An introduction to cybernetics.

In this paper, we open up a debate about the political message of The Walking Dead television series by critiquing the method and findings of its existing ideological interpretations. The series has spawned several critical analyses that suggest the series provides an endorsement of ‘Trump values’ – such as social conservatism, fascism and right-wing triumphalism. These analyses, we argue, are mired in a process of ideological overcoding which fails to appreciate the revolutionary ‘structures of feeling’ that the text creates in its audience. By unpacking the text as a ‘body genre’, we argue that watching The Walking Dead actually develops an affective desire for relatedness, codependence and the development of a collective politics. We argue these feelings resonate with The Walking Dead’s audience and that, as such, the text stands as an example of what Guattari calls ‘an ecosophic object’ a cultural object with the potential to generate social change.

Wishing for the apocalypse: The Walking Dead as an ecosophic object

Journeys beyond being: the cyberpunk-flavoured novels of Jeff Noon

Technological media spectacles increasingly mediate our relation to the nonhuman world. This becomes worrisome from an ecological perspective when the powers steering the media are corporations whose primary concern is profit. Jeff Noon’s science fiction novel Nymphomation provides readers with an instructive lens through which to examine such a coalescence between corporations and media technologies. The novel presents a mediascape saturated by corporate messages as leading to environmental deterioration but also imagines media technologies as a way to intervene in such situations through the practice of culture hacking. Culture hacking engenders creative practice, resulting in the amelioration of the environmental problems caused by the profit-driven logic of postindustrial capitalism. This representation functions as a metaphor for ecological advocacy, thus staging one of the roles ecocriticism hopes to play in mitigating environmental problems: identify and critique the cultural values and ide...

Emma K. Nicoletti

Papers

Reality Hacking—A Reality Check: Ecological Advocacy in Jeff Noon’s Nymphomation