The political technology of the ‘Camp’ in historical capitalism

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
John Welsh
Keyword(s):  
The Political ◽  
Historical Capitalism ◽  
Political Technology

scholarly journals Alphabetic Memes: Caricature, Satire, and Political Literacy in the Age of Trump

October ◽  
2019 ◽  
Vol 170 ◽  
pp. 5-24
Author(s):  
Emily Apter
Keyword(s):  
Social Networks ◽  
Limited Liability ◽  
Sharing Economy ◽  
Political Life ◽  
Secret Message ◽  
The Political ◽  
Implicit Trust ◽  
Indirect Consequence ◽  
Political Literacy ◽  
Political Technology

Memes are an increasingly omnipresent political technology in the age of Trump, weaponized by troll armies, while at the same time reviving oppositional genres of caricature and satire that are in turn conducive to new forms of political literacy. As a medium, the meme is a mechanism of transliteration, translating affects into icons that read out visually and orthographically, as alphabet, cipher, rebus, anagram, tag, GIF, secret message. In their antidepressant function, memes are salves for solitary souls. They are community-builders connecting solo agents to social networks and political causes. They engender an implicit trust among the users who co-produce and distribute them (modeling a sharing economy dubbed “platform cooperativism” by Trebor Scholz). And yet, because of their predication on impersonal intimacy, memes shift the ground of the political, from an ethics of direct responsibility to an ethics of limited liability and indirect consequence in moral action. This essay examines some key episodes in the political life of memes, examining works by Jenny Holzer, Mary Kelly, Lutz Bacher, Slavs and Tartars, Tony Cokes, and Silvia Kolbowski, as well as anonymous meme-makers.

The Global Visa Regime and the Political Technologies of the International Self: Borders, Bodies, Biopolitics

2006 ◽  
Vol 31 (2) ◽  
pp. 167-189 ◽  
Author(s):  
Mark B. Salter
Keyword(s):  
The Political ◽  
Sovereign Power ◽  
Mobile Populations ◽  
International Borders ◽  
Global Mobility ◽  
The Creation ◽  
The Individual ◽  
Political Technology ◽  
Individual Body ◽  
The Way

This article examines the micropolitics of the border by tracing the interface between government and individual body. In the first act of confession before the vanguard of governmental machinery, the border examination is crucial to both the operation of the global mobility regime and of sovereign power. The visa and passport systems are tickets that allow temporary and permanent membership in the community, and the border represents the limit of the community. The nascent global mobility regime through passport, visa, and frontier formalities manage an international population through and within a biopolitical frame and a confessionary complex that creates bodies that understand themselves to be international. The author charts the way that an international biopolitical order is constructed through the creation, classification, and contention of a surveillance regime and an international political technology of the individual that is driven by the globalization of a documentary, biometric, and confessionary regime. The global visa regime and international borders are crucial in constructing both international mobile populations and international mobile individuals.

Absolute Capitalism

2019 ◽  
pp. 269-290
Author(s):  
Étienne Balibar
Keyword(s):  
The Political ◽  
The World ◽  
Great Transformation ◽  
Historical Capitalism ◽  
General Economy

In this essay, a tentative effort is made to adapt key categories of Marxism to the understanding of the world characterized by financialization and globalization. Looking for what David Harvey has called the “points of stress” in Marx’s theory of accumulation and crisis, the chapter explores two main issues: first, the withering away of the political (articulated around nations, classes, sovereignty, and antagonism) in a general economy of violence; and second, the articulation of “ecological debt” and “anti-planning” through the domination of liquidity over the organization of productive processes. Instead of focusing on the ideological category of “neo-liberalism,” the essay proposes to analyze the Great Transformation that leads from Historical Capitalism to a postcolonial and postsocialist Absolute Capitalism, the central “contradiction” of which reside in the structural and anthropological limits of commodification.

Discounting the Future

Futures ◽  
2021 ◽  
pp. 379-394
Author(s):  
Liliana Doganova
Keyword(s):  
Pharmaceutical Research ◽  
Capital Budgeting ◽  
The Political ◽  
Allocation Of Resources ◽  
Collective Decisions ◽  
The Future ◽  
History Of ◽  
Political Technology ◽  
Pharmaceutical Research And Development ◽  
Economic Instrument

This chapter analyses the political, environmental, and human implications of acts of discounting. Discounting is an economic instrument used by companies and policymakers to make the future commensurate with the present. This chapter argues that discounting is a political technology: it embeds debatable assumptions about value and the future, and it produces tangible effects in an expanding range of empirical domains. Drawing on examples from the history of discounting (capital budgeting, forest management, environmental regulation, and pharmaceutical research and development), the chapter discusses four of its political qualities. First, discounting equips collective decisions about the allocation of resources; second, it shapes the characteristics of future entities; third, it is an instrument for governing behaviour that guides decision-making in a myriad of places and instances; and fourth, it problematizes the very separation of the present and the future.

scholarly journals Μισέλ Φουκώ: Η συγκρότηση του σύγχρονου πειθαρχικού υποκειμένου

Conatus ◽  
2017 ◽  
Vol 1 (1) ◽  
pp. 41
Author(s):  
Θάνος Κιοσόγλου (Thanos Kiosoglou)
Keyword(s):  
Everyday Life ◽  
Human Body ◽  
The Body ◽  
The Political ◽  
Human Being ◽  
Human Beings ◽  
Present Account ◽  
The Reformation ◽  
The Everyday ◽  
Political Technology

In his seminal Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, Michel Foucault aims at outlining the historical course that led to the promulgation and consolidation of the institution of imprisonment as a means of punishment as well as narrating how the corresponding human type, i.e. the contemporary disciplined subject, has been shaped. Obviously, the disciplined subject gradually took the place of the tormented subject. Consequently, this study aims at describing the sequential mutations of the imposed punishment as it progressively shifted from the spectacular slaughtering of the body to the strictly scientific manipulation of the non-material dimension of the human being. The reformation of the punitive practices “constructs” a docile body. It must be noticed, however, that this body is not necessarily guilty, since the disciplinary schemes concern everybody, even the most innocent sides of the everyday life as for example the hospital, the school or the barracks. Additionally, discipline is imposed through the division of the space, what Foucault calls the “art of allocation”, so that every working person is easily seen and supervised by the eye of the authority, while the disciplined subject is being forged gradually through the sense of responsibility before the flowing time. Foucault highlights the “political technology of the body”, that is its usurpation by the authorities, who aim at imposing to it adictated activity that produces palpable results in a binding frame of time. Although selective and brief, the present account of the punitive concepts of the three last centuries clarifies the fact that the authoritarian strategies are indissolubly interwoven with the different connotations of the human body, through the use of which they subdue human beings.

scholarly journals The Phenomenon of Identity and Political Technology of Its Formation

2020 ◽  
Vol 7 (1 (25)) ◽  
pp. 103-113
Author(s):  
Yury P. Denisov
Keyword(s):  
Identity Formation ◽  
Scientific Literature ◽  
The Political ◽  
Political Technology

The article is devoted to the understanding of the phenomenon of identity through the prism of the possibility of implementing technologies of its formation. The author considers constructivist, essentialist, postmodern approaches to the study of this phenomenon, analyzes the varieties of identity defined in modern scientific literature, and describes the political technology of its construction. Based on his research the author synthesizes various approaches and develops the structure of identity. At the end of the article the author offers a few recommendations on the implementation of political technologies of identity formation.

scholarly journals The role of national symbols in the political protests: case of Mexico

2021 ◽  
pp. 1-7
Author(s):  
Liudmila Leonidovna Kleshchenko
Keyword(s):  
The Political ◽  
Protest Movements ◽  
Political Actors ◽  
Mobilization Potential ◽  
National Symbols ◽  
Political Protests ◽  
Political Forces ◽  
New Meanings ◽  
Political Technology

This article explores the specificity of using national symbols in the political protests. The construction of the new meanings of national symbols by protest movements is viewed in the frame of collective memory. The goal of this research is to determine the peculiarities of involving unofficial national symbols in the protest discourse by the opposition political forces on the example of modern Mexico. It is demonstrated how the radical protest Neozapatismo movement uses the image of the country's national hero Emiliano Zapata for legitimizing the own agrarian program and rule in the state of Chiapas, as well as a resource for mobilizing the supporters of drastic agrarian reforms. The conclusion is made that due to such characteristics of national symbols as sacred nature, wide occurrence, recognition, they possess high mobilization potential, carrying out mobilization function in the political protests. It pertains to both, state symbols (flag, coat of arms, anthem) and unofficial symbols. National symbols can also be used by protest movements as a means of legitimation / deligitimation of authority. The author underlines that the use by political actors of national symbols, which may cause strong emotional response of the audience, should be considered as manipulative political technology.

scholarly journals Controlling academics: Power and resistance in the archipelago of post-COVID-19 audit regimes

2021 ◽  
pp. 146349962110105
Author(s):  
John Welsh
Keyword(s):  
The Self ◽  
Academic Life ◽  
Survival Strategies ◽  
The Political ◽  
Academic Setting ◽  
Government Response ◽  
Audit Culture ◽  
Power And Resistance ◽  
Political Technology ◽  
Anthropological Literature

Government response to the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic promises to entrench austerity politics deeper into the organization of academic life, and audit regimes are the likely means of achieving this. Redoubled efforts to understand the operation of audit as a strategic technology of control are therefore clearly a priority. A distinctly anthropological literature has emerged over recent years to analyse and understand audit culture in academia, but what seems to be missing are analyses capable of bringing the disparate techniques experienced in academic audit together into coherent technologies, and identifying how these technologies thereby constitute a distinct audit regime within the broader audit culture. While the anthropological literature implicitly calls for further historical and conceptual exploration of the rationality to these techniques, what is required is the translation of our understanding of audit rationality into a presentation of the concrete techniques of control as they are experienced, so that more effective counter-conducts and resistances can be conceived. This article indicates how an excursion into the Soviet Gulag, and the political technology of the ‘camp’ that is its principal apparatus, can reveal not merely how the techniques of audit operate, but also indicate how those techniques might be engaged tactically in the academic setting. This kind of analogic analysis can allow us to understand audit in ways more promising for resistance to its idiomatic power, replacing demoralized and helpless resignation with inspirational exempla. Politically, the article argues that ‘techniques of the self’ are not only necessary to engage audit techniques through particular kinds of counter-conduct, but how these counter-conducts are contributory to the organized and concerted kind of resistance that we so desperately desire. The practice of tukhta is singled out and introduced as an illustrative means for combining survival strategies with the development of critical rationality in praxis.

On the political technology of Victorian England: the concept of “jingo” in the publishing practice of “Punch” magazine (1878–1879)

2021 ◽  
pp. 223-234
Author(s):  
Nataliya V. Dronova
Keyword(s):  
Public Opinion ◽  
British History ◽  
The Political ◽  
Victorian England ◽  
Political Identification ◽  
Key Issues ◽  
Publishing Practice ◽  
Indirect Analysis ◽  
Political Technology ◽  
The 19Th Century

We explore the logic and techniques of using the concept of “jingo” in the publishing practice of “Punch” magazine as a tool of political technologies aimed at shaping public opinion on key issues of foreign policy and electoral behavior in Britain in 1878–1879. The urgency of the problem being analyzed is due to the importance of a comprehensive understanding of the pheno-menon of jingoism as one of the significant manifestations of the political history and culture of Victorian England. The study adopted a cross-disciplinary approach, which involves politically and linguistically indirect analysis of the concept of “jingo” in the context of the political and ideological realities of British history during the Eastern crisis of the 1870s of the 19th century. Specific examples show that the peculiarities of the genre of the magazine, its popularity, consideration of the cultural request of its audience determined the choice of language means, the style of presentation of the material and the choice of images. It is justified that the methods used in the texts of Punch were aimed at maintaining a positive image of the liberals and discrediting opponents both at the personal level and the party. It is concluded that the concept of “jingo” in the propaganda campaign of “Punch” has taken meaning propaganda cliches, which acted as a means of political identification, social and political advertising and anti-advertising, served as a tool to manipulate public opinion. This study may provide material for a number of further studies in the study of British political culture.

Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document