Performing microcelebrity: Analyzing Papi Jiang's online persona through stance and style

ABSTRACT Contemporary digital media is characterized by a cultural logic of participation that encourages sharing, confession, phatic communication, and an emphasis on the visual. In this techno-cultural milieu, self-presentation has become a key mode of communication, and has enabled ordinary individuals to attain a measure of celebrity status. A key component of being a microcelebrity entails developing a consistent persona that is recognizable and unique. How such persona can be studied from the sociolinguistic perspective of stance and style is the focus of this article. We combined corpus linguistic and qualitative discourse analytic methods to examine a small corpus of videos produced by Chinese online celebrity, Papi Jiang. The article presents key lexico-grammatical, discourse-level, and non-linguistic resources that are analyzed as stance markers that together contribute to Papi's intense, critical-satirical performative style. The significance of the findings is discussed in relation to performance, performativity, and critique in digital media. (Persona, microcelebrity, style, performance, stance)*

The Sociocultural Context in Law: Modernism - Postmodernism - Metamodernism

This article analyses the socio-cultural aspects of modern law in terms of philosophical and legal analysis and in the context of the changes that take place in the culture of the 19th-21st centuries. The objec­tive of this work is to identify the discourse of today’s cultural strategies and their reflection in law and legal culture. The article uses an arsenal of methodological tools of philosophical and legal analysis, a cultural me­thodology through which the values of modern society are revealed, as well as a methodology of historical and philosophical research. The main result of the work is to establish that modern law cannot be understood outside and regardless of its contextuality, as well as in accordance with the cultural logic and peculiarities of civilisational deve­lop­ment in the context of globalisation. The main conclusion of the article is that the emergence of post-postcapitalism and the deepening of the consumer society result in a crisis of law and its excessive bureaucratisation and formalisation. The emerging cultural logic of metamodernism refers to such concepts as “structure of feeling”, “oscillation”, “communication”, “post-truth”, “totality” in order to restore the subject-orientation of law and give anthro­pological substance to the traditional concepts of “human dignity”, “freedom” and “justice”.

“Making My Prayer with Joy”

Drawing on recent literature in the history of emotions, this article describes Paul’s epistolary prayers as emotional practices that aim to harmonize and amplify the emotions of Paul and his addressees, particularly shared joy and longing. In Philippians and 1 Thessalonians, philophronetic topoi and the emotional norms they encode provide the basic cultural logic undergirding these prayers’ affective work. Compensating more or less successfully for the somatic signals otherwise constitutive of collective emotions, Paul’s explicit evocation of presumptively shared emotion nourishes the fantasy of presence and thus the rewards of common feeling, which include emotional sustenance for Paul himself and, if his letter is successful, a renewed feeling of solidarity among his addressees that reinforces their shared loyalty to Paul and his Lord.

Mediation, Regulation, Critique: Mapping the Relationship between Cultural Meanings and Political Responses to Poverty, 1970-2010

<p>Since 1970 there has been growing concern over poverty in New Zealand in academia, government, and popular culture. From 1970 until 1984, this concern focused on New Zealand’s prolonged recession and falling standards of living in a period of high inflation. Since then, however, poverty and economic disparity have increased dramatically. The 1970-1984 period is now looked upon as relatively generous and committed to economic equality. The increase in poverty in contemporary times is marked by two political features. Neoliberal economic and social policies have resulted in the polarisation of wealth, increased employment insecurity, and reduced income for those reliant on state benefits (Harvey 2005). At the same time, discourses of morality have blamed beneficiaries for their “dependence” on the state. These features are not simply coincidental: the Governments that pursued income supplement reductions in New Zealand also employed the rhetoric of “welfare dependency” (O’Brien, Bradford, Stevens, Walters & Wicks 2010). As such, the link between moral discourse about poverty and political outcomes for the poor seems undeniable. I argue in this thesis that the relationship between these moral discourses and political outcomes is not as straightforward as the narrative above suggests. To make this argument I analyse moral discourses of poverty in the pre-neoliberal and neoliberal periods and find that these discourses are not as clearly aligned with macroeconomic periods as some suggest. Using this analysis, I then draw upon three traditions of cultural studies with macro-sociological theoretical orientations to determine a more fruitful analysis of the relationship between cultural meaning and political outcomes. I propose in this thesis that an analysis of the cultural meaning and political outcomes of poverty requires an investigation into three related spaces of contestation: mediation, regulation, and critique. To operationalise this analysis I focus specifically on newsprint mediation of poverty and neoliberalism, the institutional arrangements of the state that correspond to macroeconomic periods, and anti-poverty social movements. I also argue – counter to trends in sociological cultural studies – that the concepts of ideology and class must be re-introduced to effectively analyse the relationship between the cultural meanings and political outcomes of poverty. In my analysis I find considerable spaces of contestation between newspaper media, state institutions, and social movements. At the same time, synergies between them emerge. In all three, a “cultural logic” that promotes social and ethnic identities over economic identities becomes institutionalized within social movements, state institutions, and media reporting within the neoliberal era. This promotion of identities runs counter to the economic regulation of the period, where polarization occurs throughout society. As this “cultural logic” is institutionalized in the state, it is used to promote the understanding that economic disparity occurs between cultural identities rather than across them. As such, it translates potentially radical claims for economic redistribution into claims for inclusion. From this finding I conclude that the cultural logic, although it is called upon by actors across the political spectrum, nevertheless constitutes an ideology. It not only serves, in economic terms, a limited class at the expense of many, but also masks relative class benefits.</p>

Mediation, Regulation, Critique: Mapping the Relationship between Cultural Meanings and Political Responses to Poverty, 1970-2010

<p>Since 1970 there has been growing concern over poverty in New Zealand in academia, government, and popular culture. From 1970 until 1984, this concern focused on New Zealand’s prolonged recession and falling standards of living in a period of high inflation. Since then, however, poverty and economic disparity have increased dramatically. The 1970-1984 period is now looked upon as relatively generous and committed to economic equality. The increase in poverty in contemporary times is marked by two political features. Neoliberal economic and social policies have resulted in the polarisation of wealth, increased employment insecurity, and reduced income for those reliant on state benefits (Harvey 2005). At the same time, discourses of morality have blamed beneficiaries for their “dependence” on the state. These features are not simply coincidental: the Governments that pursued income supplement reductions in New Zealand also employed the rhetoric of “welfare dependency” (O’Brien, Bradford, Stevens, Walters & Wicks 2010). As such, the link between moral discourse about poverty and political outcomes for the poor seems undeniable. I argue in this thesis that the relationship between these moral discourses and political outcomes is not as straightforward as the narrative above suggests. To make this argument I analyse moral discourses of poverty in the pre-neoliberal and neoliberal periods and find that these discourses are not as clearly aligned with macroeconomic periods as some suggest. Using this analysis, I then draw upon three traditions of cultural studies with macro-sociological theoretical orientations to determine a more fruitful analysis of the relationship between cultural meaning and political outcomes. I propose in this thesis that an analysis of the cultural meaning and political outcomes of poverty requires an investigation into three related spaces of contestation: mediation, regulation, and critique. To operationalise this analysis I focus specifically on newsprint mediation of poverty and neoliberalism, the institutional arrangements of the state that correspond to macroeconomic periods, and anti-poverty social movements. I also argue – counter to trends in sociological cultural studies – that the concepts of ideology and class must be re-introduced to effectively analyse the relationship between the cultural meanings and political outcomes of poverty. In my analysis I find considerable spaces of contestation between newspaper media, state institutions, and social movements. At the same time, synergies between them emerge. In all three, a “cultural logic” that promotes social and ethnic identities over economic identities becomes institutionalized within social movements, state institutions, and media reporting within the neoliberal era. This promotion of identities runs counter to the economic regulation of the period, where polarization occurs throughout society. As this “cultural logic” is institutionalized in the state, it is used to promote the understanding that economic disparity occurs between cultural identities rather than across them. As such, it translates potentially radical claims for economic redistribution into claims for inclusion. From this finding I conclude that the cultural logic, although it is called upon by actors across the political spectrum, nevertheless constitutes an ideology. It not only serves, in economic terms, a limited class at the expense of many, but also masks relative class benefits.</p>

Post-Crisis Reckoning: Making Sense of Early 21st-Century Civilizational Ruptures

As the world is struggling with the Covid crisis and its numerous aftereffects, it is easy to forget that the present pandemic is only the latest of a whole series of paradigm-changing 21st-century crises. Indeed, the word “crisis” has become one of the key concepts for the understanding of the early 21st century. Thus, crisis seems very much to be the default position of the 21st century, the new norm. In this paper, I argue that the 21st century has a recognizably different cultural logic from what the previous one had: most of our social, ideological, political, financial, and ecological paradigms are either changing or will (or must) change soon. As most of our critical concepts, intellectual tools, and ideological frameworks were made during the boom years of the late 20th century, they are clearly outdated and inadequate today. Thus, in this paper, through taking account of these shifting intellectual and artistic paradigms, I attempt to indicate how the present crisis of knowledge and sense-making may be turned into a process of knowing and making sense of crisis, and thus help us meet the challenges of the new century. It is often through these fault-lines, breakdowns, and inconsistencies of our narratives that one may recognize those pre-crisis assumptions that we have to critically re-evaluate and update in order to understand the new century.1

Reinterpreting local wisdom of Rumah Kaki Seribu as sustainable architecture

Awareness of the increasing global issues regarding global warming and climate change has encouraged building designers to look back on knowledge of traditional architecture as energy-efficient and sustainable solutions. This study focuses on the traditional architecture of Rumah Kaki Seribu as sustainable architecture. Rumah Kaki Seribu is a traditional architecture located in the Arfak Mountains, West Papua, inhabited by the Arfak Tribe. Each architectural element of Rumah Kaki Seribu has a different sustainability value. The sustainability value of Rumah Kaki Seribu discussed is the concentration on the fireplace element and the roof element. The fireplace and roof elements were analyzed using the eco-cultural concept of the six competing logics of sustainable architecture by Simon Guy and Graham Farmer. Eco-cultural logic is a logic that is closely related to traditional architecture. The characteristics of sustainable buildings that use eco-cultural logic can be determined by looking at several parameters, namely the image of space, the source of environmental knowledge, the building image, technologies, and the idealized concept of place. The study aims to learn traditional architecture as a design approach to understand and respect the environmental context for solutions to global issues that occur.

Tweeting ourselves to death: the cultural logic of digital capitalism

Media scholarship has long argued that public discourse is a function of the architecture of the media by which it is carried. Media architecture is, as political economists have argued, in turn shaped by the capitalist regime of accumulation within which the media operate. This paper draws together these two strands of literature to ask: as the accumulation of data is coming to define contemporary capitalism, what cultural logic does this produce? The paper argues that, as media are shaped around the extracting user data, they become organized around personhood and the extension of commodification deeper into our sense of self. The lifestyle fragmentation and segmentation engendered by new media technologies carry over into public discourse, shaping a public, and political life defined by identity and difference. If, as Neil Postman suggested, a society’s way of knowing reflects its media technology, the emerging epistemology of the social media society is truth as identity, as our very ways of knowing are reduced to expressions of who we are.

“They Paint Sedition on the Walls”: Towards a University of “Immigrants”

While publicly funded institutions in India have provoked the punitive ire of the ruling Hindu Right and systematically invited acts of state terror, a new education policy drafted by the same ruling party advocates a wholesale return to a “liberal arts” curriculum. The essay attempts to demonstrate how the “liberal” has become the cultural logic of a communal-fascist regime, insofar as the regime is harnessing universities to its project of redefining citizenship as exclusionary, with a special rejection of the citizenship claims of Muslims. In this context, how might we rally our forces behind a hijacked “idea” of the university—and what are the possible futures of such a political maneuver? This essay suggests how a practice of imaginative labor at the university might be leveled not toward citizenship, but toward lessons in immigrancy. It will also address how a mass online transition—prompted by policy in the name of a pandemic—reconfigures rights of entry to this imaginative labor.