Sunil Manghani

Experimental Text-Image Travel Literature

THE BOOKS under review have been selected from the Topographics series published by Reaktion Books. This series offers a collection of experimental writing about place, established under a remit to provide ‘criticism with original expressive writing, to explore the creative collision between physical space and the human mind’.1 Across the series, issues arise regarding the urban setting, visuality, postmodernity, the body and so forth. I take as the overriding interest here their relevance to visual and cultural studies research; fields of study which, if only because of their interdisciplinary nature, bring to attention a number of self-consciously testing theoretical concerns. As Chaney notes, this enterprise can become ‘considerably demanding intellectually’ (2000: 112), a symptom of which, paralleling Connor’s remarks of postmodern theorizing, is the propensity to attend only ‘to the manifest content of [. . .] theory, rather than assessing its discursive effects: looking at what it says, rather than at what it does’ (1994:

The Art of Paolo Cirio: Exposing New Myths of Big Data Structures

This article examines the work of internet activist and artist Paolo Cirio, whose practice intersects with matters of copyright, privacy, transparency and corporate finance. His project Loophole for All, for example, exposes the practice of tax evasion in the Cayman Islands by counterfeiting Certificate of Incorporation documents. An important aspect of Cirio’s work is how he names himself in the process. Placed within our contemporary ‘data turn’, his work is framed critically in this article in terms of a ‘new structuralist’ account of culture and society. The article attends to the view that power increasingly comes through the algorithm, but argues that we risk reifying so-called generative rules, which may simply be algorithms out of sight. Cirio’s art practice helps focus on what it means to make a critique of contemporary and ubiquitous algorithm structures. As part of this, the article considers how ‘anonymity’ underlies subversive art practices of the 20th century and contemporary protest groups, but that this anonymity arguably undermines attempts to effect change.

Barthes/Bataille: The Writing of Neutral Economy:

By his own admission, Roland Barthes was seemingly remiss in not placing Georges Bataille within his account of ‘zero degree’ writing. This article draws inference from this fact, but specifically examines commonalities between Bataille’s heterology and Barthes’ late project on the Neutral (in which reference to ‘zero degree’ is again raised). The article works through Barthes’ two key articles on Bataille, ‘The Metaphor of the Eye’ and ‘Outcomes of the Text’, and also considers Bataille’s statement on informe, a concept that can be said to resonate with Barthes’ use of the Neutral. Neither term refers to specific ‘forms’, but rather an ‘operation’ of writing, as a means of undoing knowledge without its disavowal. An account is given of the commonalities of Bataille’s ‘general economy’ and what might be termed Barthes’ Neutral economy. Emphasis is placed upon their practice of writing as ethical responses in the ‘preparations’ of knowledge: to be judicious to what forms in and around knowledge, allowing as much for pauses as the possibilities of thought.

Painting as commitment

Jean-Paul Sartre opens What is Literature? with the comment: ‘No, we do not want to “commit” painting, sculpture, and music “too”, or at least not in the same way. And why would we want to?’. Sartre’s idea of the committed writer was a dominant and evocative account of intellectuals of the Left in the immediate post-war period, but was superseded with the arrival of ‘theory’ from Althusser onwards; and with post-structuralist notions fully decentering the subject. What might this mean for the painter? Taking an existential account of painting as its starting point, the article offers a reappraisal of the anti-aesthetic and postmodern debates of the 1980s, and suggests the need to re-situate painting as commitment in itself. Rather than simply the need to place painting within wider social networks, it is the inherent appeal to freedom that remains significant about the medium.

Introducing E-Special Issues of Theory, Culture & Society and Body & Society

Theory, Culture & Society first launched in 1982, and its companion journal Body & Society followed in 1995. Both have consistently been at the forefront of critical debates in sociology, cultural theory and social theory, accruing over the years an impressive archive of articles, reviews, and commentaries. The richness of this archive has prompted the development of e-special issues. These provide an opportunity to bring together complementing articles from across both journal archives. All issues consist of a newly commissioned editorial introduction along with a selection of articles from the archives. The inaugural issue, edited by Jussi Parikka and Paul Feigelfeld, focuses on the German media theorist Friedrich Kittler. In considering Kittler’s impact across the field of humanities, the editors have brought together Kittler’s own texts published by the journal along with other scholarly articles that continue or comment on his work. The collection provides an opportunity for the editors to address core aspects of Kittler’s insights into the relationship between media technologies and cultural formations. The editorial introduction, as printed here in the Annual Review of TCS, sets out key sections on technology, aesthetics, ontology and epistemology, identified as the significant axes where Kittler opens up traditional notions of art and humanities. An underlying theme is a material understanding of aesthetics and philosophical determinations of the concept of media, from the ancient Greeks to computational culture. As established with the inaugural issue, the aim of e-special issues is to offer new ways into the archive materials, to produce different lenses through which to view the various theories, themes and debates that circulate through both journals. Two new issues are: Fiction & Social Theory, edited by David Beer, which brings together a range of articles to explore both how theory can be used to understand or illuminate fiction and how theory can be extended, challenged or informed by fictional resources; and Complexity, edited by Oliver Human, which offers a

Zones of Indeterminacy: An Interview with Peng Yu

In ‘Zones of Indeterminacy: Art, Body and Politics in Daoist Thought’, Peng Yu foregrounds the concept of Xu from Zhuangzi’s philosophical writings, and relates this to questions about the political body. Xu refers to a Daoist notion of ambiguity, though it remains unclear as to how to fully define the term. The article explores its meaning through reference to debates of the body, but also liubai painting, which refers to the idea of ‘leaving blankness’, associated with Chinese ink painting. For Peng Yu, the notion of Xu can help us to consider a ‘politics of indeterminacy’ – a means of redefining the status of subject within power structures, or rather a radical re-articulation of how we refer to power relations in the first place. In this interview, with Sunil Manghani and Cheng-Chu Weng, Peng Yu outlines and elaborates upon the main themes of the article.