Remembering Pokémania: Memory, Cognitive Assemblages, and Augmented Reality

Introduced in July 2016, Pokémon GO is widely considered the killer app for contemporary augmented reality. Popular attention to the game has waned in recent years, but Pokémon GO remains enormously successful in terms of both player base and revenue generation. Whether individuals experienced the game for a short time or remain dedicated hardcore players, Pokémon GO exists as memories of time and place, imbuing familiar sites and routes with new meaning and temporal connection. Attending to these complex interrelationships of place, space, mobility, humans, technologies, infrastructures, environments, and memory, we situate Pokémon GO as what Hayles (2016) calls a cognitive assemblage—sociotechnical systems of interconnectivity in which cognition is an exteriorized process occurring across multiple levels, sites, and boundaries. In turn, we conceptualize cognition (and specifically memory) not as confined within a delimited hominid body, but instead operating through contextual relations, at multiple sites, and in a constant state of becoming. By reflecting on our own experiences as part of the distributed memory of Pokémon GO, we situate memory as momentary convergence of signals made possible by infrastructures, inscribed on servers and silicon, and made part of algorithmic suggestion and learning AI. Additionally, our own memories and experiences serve to highlight the experiential complexity of cognitive assemblages in relation to structures of feeling, as well as new temporal and spatial relations.

Memorializing monuments: State space and state rollback under neo-liberalization in Mexico

Recent contributions to urban geography have considered state space by innovatively focusing on specific cases of the city built environment. Examples could include here Karl Schlögel’s slicing through the spaces of state power in Moscow 1937 or Yuri Slezkine’s methodological cue to read the saga of the Russian Revolution across time in The House of Government. This article adds to the methodological insights of urban researchers by honing in on the Monument to the Revolution in Mexico City, in order to consider its role as a socially produced, conflictual and dynamically changing site in the struggle over public space and its memorialization. Since its opening in 1938, the Monument to the Revolution at Plaza de la República has been a pivotal fulcrum of state power in abetting the changing geography of state space. Equally, the site has experienced contradictions and differences stemming from socially produced space across time, in the form of periods of state crisis and, most recently, state ‘rollback’ and ‘rollout’ under neo-liberalization. This article addresses both neo-liberalizing and differential structures of feeling as they bear on the space at the Monument to the Revolution. It does so by situating the Monument to the Revolution within the urban question and how neo-liberalization has unlocked local and aesthetic meanings that have become commodified, not least through the extraction of monopoly rents. Further, the article spotlights simultaneous contemporary contestations of state power and impulses of socio-spatial struggle over difference articulated in and around Plaza de la República at the monument. In so doing, the article contributes an important pedagogical focus on both homogenizing and differential structures of feeling inscribed in spaces of capitalism in the twenty-first century.

Discussion on Raymond Williams’ Methodology of Drama Criticism

Raymond Williams is one of the representative figures of British cultural Marxism and British cultural research. His cultural research, especially mass culture research, focuses on literary criticism. Among them, drama criticism is one of Williams’ most important forms of cultural criticism methodology. Williams’ drama criticism is based on drama history criticism. Through the historical analysis of drama content and form as well as the synchronic analysis of modern drama in different historical periods, including the ongoing drama history, Williams proposed the notion of “structures of feeling.” The emergence of this concept opened up the social critical dimension of Williams’ drama criticism. Drama criticism has become a window for examining, analyzing, and grasping the current social emotional structure or social culture. Furthermore, by implanting tragic plots in the drama, a potential practical strategy of social and cultural revolution can be realized.

TRANSNATIONAL FEELINGS: DIGITAL AFFECT AS A GLOBAL ANALYTIC

This panel examines the role of affect in transnational digital media, offering fine-grained analyses of online communities and media artifacts which contend with and carve out contested futures. In doing so, it offers digital affect as an analytic for contending with interdependent realities. Through qualitative interviews, close readings, and textual analyses, these projects engage in a range of approaches to trace the digital affects which circulate transnationally. They examine the World Economic Forum as a transnational spectacle of justice, the promotional materials and the recoding work of extremist groups like the so-called “Islamic State,” online communities which suture continuities between Al-Andalus and an emerging Arab Muslim identity, and global meme-makers who engage in expression through playful but also puncturing forms of critique. Through these case studies, the panel examines the power of particular affects—like nostalgia, fear, shame, and zanaakha, a kitschy humor of the times—and the particular power of affects—to bind and polarize communities, to identify transnational structures of feeling, and to reshape the political present by feeling history differently. By turning to these spaces, these projects make the case for careful, contextualized approaches to affect and digital media in order to mine their political power.

“Ach for It”: Anthony Leigh, Autonomy, and Queer Pleasures in the Restoration Playhouse

Anthony Leigh (d. 1692) built his career as a Restoration comedic actor by playing a combination of queer, lascivious, old, and/or disabled men to audiences’ great delight. In this essay, I key in on two plays that frame Leigh’s career: Thomas D’urfey’s The Fond Husband (1677) and Thomas Southerne’s Sir Anthony Love (1690). In The Fond Husband, a younger Leigh plays a “superannuated,” almost blind and almost deaf Old Fumble who, in the first act, kisses a man because he cannot navigate the heterosexual erotic economy of the play (as over-determined by able-bodiedness). Over a decade later, in Sir Anthony Love, Leigh plays an aging, queer Abbé who is so earnestly erotically invested in Love’s masculinity (unaware that Love is a woman in drag) that he attempts to seduce Love with dancing. I bring the beginning and end of Leigh’s stage life together to argue that Leigh’s body, performing queerly, asks audiences to confront the limits of pleasure in sustaining fantasies of the abled, autonomous heterosexual self. Using these two Restoration comedies that bookend Leigh’s career, I trace pleasures and queer structures of feeling experienced in the Restoration playhouse. While Durfey and Southerne’s plays-as-texts seek to discipline unruly, disabled queer bodies by making Fumble and the Abbé the punchline, Leigh’s performances open up alternative opportunities for queer pleasure. Pleasure becomes queer in its ability to undo orderings and fantasies based on autonomy (that nasty little myth). In his Apology, Colley Cibber reveals the ways that Leigh’s queerly performing body engages the bodies of audience members. In reflecting on the reading versus spectating experience, Cibber remarks, “The easy Reader might, perhaps, have been pleas’d with the Author without discomposing a Feature; but the Spectator must have heartily held his sides, or the Actor would have heartily made them ache for it” (89). Spectatorship is not a passive role, but rather a carnal interplay with the actor, and this interplay has immediate, bodily implications. Audiences laugh. They ache. They touch. Whereas the reader of a play in private can maintain composure, audiences in the theatre are contrarily discomposed, non-autonomous, and holding onto their sides. Leigh’s ability as a comedian energizes the text and produces pleasure on an immediate, corporeal level for audiences. And that pleasure is generated through stage business built on touching, feeling, and seducing male-presenting characters. Spectatorship may, in fact, be a queer experience as Leigh’s queerly performing body exposes the limits of autonomy.

First genocide, now ecocide: an anti-life force in organisations?

Most contributions to OSD have assumed that organisations are beset by various anxieties—some inherent to their work, some to the social context in which they operate—which threaten to blow them off course. If not managed effectively these anxieties generate various defences—splitting, denial, dissociation, etc.—which undermine the capacity to engage creatively with the organisation's internal and external reality. Many of the organisations studied, in healthcare, education, etc., ostensibly have a public purpose, but what of those organisations whose purpose is antisocial, where their business is primarily to destroy rather than create? The group relations tradition emerged from the aftermath of the Holocaust and genocide. Today the genocidal impulse has become conjoined with an ecocidal one; as a result we stand on the brink of disaster. This article explores the "structures of feeling" in organisations as our existential fears reach acute levels, and asks whether we need to extend our frame of analysis beyond the anxieties and defences provoked by our destructiveness in order to better understand humanity's apparent embrace of destructiveness.

Beyond Measure? Disability Art, Affect and Reimagining Visitor Experience

Disability, mad and d/Deaf arts are motivated to transform the arts sector and beyond in ways that foreground differing embodiments. But how do we know if such arts-based interventions are actually disrupting conventional ways of experiencing and consuming art? This article presents three themes from a critical literature review relevant to curating and creating artwork meant to spur social change related to non-normative bodies. We highlight examples that push beyond standard survey measurement techniques, such as talk-back walls and guided tours by people with lived experiences. We also explore the myriad affective outcomes of art and how we might measure emotional reactions, recognizing that disability itself is imbricated in structures of feeling. We argue that such efforts must integrate concepts of access from the field of critical disability studies. Ultimately, tools for measuring audience response to politicized art must contribute to challenging and transforming these structures.