Yves Citton

Et si ce n’était même plus du capitalisme, mais quelque chose d’encore bien pire ?

Le capital a pense trouver le moyen d’esquiver la confrontation avec les travailleurs en se fiant au vecteur d’information. La mondialisation, la desindustrialisation et la sous-traitance permettraient de s’affranchir du pouvoir dont disposaient les travailleurs pour bloquer les flux de la production. Il est temps, toutefois, de se demander si ce qui est apparu en plus et au-dessus du mode de production capitaliste ne serait pas quelque chose de qualitativement different, qui se trouve en train de generer de nouvelles formes de domination de classe, de nouvelles formes d’extraction de plus-value, voire meme de nouveaux types de formation de classe. De meme que le capital a domine la propriete fonciere, subsumant son controle sur la terre dans une forme de propriete plus abstraite et fongible, de meme la classe vectorialiste a subsume et deborde le capital en s’appuyant sur une forme plus abstraite de valorisation.

Immedialità intra-attiva e intermedialità estetica

L’articolo cerca di spostare il punto di vista sull’intermedialita, ponendo l’accento sul problematico statuto ontologico ed estetico dei media come “intermediari”, vale a dire come agenti dell’“in-fra” e del “tra”. L’articolo riflette sui cortocircuiti ontologici nella formazione della realta, illustrati dalla massmediatizzazione degli omicidi seriali, considerati qui come una forma perversamente razionale di delusione tecnologica. Inoltre si addentra nell’uso che Karen Barad fa di nozione come “intra-azione” e “taglio agenziale”, allo scopo di gettare luce sui processi attraverso cui gli apparati tecnologici della sensibilita (media) producono realta, inserendo inserti di apparenza/rilievo tra noi, soggetti umani, e dando cosi un’esistenza palpabile a cio che e in opera “in” e “tra” noi. L’articolo conclude con osservazioni su alcune delle implicazioni che tale riflessione ontologica potrebbe avere per l’estetica.

Fictional Attachments and Literary Weavings in the Anthropocene

Literary studies can find inspiration in Bruno Latour’s 2013 book An Inquiry into the Modes of Existence insofar as it helps them map and locate where and how they can contribute to the debates that will shape our necessary turning away from the suicidal path of capitalist ecocide. In return, AIME can find in literary studies a field of research that will help it overcome its current attention deficit toward the issues of media agency. Along the way, we will discover that the humanities may indeed be the most dangerous and reactionary of all disciplines, unknowingly siding with our most intimate enemy in the anthropocenic war (“the humans”). The time has come to evolve from the Humanities to the Medianities!

Rethinking "Impact": Between the Attention Economy and The Readerless Republic of Letters

Time is in short supply, so my argument will be condensed, and therefore apparently dogmatic. I will sketch seven reasons why we should distance ourselves both from the promotion of “impact” as an appropriate measure of a scholar’s output and from its knee-jerk rejection as a scandalous, oppressive and humiliating form of control of scholarly work.1 My main points will be that we all crave impact (understandably), that the current definition of “impact” tends to hide what it claims to reveal (and should therefore be rejected), but, more importantly, that the very framing of “impact” rests on an obsolete conception of how and why we do research. To put it bluntly: we still hang on to the traditional idea that articles and books are made to be read (by a maximum of people), whereas we should accept the fact that they are mostly made to be written—independently of who does or does not end up reading them.

Reading Literature and the Political Ecology of Gestures in the Age of Semiocapitalism

This article presents the activity of reading literature as the inculcation of relational gestures (within the larger scope of the development of semiocapitalism) and the humanities as reflexive practices of interpretation. It calls for literary studies to be conceived within the emerging field of media archaeology as a form of gestural resistance to the algorithmic protocolization of our behaviors. A political ecology of gestures is needed in order to soften (and reorient) the various protocols which tend to rigidify our reactions. Literary studies and the humanities can bring a crucial contribution to such a political ecology of gestures.

Des corps en public : Remarques faites à Zuccotti Park, le 23 octobre 2011

ResumeSi l’espoir est une revendication impossible, alors nous exigeons l’impossible. Mais la verite, c’est qu’il n’y a effectivement pas ici de revendications qui puissent etre soumises a un arbitrage quelconque, parce que nous ne sommes pas reunis simplement pour exiger la justice economique et l’egalite sociale. Nous composons une communaute de corps rallies dans les rues et dans les parcs.

Contre-fictions : trois modes de combat

On essaie ici de definir la notion de contre-fiction en esquissant trois types possibles. Les contre-fictions initiatrices nous permettent d’imaginer un autre monde possible qui, en suscitant notre desir, nous donne un recul critique sur le monde actuel. Les contre-fictions denonciatrices s’insinuent dans la production des apparences pour court-circuiter la logique reproductrice du capitalisme consumeriste. Les contre-fictions documentaires misent sur la charge de realite captee par les enregistrements analogiques pour dejouer les cliches informant la programmation de notre realite par la logique du spectacle.

Se soulever, pour que l'intellect général puisse avoir un corps

Dans sa configuration actuelle, l’intellect general est a la fois fragmente et depourvu de perception collective et de conscience de soi. Seule l’emergence consciente du travail cognitif comme incarnation sensible et sociale de l’intellect general permettra l’avenement d’une recomposition de notre connaissance commune, scientifique, technique, affective, organisatrice, ainsi que de notre interet commun.

Television Art, Ubiquity and Immersion. A Dialogue of Translation with Joseph Nechvatal

In his extremely suggestive essay entitled “Towards an Immersive Intelligence”, artist and theorist Joseph Nechvatal defines immersive virtual reality art as “an art that has a continuous, coherent quality and strives to ambiently include everything of perceptual worth within its domain in an overall, enveloping totality that is concerted and without an evident frame or border”. Television, on the face of it, is not a medium capable of providing any form of sensory immersion: compared to the Imax or to a trip through virtual reality goggles, its screen (even in its “giant” sizes) remains ridiculously small. More importantly, whereas immersion requires the intense capture of our full attention in the enveloping totality it artificially creates, our viewing of television is generally distracted and superficial. Immersion, however, can be understood in a rather different manner: even if TV screens are tiny, and getting tinier as we will increasingly watch programs on our I-phones and I-pads, the TV of the future will be everywhere (or everyware, as Adam Greenfield puts it). It may therefore be an exciting challenge—for theorists, but mostly for artists—to translate Nechvatal’s analysis, from sensory immersion through virtual reality devices, towards communicational immersion through ubiquitous TV. The following pages propose a (fictional) dialogue between Nechvatal’s quotes and an impersonal rhetorical procedure which attempts to translate his theorization of the viractual into possible ways for artists to experiment with ubiquitous TV.

Switzeurolandia : une monstruosité en devenir ?

Baptisons ce monstre Switzeurolandia. Definissons-le comme le croisement entre une monstruosite nationale «reelle » (Switzerland) et une monstruosite post-nationale en devenir (Eurolandia). Et envisageons Switzeurolandia a partir d’une hypothese projective : la monstruosite Swiss offre deja un modele reduit du type d’economie des affects politiques qui pourrait caracteriser la monstruosite europeenne, si on l’abandonne a ses tendances de developpement actuellement dominantes.