fear, in other words, home. Through song, repetition, and other ways of marking we establish personal territories in a search for a place of comfort. This essay explores the nature of these markings, of this territorialization, and how such processes are cultural. Indeed, the essay argues that subjectivity is a product of territorializing, identity is territory. Identity is grounded in habit; the repetition of action and thought establishes home. The essay concludes by returning to the idea of culture on a more general level and how a theory of home and everyday life as territorialization may help better explain how cultures move, adapt, and resist.

An immense and unexpected field of action: Webcams, surveillance and everyday life

The essay uses a quotation from Walter Benjamin to ask what ‘immense and unexpected field of action’ is revealed through the numerous web-cameras connected to the internet. The essay considers the subject of the webcam gaze to be that of everyday life in a society of surveillance and control. Drawing on Mark Andrejevic’s concept of digital enclosures and Michael H. Goldhaber’s argument that the Internet is an attention economy, the essay considers webcams and other means of online expression in the context of Gilles Deleuze’s notion of a society of control. In the end, the essay considers the webcam to reveal aspects of everyday life through senses of thisness, durée, awareness, embodiment and care, as everyday life is caught up in and constituted by intertwined networks of care and control.

THE PASSION OF CULTURAL STUDIES

Melissa Gregg’s book, Cultural Studies’ Affective Voices, is first and foremost a genealogy of an affective cultural studies, tracing elements and strategies in the discourses of key cultural studies figures which mark cultural studies as an important and unique form of scholarship. These figures Richard Hoggart, Stuart Hall, Lawrence Grossberg, Andrew Ross, and Meaghan Morris each rely on a particular affective turn in their discourse, or use the affective register as a way of presenting alternatives to mainstream scholarly practice. Richard Hoggart in the Uses of Literacy elicits in the reader an empathy for the working class; Stuart Hall, in his emphasis on the historical specificities of conjunctural analysis, himself becomes an affective model, an inspiration for pursuing cultural studies as a vocation; Lawrence Grossberg not only theorizes affect especially in his work on rock music and politics, but seeks to personally mobilize cultural studies in the United States student by student, scholar by scholar (Gregg refers to him as ‘Messianic’); Andrew Ross’s is a clear voice pursuing justice and accountability, twinning academic and activist work; and Meaghan Morris’s critical feminist voice uses its affective charge (frustration, enthusiasm, anger, panic, amusement . . .) to ground theoretical, political, and cultural debates in the specificities of historical and personal conjunctures. What the use of affective discourse reveals is the importance of the conjunctural to what is uniquely cultural studies not letting theory or abstraction or traditions of detached critical distance let one off the hook of understanding the felt specificities of the historical. Gregg writes: ‘The positive affects I am claiming for cultural studies are those of solidarity, commitment and hope . . . . these are the forces required to maintain belief in the significance of human-centred scholarship in a world of pervasive cynicism, commerce and fear’ (p. 23). As a book about affect and conjuncture it is important that this book too takes a conjunctural approach to these matters. The book is a self-consciously generational book in many respects. It comes from the perspective of a generation of cultural studies students coming into an already established field

Guattari, Deleuze, and Cultural Studies

ABSTRACT This essay maps the changing ways that the concepts and writings of Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari have been mobilized in the journal Cultural Studies over the past three decades, reflects on roads not taken, and invites readers into a new conversation about the implications of the work of Deleuze and Guattari for cultural studies.