The Scouring of Wellywood

This article uses the work of brand theorists and New Zealand–based cultural critics to examine the circumstances that created the “Hobbit Law,” a New Zealand law aimed at busting local film industry unions. Branding logics created a struggle for authenticity around the importance of Middle-earth to New Zealand's national identity in the twenty-first century. This hybrid identity was then articulated as something that stood against labor actions by film industry workers, culminating in citizen marches against local labor. It closes by exploring ways that the importance of the brand as sense-making tool under neoliberalism might be reconfigured as something that might bridge the gap between media consumer and creative industry worker.

Cultural Politics and Conquest Culture

In this article, the authors explore recent developments in urban regeneration in Istanbul, and specifically in the important historic district of Beyoğlu. In one respect, these developments, which are linked to the promotion of cruise ship tourism, are on the same predictable lines as neoliberal projects in other cities across the world. Significantly, in the Istanbul context, local agency is being sidelined, and projects are being financed and managed through the intervention of the central state. In this Turkish version of urban transformation, however, there is a locally distinctive aspect that merits attention. Istanbul is a city that was conquered by the Ottomans in 1453, and the discourse of conquest has remained significant within the urban imaginary. And at the present time, it is being mobilized by the state and its cultural ministry, in the cause of creating a new urban image conforming to its Islamist principles. The key project involves the establishment of what is called the Beyoğlu Cultural Route, which is essentially a touristic itinerary. The authors argue that the state's initiatives, and the route project in particular, involve an erasure—a conquest—of Beyoğlu's legacy of cosmopolitan values. This discussion explores what has been of civic and cultural value in the lifeworld of Beyoğlu, past and present. Resistance to the state's control of resources and institutions, and to its conquest ideology, needs to be grounded in civic principles open to diversity and difference in the city.

The Advent of Media Modernity out of Wild Bill's Ashes

This article positions David Milch's Deadwood (2004–6) as a narrative universe that merits serious theoretical scrutiny on account of its far-reaching account of the dawn of American technocapitalism. While Kittlerian media-archaeological wisdom situates media modernity's primal scene at the turn of the century (with the emergence of the Edisonian gramophone, film, and typewriter), Deadwood figures the multimedia Big Bang as having taken place a few decades prior, with the advent of telegraphy, photography, and railroads. In the world of Deadwood, this “Discourse Network 1876” condenses in the spectral figure of George Hearst, a tyrannical mining and media magnate who descends on Deadwood to seize and consolidate the area's gold mining rights. When community leaders Al Swearengen and Seth Bullock rise up to resist Hearst, he wields the cybernetic grid of Discourse Network 1876 to run roughshod over the town's fragile social compact. Although this vision of the American Leviathan is a bleak one (and therein resides much of Deadwood's tragic mythos), Milch's Deadwood: The Movie (2019) revisits the town a decade later and rehabilitates the notion that a tightknit community of concerned citizens can, under the right conditions, serve as a viable, but precarious, bulwark against the Hearstian electrical storm.

“To Believe in an Image (Again)”

In screen studies and photography studies, the name of the acclaimed film theorist and critic André Bazin is frequently invoked by scholars seeking to defend the import of analogue media on ontological grounds by citing photography's privileged connection to the real. This article seeks to unsettle Bazin's reputation as the patron saint of analogue recording by exploring the ontological implications of the concept of sense in Bazin's writings on neorealism. Placing Bazin's writings into dialogue with a selection of critiques that find the digital image to be lacking in historicity, negativity, and presence, and flag its potentially authoritarian impulses, this essay seeks to reframe Bazin's ontological project as a question of cinema's sense (rather than its essence) to mobilize a different set of conclusions that may in fact prove to restore faith in the digital image and its rapport with the real. By maintaining that what is often treated as a purely technological problem also harbors aesthetics implications, this article confronts the manifest skepticism that has pervaded the discourse around the digital since the 1990s, seeking an alternative outlook in Jean-Luc Nancy's work on sense, an ontological concept that evidences the political potentials (or potential politics) of Bazin's predilection for images, which are said to ameliorate our love for reality by transmitting the excessive sense of the world in its ambiguity, creativity, and unpredictability.

Where We Produce One, We Produce All

Hillary Clinton and Katy Perry drink the blood of murdered children to live forever, Barack Obama and Tom Hanks participate in the sex trafficking and molestation of children, and a cabal of Satan worshippers control global events from behind the scenes. This is the central, animating idea behind QAnon, a right-wing populist conspiracy theory that has achieved a level of saturation in American and global politics (in)commensurate with its peculiarity. Although part of the reason for QAnon's enormous success must reside in widespread conditions of political distrust and epistemological uncertainty, another part consists in its exploitation of a technologically enabled mode of rhetorical hermeneutics. This article focuses on the latter, arguing that there exists a tendency among QAnon followers to read and write esoterically, primarily in relation to President Trump, and to do so via the amateur “produsage” made possible by a serpentine pipeline of digital-cultural interactivity and networked internet platforms. This is not to say, of course, that any QAnon participant is versed in the history of esoteric writing, only that QAnon as a discourse appears to rely heavily on a communicative strategy of encoding and decoding that bears strong resemblance to an esoteric hermeneutic, but one played out across social media.

A Pharmacology of Cinema

French philosopher Bernard Stiegler inscribes himself in the tradition of critical theory. In this respect, the influence of Adorno and Horkheimer has been crucial to the development of his own understanding of cinema. Yet Stiegler reproaches his predecessors for not having stressed enough the positive virtues of cinema on culture. For Stiegler the industry of cinema is not simply a menace to the human mind, but a positive medium for its reinvention. It is in that sense that cinema is pharmacological, insofar as it can be either spiritually and culturally enhancing or destructive, depending on how it is acted on. As the article concludes, Stiegler's pharmacology of cinema invites us to take part in our cinematic cultural becoming through the revival of the figure of the amateur. But it does so at the risk of cultural snobbery. While Stiegler does not condemn the cinematic medium per se, he does express clear reservations on the potential of commercial cinema, the pharmacological critique of which remains to be thought.

Žižek

Two very substantial new books by Slavoj Žižek were published in early 2020; they are at two different ends of the spectrum that runs from obscure Hegelian-Lacanian philosophical reflections (Sex and the Failed Absolute) to uninhibited short Maoist-Leninist political “interventions” (A Left That Dares to Speak Its Name). Žižek claims to have completed an intellectual system (continuing the idea of earlier essays) that, as a philosophical foundation, currently informs his political writings. The review follows the sexual problematic through Žižek's philosophy (its antihumanist ethical and political orientations) to the politics of “the impossible” act or event.