Showing papers in "Representations in 2014"
TL;DR: In this paper, the authors argue that the intellectual implications of search technology are rendered opaque by humanists' habit of considering algorithms as arbitrary tools, and that humanists may need to converse with disciplines that understand algorithms as principled epistemological theories.
Abstract: Quantitative methods have been central to the humanities since scholars began relying on full-text search to map archives. But the intellectual implications of search technology are rendered opaque by humanists’ habit of considering algorithms as arbitrary tools. To reflect more philosophically, and creatively, on the hermeneutic options available to us, humanists may need to converse with disciplines that understand algorithms as principled epistemological theories. We need computer science, in other words, not as a source of tools but as a theoretical interlocutor.
72 citations
TL;DR: In this paper, the importance of UNESCO's role within the global history of the book is established, and the research on the book in the developing world that UNESCO sponsored in the 1960s and 1970s, and how that research supported claims that government should intervene in book and media industries in order to shift the disastrous imbalance in the global media system.
Abstract: This article establishes the importance of UNESCO’s role within the global history of the book. Its focus is the research on the book in the developing world that UNESCO sponsored in the 1960s and 1970s, and how that research supported claims that government should intervene in book and media industries in order to shift the disastrous imbalance in the global media system. It shows how these claims were undermined by the interests of the developed world and sidelined by the emerging discipline of book history.
40 citations
TL;DR: It is argued that linguistic capitalism implies not an economy of attention but an Economy of expression, and natural languages could progressively evolve to seamlessly integrate the linguistic biases of algorithms and the economical constraints of the global linguistic economy.
Abstract: Google’s highly successful business model is based on selling words that appear in search queries. Organizing several million auctions per minute, the company has created the first global linguistic market and demonstrated that linguistic capitalism is a lucrative business domain, one in which billions of dollars can be realized per year. Google’s services need to be interpreted from this perspective. This article argues that linguistic capitalism implies not an economy of attention but an economy of expression. As several million users worldwide daily express themselves through one of Google’s interfaces, the texts they produce are systematically mediated by algorithms. In this new context, natural languages could progressively evolve to seamlessly integrate the linguistic biases of algorithms and the economical constraints of the global linguistic economy.
29 citations
TL;DR: The authors argue that denotative, literal, and technical language is the opposite of literary language and a vigorous reading of the former should seek to realize its opacity and difficulty, its nonidentity with itself.
Abstract: Denotative, literal, and technical language—transparent and lacking in resonance—seems to be the opposite of literary language. A vigorous reading of the former, we argue, should seek to realize its opacity and difficulty, its nonidentity with itself. To do so requires a revised and expanded sense of denotation, a rethinking of reference, the dereification of writing, an appeal to more expansive and heterodox archives, a historicism that forestalls or delays the figural, and more reading. Unlike recent literary critical attempts to restrict the field of reading, the practices sketched here seek to remove all limits to that which can be read, researched, and made into meaning.
19 citations
TL;DR: In this paper, the authors compare twenty-first-century credit scoring against eighteenth-and nineteenth-century forms of credit evaluation, and show that the credit score, the social person, and literary character remain significantly entangled.
Abstract: This essay reads twenty-first-century credit scoring against eighteenth- and nineteenth-century forms of credit evaluation. While the latter famously draws its qualitative model of credibility from the novel, and the former predictably describes itself as quantitative and impersonal, in fact the credit score, the social person, and literary character remain significantly entangled. Through a reading of Gary Shteyngart’s Super Sad True Love Story , this essay shows what kinds of persons the practice of credit rating produces.
19 citations
TL;DR: In this paper, Barthes reconsiders notation as the practice by which the writer provisionally makes literary meaning, and shows how an emerging genre, the novel of commission, pulls referential, preparatory materials into the novel in order to reimagine the sociality and institutionality of the writing process.
Abstract: In “The Reality Effect,” Roland Barthes reveals notation’s ideological function within the realist novel; a decade later in Preparation of the Novel , Barthes reconsiders notation as the practice by which the writer provisionally makes literary meaning. Barthes’s revision of his claims for the reality effect helps us see how an emerging genre—the novel of commission—pulls referential, preparatory materials into the novel in order to reimagine the sociality and institutionality of the writing process.
14 citations
TL;DR: The epistemological rupture proffered by finance in the seventies, seeming to inaugurate a distinct mode of production, is merely a form of appearance that capital's struggle takes in crisis, beneath which the capitalist economy remains under the sway of the law of value and its source in socially necessary labor time as discussed by the authors.
Abstract: The epistemological rupture proffered by finance in the seventies, seeming to inaugurate a distinct mode of production, is merely a form of appearance that capital’s struggle takes in crisis, beneath which the capitalist economy remains under the sway of the law of value and its source in socially necessary labor time. While narrative fiction has been taken insistently as the relevant literary mode or genre for understanding the motion and particularly the temporality of finance, poetry finally provides a better heuristic for such an understanding and, more substantially, for grasping the motion and dynamic of value moving behind the seeming of finance’s hegemony.
10 citations
TL;DR: In this paper, a constellation of high-rise horror movies from contemporary Bollywood is analyzed as a cinema of apprehension, and an emergent "techno-aesthetic of security" that plunges viewers into an immersive experience of horror, orienting them to the violence of acute dispossession (of lands and livelihoods) catalyzed by current speculative financial globalization.
Abstract: This essay theorizes a constellation of “high-rise horror” films from contemporary Bollywood as a cinema of apprehension. I elaborate an emergent “techno-aesthetic of security” that plunges spectators into an immersive experience of horror, orienting them to the violence of acute dispossession (of lands and livelihoods) catalyzed by current speculative financial globalization.
10 citations
TL;DR: In this paper, the discursive power of the JSTOR database is examined, and it is shown that using an online resource for research acceding to unnoticed assumptions that underlie the construction of that resource can influence the work that gets done.
Abstract: Digital resources are helping to change the ways scholars and students work, but they must also be helping to shape the work that gets done. Taking JSTOR as an example, we might ask about the discursive power of the database. How is using an online resource for research acceding to unnoticed assumptions that underlie the construction of that resource?
9 citations
TL;DR: The Triumph of Life by Percy Shelley as mentioned in this paper is a reinterpretation of Lucretian poetic science that connects the epochal, romantic interest in biological life to the period's pressing new sense of its own historicity.
Abstract: This essay explores Percy Shelley’s The Triumph of Life as a strategic revival of Lucretian poetic science: a materialism fit to connect the epochal, romantic interest in biological life to the period’s pressing new sense of its own historicity. Shelley mobilizes Lucretian natural simulacra to show how personal bodies produce and integrate passages of historical time, exercising a poetics of transience that resists the triumphalism characteristic of both historiography and vitalist biology in the post-Waterloo period. Representing aging faces as mutable registers of the “living storm” of a post-Napoleonic interval, The Triumph depicts the face-giving trope of prosopopoeia as the unintended work of multitudes—demonstrating a nineteenth-century possibility of thinking biological, historical, and rhetorical materialisms together.
8 citations
TL;DR: The authors traces a long history in Christian political thought of linking politics, statecraft, and worldly authority to the broader category of carnal literalism, typed as "Jewish" by the Pauline tradition.
Abstract: This article traces a long history in Christian political thought of linking politics, statecraft, and worldly authority to the broader category of carnal literalism, typed as “Jewish” by the Pauline tradition. This tradition produced a tendency to discuss political error in terms of Judaism, with the difference between mortal and eternal, private and public, tyrant and legitimate monarch, mapped onto the difference between Jew and Christian. As a result of this history, transcendence as a political ideal has often figured (and perhaps still figures?) its enemies as Jewish.
TL;DR: The authors examines the co-implications of CGI filmmaking, US hegemony, and neoliberal financialization as manifested in Korea's "IMF crisis cinema" to reflect on the innate proximity of popular filmmaking to finance, and specifically on the proximity between its own material apparatus and the economic apparatus that the IMF crisis inserted into the center of Korean public discourse.
Abstract: This paper examines the co-implications of CGI filmmaking, US hegemony, and neoliberal financialization as manifested in Korea’s “IMF crisis cinema.” These films are populated by what I term neoliberal forms that epitomize the effort in this cinema to reflect on the innate proximity of popular filmmaking to finance, and specifically on the proximity between its own material apparatus and the economic apparatus that the IMF crisis inserted into the center of Korean public discourse.
TL;DR: In this paper, a conjectural history of symbolic language shared by the Victorian human and natural sciences is explored, in which linguistic events of metaphor become narrative events of organic metamorphosis.
Abstract: George Eliot’s recourse to comparative mythology and biology in Middlemarch and Daniel Deronda engages a conjectural history of symbolic language shared by the Victorian human and natural sciences. Troubling the formation of scientific knowledge as a progression from figural to literal usage, Eliot’s novels activate an oscillation between registers, in which linguistic events of metaphor become narrative events of organic metamorphosis.
[...]
TL;DR: In this paper, the authors describe financial dramas as futures markets that establish rates of conversion between heterogeneous equities and should be understood as functionally equivalent to the class of financial instruments known as derivatives.
Abstract: Recent HBO dramas like Game of Thrones , Luck , and The Newsroom do more than generate HBO brand equity—they quantify that equity and determine the conditions under which it might be converted into other kinds of Time Warner equity. These incipiently financial dramas are futures markets that establish rates of conversion between heterogeneous equities and should be understood as functionally equivalent to the class of financial instruments known as derivatives.
TL;DR: This paper examined nonfiction documentary forms where more poetic practices have served as a communicative, if not denotative, tool for underwater observation. But their focus was on the first extended underwater observation by pioneering divers like William Beebe, Hans Hass, Philippe Tailliez, and Philippe Diole.
Abstract: While documentary is generally thought to value clarity and denotation, this article examines nonfiction documentary forms where more poetic practices have served as a communicative, if not denotative, tool. Accounts of the first extended underwater observation by pioneering divers like William Beebe, Hans Hass, Philippe Tailliez, and Philippe Diole used literary allusions and fanciful rhetoric to express the implausible conditions of this alien environment, in a practice that reached its height before the flowering of underwater color and documentary cinema in the mid-1950s.
TL;DR: In this paper, the authors argue that a technical maritime lexicon marks the protagonists' accession to maturity, and that such a lexicon and the love for the world it attests to and demands also forces a redefinition of what it means to be mature, offering an open, adventurous, never to be completed Bildung that refuses the stasis of marriage or a settled profession.
Abstract: Technical language in novels, rare in itself, is still more rarely interpreted. Focusing on Robert Louis Stevenson’s bildungsromans, in this essay I argue that a technical maritime lexicon marks their protagonists’ accession to maturity. But that lexicon and the love for the world it attests to and demands also forces a redefinition of what it means to be mature, offering an open, adventurous, never-to-be completed Bildung that refuses the stasis of marriage or a settled profession.
TL;DR: In the 1980s, Japanese animation shifted its focus away from the social self and toward cosmic subjectivity, the framing of intensely personal emotions within the larger impersonal expanse of the universe as mentioned in this paper.
Abstract: In the 1980s, Japanese animation shifted its focus away from the social self and toward cosmic subjectivity, the framing of intensely personal emotions within the larger impersonal expanse of the universe. This essay examines an important moment in this shift: Night on the Galactic Railroad, anime studio Group TAC’s 1985 feature based on the classic Japanese children’s tale by Miyazawa Kenji. The film emphasizes the interpenetration of the microcosmic and macrocosmic through a range of experiments with “limited” animation, sound design, and character design that would in turn influence the imaginary worlds of later anime.
TL;DR: In the late eighteenth century, a lay naturalist in Hessen-Kassel created a library of books, each made out of a different species of tree as mentioned in this paper, which troubled efforts to know and manage the forest in this period.
Abstract: In the late eighteenth century, a lay naturalist in Hessen-Kassel created a library of books, each made out of a different species of tree. This essay looks at how the wood library addressed the gap between the materials of nature and the materials of nature’s explanation, which troubled efforts to know and manage the forest in this period.
TL;DR: The authors found evidence that the novelist Endo Shūsaku read the anticolonialist writer Frantz Fanon in the early 1950s, incorporating Fanon's arguments on color and colonialism into his depiction of Japanese subjects after 1945.
Abstract: Textual evidence indicates that the novelist Endō Shūsaku read the anticolonialist writer Frantz Fanon in the early 1950s, incorporating Fanon’s arguments on color and colonialism into his depiction of Japanese subjects after 1945. Examination of that heretofore unnoticed encounter provides an opportunity to reconsider the paradigms by which each writer is understood today and the terms in which they imagined a world not ordered by empires, whether European, American, or Japanese.