scholarly journals From Anti-Oedipus to Anti-Hype: A Critique of Hyperstition

2020 ◽  
Vol 31 (5) ◽  
pp. 23-36
Keyword(s):  
Science Fiction ◽  
Human Behavior ◽  
Critical Analysis ◽  
Gilles Deleuze ◽  
Felix Guattari ◽  
Distinct Form ◽  
Left Wing ◽  
The Past ◽  
Current State ◽  
The Future

The article describes the current state of left-wing post-Deleuzian philosophy, which is going through a period of obsession with the production of fictions. The authors argue that science fiction is today often mobilized as a tool for imagining a future that is incommensurable with the current late capitalist order. However, when trying to imagine a post-capitalist future, contemporary left-wing philosophers tend to look to the past for inspiration, a maneuver which only exacerbates the “exhaustion of the future,” that has retrofuturism as its cultural correlate. Based on this, the authors suggest that philosophical instrumentalization of science fiction may result in a distinct form of intellectual escapism. The article argues that in this context, special attention should be paid to the concept of hyperstition, which has arisen under the influence of science fiction narratives and is embedded in current popular rhetoric about hacking the future. The authors point out that the way hyperstition functions has a resemblance to marketing mechanisms, and they suggest that it corresponds to what Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari called an unconscious representation or fake image. The article subjects hyperstition to a critical analysis in which the authors show that the genealogy of hyperstition as a practice of programming reality through fictions stems from the ideas of William S. Burroughs. Burroughs set out to develop new ways of linguistic infection and modeling human behavior by means of his cutup technique. This approach blurs the distinction between reality and fiction. Some members of the CCRU transplanted Burroughs’ ideas to the theoretical soil that Deleuze and Guattari had tilled. Hyperstition has been reborn in the CCRU’s legacy project of left-wing accelerationism, which redirects the idea of self-fulfilling fiction toward developing a non-deterministic concept of progress. Pointing to the ineffectiveness of hyperstition as a tool for socio-political change, the authors propose abandoning Anti-Oedipus in favor of Anti-Hype.

Artistic Challenges within Control Societies: Big Data and Democratic Resistance

MedienJournal ◽  
2017 ◽  
Vol 38 (4) ◽  
pp. 50-61 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jan Jagodzinski
Keyword(s):  
Big Data ◽  
Gilles Deleuze ◽  
Data Archive ◽  
Current State ◽  
The Future ◽  
The Way

This paper will first briefly map out the shift from disciplinary to control societies (what I call designer capitalism, the idea of control comes from Gilles Deleuze) in relation to surveillance and mediation of life through screen cultures. The paper then shifts to the issues of digitalization in relation to big data that have the danger of continuing to close off life as zoë, that is life that is creative rather than captured via attention technologies through marketing techniques and surveillance. The last part of this paper then develops the way artists are able to resist the big data archive by turning the data in on itself to offer viewers and participants a glimpse of the current state of manipulating desire and maintaining copy right in order to keep the future closed rather than being potentially open.

BACK ON CIRCE'S ISLAND

Ramus ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 49 (1-2) ◽  
pp. 213-235
Author(s):  
Michiel van Veldhuizen
Keyword(s):  
Science Fiction ◽  
Analogical Reasoning ◽  
Gilles Deleuze ◽  
Margaret Atwood ◽  
Classical Antiquity ◽  
Felix Guattari ◽  
Dio Chrysostom ◽  
The Witch ◽  
The Moment ◽  
Physical Degradation

The reception of Circe's island in and through Classical Antiquity has largely focused on the enigmatic sorceress herself. The long literary chain of interpretive topoi—Circe the witch, the whore, the temptress—stretches from Apollonius, Virgil, Ovid, and Dio Chrysostom to Spenser, Calderón, Joyce, Margaret Atwood, and Madeline Miller. Her role as Odysseus’ benefactor, so unmistakable in Homer, is soon forgotten; to Virgil, she is above all dea saeva, (‘the savage goddess’, Aen. 7.19). One distinguishing feature of Circe and her reception is the focus on representation: the enchantment of Circe, as Greta Hawes puts it, is above all a study in allegory. From the moment Circe put a spell on Odysseus’ companions, transforming them into animals in Book 10 of the Odyssey, Circe has invited analogical reasoning, centered on what the transformation from one being into another represents. More often than not, this transformation is interpreted according to a dualist thinking about humans and animals: subjects are transformed from one being into another being, thus representing some moral or physical degradation. This article, by contrast, concentrates on Circe's island through the lens of becoming-animal, the concept developed by Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari in the tenth plateau of A Thousand Plateaus, ‘1730: Becoming-Intense, Becoming-Animal, Becoming-Imperceptible…’. I explicate the concept of becoming-animal by applying it to a Deleuzian encounter with Circe's island, both in its ancient articulations and in its various receptions, including H.G. Wells's science fiction novel The Island of Dr. Moreau.

Excavating the Future

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Shawn Malley
Keyword(s):  
Popular Culture ◽  
Science Fiction ◽  
Cultural Study ◽  
Homeland Security ◽  
War On Terror ◽  
Adaptive Responses ◽  
Film And Television ◽  
The Past ◽  
The Future ◽  
The U.S

Well-known in popular culture for tomb-raiding and mummy-wrangling, the archaeologist is also a rich though often unacknowledged figure for constructing ‘strange new worlds’ from ‘strange old worlds’ in science fiction. But more than a well-spring for scenarios, SF’s archaeological imaginary is also a hermeneutic tool for excavating the ideological motivations of digging up the past buried in the future. A cultural study of an array of popular though critically neglected North American SF film and television texts–spanning the gamut of telefilms, pseudo-documentaries, teen serial drama and Hollywood blockbusters–Excavating the Future treats archaeology as a trope for exploring the popular archaeological imagination and the uses to which it is being put by the U.S. state and its adversaries. By treating SF texts as documents of archaeological experience circulating within and between scientific and popular culture communities and media, Excavating the Future develops critical strategies for analyzing SF film and television’s critical and adaptive responses to contemporary geopolitical concerns about the war on terror, homeland security, the invasion and reconstruction of Iraq, and the ongoing fight against ISIS.

The Everyday Archaeologist Matters

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sarah E. Price ◽  
Philip J. Carr
Keyword(s):  
Human Behavior ◽  
Cultural Changes ◽  
Southeastern Archaeology ◽  
The Past ◽  
Everyday Lives ◽  
The Everyday ◽  
The Future

Archaeology has many goals, and those goals may differ depending on your theoretical paradigm. These aims vary from bringing order to an incomplete and imperfect record of people in the past, to distilling the actions of the past in order to understand not only cultural changes but also the reasons those change occurred, to synthesizing this information to predict human behavior through laws, and to using the past to better the future of humanity. Thinking about the everyday broadens perspectives, posits new questions, presents testable hypotheses, and, perhaps because it is measured on a shared scale, brings some level of consilience to southeastern archaeology. In this chapter, the authors discuss three opportunities for making archaeology relevant: writing palatably, scaling interactions, and engaging people with their past by bringing archaeology into their everyday lives.

Introduction

2017 ◽  
pp. 1-21
Author(s):  
Enzo Traverso
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Historical Context ◽  
Left Wing ◽  
The Past ◽  
The Future ◽  
Financial Capitalism

The introduction analyzes the historical context in which left-wing melancholy arises as a prismatic frame for rethinking the past: “presentism,” a dilated present that absorbs in itself both the past and the future. It corresponds to a neoliberal temporality that replaces twentieth century utopias with a spasmodic acceleration retreated into the boundaries of financial capitalism, deprived of any projection into the future.

Indigenous science (fiction) for the Anthropocene: Ancestral dystopias and fantasies of climate change crises

2018 ◽  
Vol 1 (1-2) ◽  
pp. 224-242 ◽  
Author(s):  
Kyle P. Whyte
Keyword(s):  
Climate Change ◽  
Science Fiction ◽  
Indigenous Peoples ◽  
Viewing Time ◽  
The Past ◽  
The Future ◽  
Parallel Universes ◽  
Indigenous Perspectives ◽  
Colonial Violence ◽  
Climate Crisis

Portrayals of the Anthropocene period are often dystopian or post-apocalyptic narratives of climate crises that will leave humans in horrific science-fiction scenarios. Such narratives can erase certain populations, such as Indigenous peoples, who approach climate change having already been through transformations of their societies induced by colonial violence. This essay discusses how some Indigenous perspectives on climate change can situate the present time as already dystopian. Instead of dread of an impending crisis, Indigenous approaches to climate change are motivated through dialogic narratives with descendants and ancestors. In some cases, these narratives are like science fiction in which Indigenous peoples work to empower their own protagonists to address contemporary challenges. Yet within literature on climate change and the Anthropocene, Indigenous peoples often get placed in historical categories designed by nonIndigenous persons, such as the Holocene. In some cases, these categories serve as the backdrop for allies' narratives that privilege themselves as the protagonists who will save Indigenous peoples from colonial violence and the climate crisis. I speculate that this tendency among allies could possibly be related to their sometimes denying that they are living in times their ancestors would have likely fantasized about. I will show how this denial threatens allies' capacities to build coalitions with Indigenous peoples. Inuit culture is based on the ice, the snow and the cold…. It is the speed and intensity in which change has occurred and continues to occur that is a big factor why we are having trouble with adapting to certain situations. Climate change is yet another rapid assault on our way of life. It cannot be separated from the first waves of changes and assaults at the very core of the human spirit that have come our way. Just as we are recognizing and understanding the first waves of change … our environment and climate now gets threatened. Sheila Watt-Cloutier, interviewed by the Ottawa Citizen. (Robb, 2015) In North America many Indigenous traditions tell us that reality is more than just facts and figures collected so that humankind might widely use resources. Rather, to know “it”—reality—requires respect for the relationships and relatives that constitute the complex web of life. I call this Indigenous realism, and it entails that we, members of humankind, accept our inalienable responsibilities as members of the planet's complex life system, as well as our inalienable rights. ( Wildcat, 2009 , xi) Within Māori ontological and cosmological paradigms it is impossible to conceive of the present and the future as separate and distinct from the past, for the past is constitutive of the present and, as such, is inherently reconstituted within the future. (Stewart-Harawira, 2005, 42) In fact, incorporating time travel, alternate realities, parallel universes and multiverses, and alternative histories is a hallmark of Native storytelling tradition, while viewing time as pasts, presents, and futures that flow together like currents in a navigable stream is central to Native epistemologies. ( Dillon, 2016a , 345)

Science Fiction and the Rules of Uncertainty

2020 ◽  
Vol 24 (1) ◽  
pp. 1-10
Author(s):  
Guillermina De Ferrari
Keyword(s):  
Collective Action ◽  
Science Fiction ◽  
Failure Time ◽  
Time Travel ◽  
Apocalyptic Literature ◽  
The Past ◽  
Moral Freedom ◽  
The Future ◽  
Specific Individual

A frequent trope in apocalyptic literature is a war between time and knowledge. Focusing on Rita Indiana’s “cli-fi” novel La mucama de Omicunlé (Omicunlé’s Maid), this essay explores the ambiguous role that uncertainty plays in apocalyptic literature. It argues that time travel seeks to revert the result of negative actions in the past, eliminating uncertainty retrospectively. And yet moral freedom, the mark of the human, requires uncertainty to function, which thwarts time travel as a messianic genre. Yet even in failure, time travel reminds us that impending disaster is contingent on specific individual and collective action, suggesting that the future could still perhaps be otherwise.

scholarly journals The future of multimodal corpora

2011 ◽  
Vol 11 (2) ◽  
pp. 391-415 ◽  
Author(s):  
Dawn Knight
Keyword(s):  
Corpus Linguistics ◽  
State Of The Art ◽  
Future Developments ◽  
The Past ◽  
Current State ◽  
Linguistic Research ◽  
Multimodal Corpora ◽  
The Future ◽  
Multimodal Corpus ◽  
Critical Overview

This paper takes stock of the current state-of-the-art in multimodal corpus linguistics, and proposes some projections of future developments in this field. It provides a critical overview of key multimodal corpora that have been constructed over the past decade and presents a wish-list of future technological and methodological advancements that may help to increase the availability, utility and functionality of such corpora for linguistic research.

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