Cultural Theorists Research Articles

Substitution: On the Animating Spirit of Economic Rationality

The term ‘substitution’, given minimal attention in thinking, became important in modern logic, but its treatment is highly technical. After a short review of its conceptual-historical background, the article discusses two important contemporary social and cultural theorists of substitution, Roberto Calasso and Michel Serres. It then turns to William Stanley Jevons, who first took up Boole’s logic, formulated the principle ‘substitution of similars’, the presumed heart of reasoning itself, constructed the first computer, and was a founder of neoclassical economics. The coincidence of these innovations in Jevons, through ‘substitution’, captures the way the modern world was set on its current trajectory, progressing towards a ‘substitution society’. The article concludes that as the key values of human life cannot be substituted, substitution as a general principle applied to human existence is absurd; economic theory, however, as shown in the ideas of Jevons, is founded on the exclusion of such genuine and meaningful concerns.

Are There Any True Formal Models of Success- and Prestige-Biased Social Learning?

Abstract Cultural transmission theorists have proposed there is an inherent tradeoff between social learning strategies [SLS s] that rely on direct observation of a cultural variant’s payoffs (i.e., direct bias) and those that rely on a model’s cues of success or prestige (i.e., indirect bias). While the former relies on higher-quality informational goods, a model’s success or prestige cues may be easier to access. This paper reviews mathematical models that have purported to capture indirect bias, and shows they fail to capture this tradeoff, instead making assumptions that reduce their transmission dynamics to those of a direct bias. I include a simple agent-based model to illustrate that their formal equivalence, and therefore our ability to conclude that success and prestige bias are adaptive SLS s, depends on a high correlation between success/prestige cues and a model’s payoffs. This suggests the importance of empirically ascertaining how learners evaluate a model’s fitness, and how they mitigate the risks of biasing their learning on payoff-correlates rather than payoffs themselves. Exploring the cognition underlying these decisions may shed light on maladaptive social learning.

Poetic scenes of prenatal screening

ABSTRACT Every day a patient’s pocket becomes 425 dollars lighter for clinicians to guide and provide non-invasive prenatal testing. This research inquires: what are clinicians’ experiences of explaining prenatal screening and delivering genetic syndrome diagnoses? This paper Departs Radically in Academic Writing (DRAW) and presents key findings from qualitative interviews with 12 clinicians in “poetic scenes”, inspired by cultural theorist Lauren Berlant and anthropologist Kathleen Stewart. I describe DRAW, the birth story of a research rationale, and my metaphorical meeting with Berlant and Stewart. Then the poetic scenes begin: we enter doctors’ offices and bump into assumptions; we become a time-poor clinician, labouring in language construction with varying degrees of consciousness; we dissect “risk” – an ambiguous specimen; and we board the wrong train, going to prenatal screening destinations that we don’t like to name. We imagine a world where prenatal screening is built with poetry. We dream of attention to words.

The Story of Romantic Love and Polyamory

ABSTRACTThis article explores the relationship between romantic love and polyamory. Our central question is whether traditional norms of monogamy can be excised from romantic love so as to harmonize with polyamory's ethical dimensions (as we construe them). How one answers this question bears on another: whether ‘polyamory’ should principally be understood in terms of romantic love or instead some alternative conception(s). Our efforts to address these questions begin by briefly motivating our favored approach to romantic love, a ‘narratival’ one inspired by 1930s cultural theorist Denis de Rougemont, wherein such love is exclusive, supernatural or promising transcendence, painful, impeded, and, ultimately, fatal. We maintain that, even once exclusivity is removed as an official component, tensions with polyamory's ethical dimensions remain: romantic love's other elements rationalize acting and feeling in ways that privilege a singular beloved above others. A tempting solution is to further revise romantic love. However, we are skeptical that this leaves space for distinctively romantic love. Our tentative proposal, then, is that polyamory's ethical dimensions favor rejecting romantic love as ultimately desirable.

Schoenberg as Strauss

This article examines and contextualizes Arnold Schoenberg’s arrangements of waltzes by Johann Strauss, arguing that they demonstrate how Schoenberg’s music, while radically modern, was at the same time profoundly shaped by nostalgia. This particular type of nostalgia—not simply a longing for a lost past, but rather an act of remembering that is imperfect, a dialectical process that looks backwards even as it participates in constructions of the self that are oriented towards the future—underwrites Schoenberg’s engagement with the past and anxiety about the future. His waltz arrangements, celebrating the pinnacle of Viennese imperial culture, are contemporary with his foray in dodecaphony, and as such curiously anachronistic. But, as I argue here, considering Schoenberg as a nostalgic—via the work of cultural theorists like Svetlana Boym—opens the door to some possible different narratives for music history. Schoenberg’s legacy of “crisis and progress” can thus be challenged, and something like Boym’s “third way” of modernism, with its “lateral possibilities,” can emerge.

Opacity, difference and not knowing: what can psychiatry learn from the work of Édouard Glissant?

Martinican poet, novelist and cultural theorist Édouard Glissant (1928–2011) rejected contemporary simplistic notions of creole hybridity popularised in the 1980s and 1990s in favour of a unique and explicitly antiessentialist...

Reading against Feeling: The Structure of Feeling, Practical Criticism, and Stuart Hall's Migrant Study

Abstract: Ritland identifies "feeling" and "study" as opposing concepts in the work of British-Jamaican cultural studies founder Stuart Hall. Where "feeling" for cultural theorists like Raymond Williams represented the incorporation of human agents' affective experiences into "culture," Hall found this social model dissatisfying for its elision of the difference between real-world determination and agents' subjective experiences of those worldly conditions. Hall thus forwarded a situated hermeneutics that Ritland calls "migrant study." By referring back to the literary pedagogical approach "practical criticism," Hall was able to insist on a distinction between determination and interpretation to open up opportunities for anticolonial resistance. This model of interpretation is grounded in a version of subaltern agency that views the "text" as an object available to critique through the colonial migrant's very condition of determination.

Conspiracy Theatre of the Absurd: “Birds Aren’t Real” as Parodic Hypermimesis

ABSTRACT Emerging from an ad hoc effort to counter Trump supporters at a 2017 Women’s March, the Birds Aren’t Real movement has transformed from viral performance art into a Gen Z response to political conspiracy culture. This article explores the campaign as an extension of the kind of postmodern parody that became iconic with shows like The Colbert Report in which comedians engage in absurd reproductions of increasingly absurd political realities. Inspired by the work of cultural theorist Nidesh Lawtoo, we argue that Birds Aren’t Real engages in parodic hypermimesis, or an ironical meta-mimicking of the digitally networked and infective mimetics responsible for the contemporary proliferation of conspiratorial misinformation. After explaining how parodic hypermimesis works, we illustrate its enactment in the Birds Aren’t Real movement, particularly in the way that it relies on doubling to debase conspiracy rhetoric as a predictable set of topoi, cultivates a conspiracy community via intoxicating affect, and derides the mainstream media by baiting outlets with parodic spectacles. Ultimately, this essay ponders whether, in reverberating conspiracy logics, such well-intentioned parody can successfully ascend the cardinal sins it critiques.

The Role of Aesthetics in Shaping Cultural Narratives

Purpose: The general objective of this study was to explore the role of aesthetics in shaping cultural narratives. Methodology: The study adopted a desktop research methodology. Desk research refers to secondary data or that which can be collected without fieldwork. Desk research is basically involved in collecting data from existing resources hence it is often considered a low cost technique as compared to field research, as the main cost is involved in executive’s time, telephone charges and directories. Thus, the study relied on already published studies, reports and statistics. This secondary data was easily accessed through the online journals and library. Findings: The findings reveal that there exists a contextual and methodological gap relating to the role of aesthetics in shaping cultural narratives. Preliminary empirical review revealed that aesthetics significantly influence the formation and perpetuation of cultural narratives across various forms of artistic and cultural expressions. It highlighted how traditional and contemporary aesthetic forms both preserve historical cultural heritage and adapt to societal changes, emphasizing the role of digital aesthetics in modern cultural dynamics. The research underscored the importance of diverse representations to challenge dominant narratives and promote inclusivity. It also emphasized the implications for artists, cultural theorists, educators, and policymakers in recognizing and utilizing the transformative potential of aesthetics in shaping cultural narratives. Unique Contribution to Theory, Practice and Policy: The Semiotics Theory, Social Constructionism and Cultural Hegemony may be used to anchor future studies on the role of aesthetics in shaping cultural narratives. The study recommended expanding theoretical frameworks by integrating interdisciplinary approaches to better understand the role of aesthetics in shaping cultural narratives. Practically, it urged artists and cultural practitioners to critically engage with the cultural symbols in their work, and for educators to incorporate aesthetics and cultural narrative analysis into their curricula. Policy-wise, it emphasized the need for inclusive cultural policies that promote diversity, support digital literacy, and encourage collaboration among stakeholders to create initiatives that celebrate diverse aesthetic expressions.

Afrocentric Norms and Substance Use Behaviors Among Black Young Adults

ABSTRACT Despite not displaying higher overall rates of substance use compared to White Americans, the social consequences of substance use disorders for Black Americans, particularly among Black American men, are more damaging. Furthermore, recent data suggest an uptick in substance use-related deaths among Black Americans, raising serious concerns about a growing health disparity that warrants the need for studies to identify factors associated with prevention. For decades, Black cultural theorists have argued that Afrocentric norms are important buffers against maladaptive behaviors in Black Americans, but the association in the context of substance use is still an emerging area. The present study investigated the associations between Afrocentric norms, Afrocentric self-regard, internalized negative stereotypes, and substance use attitudes and behaviors among Black young adults. Self-report questionnaires were administered to measure internalized negative stereotypes, Afrocentric norms, Afrocentric self-regard, substance use attitudes, and substance use from a sample of Black young adults (N = 619). Favorable attitudes toward substance use were found to be positively associated with internalized negative stereotypes but were inversely associated with Afrocentric norms and Afrocentric self-regard. Similarly, substance use reports within the past 30 days were inversely associated with Afrocentric norms, but the relationship to cannabis use was non-significant. Gender differences between Black men and women were also found. Implications for social work are discussed.

THE SUBSTITUTION OF REALITY: MADONNA AS A TOOL OF MASS MEDIA

Using qualitative research methods, we will explicate how the internet and other modern technologies directly impact the reality presented. Through specific segments of this study, we will analyze the democratization of art, fashion, and image in contemporary society, focusing primarily on its real, current, and true-media publication through the phenomenon of Madonna. Employing methods of textual analysis and interpretation, we will examine the works of philosophers Jean Baudrillard, cultural theorist Paul Virilio, and Douglas Kellner. In doing so, we will explain the significance of media manipulation. The primary objective of this study is to depict media through postmodern theory, presenting them as leading factors in contemporary social processes. Postmodern theorists emphasize that the media system, which has dominated reality since the early 21st century, is unable to summon the past, causing human existence to fall into a state of perpetual schizophrenic present. This incapacity results in the simulation of past events, which now return as a series of anachronistic media representations, creating the illusion of historical continuity. This leads to a state of historical amnesia, where the sense of connection to the past is lost. In such a context, everyday human experience becomes fragmented and disoriented. Media, as the primary intermediaries between reality and perception, create a new reality detached from historical continuity and deeply rooted in the present moment. This new reality, shaped by media representations, blurs the boundary between the real and the simulated, further amplifying the sense of temporal dislocation.

Hegel and the Hatäta Zär'a Ya‛ǝqob: Africa in the Philosophy of History and the History of Philosophy

Abstract This article explores an episode in the reception of Hegel's philosophy of history and historiography of philosophy with reference to the question of the possibility of non-Western philosophy, in particular African philosophy. Section I briefly outlines the contents of the Hatäta Zär'a Ya‛ǝqob and the controversy over its authorship, focusing in particular on the argument of the Ethiopianist and scholar of Semitic languages Carlo Conti Rossini that ‘rationalistic’ philosophy was impossible in Ethiopia. In section II I suggest that a major component of the intellectual background to this notion of the impossibility of philosophy in Africa can be traced to Hegel's philosophy of history. To substantiate this claim I begin by providing an account of the broader historiographical shift between 1780 and 1830, in which Africa and Asia came to be excluded from the history of philosophy, and I suggest that Hegel's philosophy of history was decisive in this process. I examine how Hegel's account of history as the realization and actualization of freedom goes together with the development of cultural production culminating in philosophy, and how both of these processes (if they are really separate processes at all), can be mapped onto particular historical-geographical populations and cultures. I suggest that, even though this was not Hegel's intention, by the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries this served as a cultural justification for political domination: those who are unfree are unfree because they are unthinking (unphilosophical), and those who are unthinking cannot be free. Finally in section III I connect this Hegelian conception to Conti Rossini's work, both his article on the Hatäta and as apologist for Italian imperialism. I conclude by reflecting on what this underexplored connection between Hegel and early twentieth-century theorists of culture might mean for attempts to construct global histories of philosophy.

“Memory Makes Us Brave”: Hauntological Echoes of the Past in the Music of Chile’s 2019 Social Upheaval

Abstract: The 2019 social upheaval in Chile began with students jumping turn-stiles in protest over a modest increase in the metro fare, but it quickly expanded into a widespread denunciation of nearly every facet of the neo-liberal economic system installed under the 1973–1990 Augusto Pinochet dictatorship. “It’s not the thirty pesos,” protesters claimed, “it’s the thirty years,” referring to the three decades of neoliberal policies after the return to democracy in 1990. In the days and weeks after the protests began, a soundtrack emerged of both original music and songs repurposed from Chile’s past. Even the new songs created in the wake of the 2019 protests also frequently reference, sample, or allude to Chile’s musical icons of the Chilean New Song era of the 1960s and early 1970s or to dictatorship era music. Both the protests and their music are therefore rooted in a hauntological past. Jacques Derrida coined the term “hauntology” in Spectres of Marx (2006), where he examines the ways in which the spirit of Marxism, like all ghosts which have yet to be laid to rest, would return, repeatedly, disrupting the present and continuing to remind us of another possible future.” In Ghosts of My Life , British cultural theorist Mark Fisher applies Derrida’s concept of hauntology to English language cultural production, arguing that 21st-century cultural products reflect a “slow cancellation of the future.” “It doesn’t feel like the future,” Fisher writes; instead, “we remain trapped in the 20th century.” This article examines how the hauntological songs of the 2019 social upheaval seek to inspire and support an oppositional consciousness against the neoliberal system and how the resilience of that same system maintains Chile’s musical ghosts in a perpetual limbo .

Light-speed, contemporary war, and Australia’s national defence strategic review

In our hyperconnected contemporary world, military and civilian digital and cyber technologies rely upon uncontested and uncongested access to frequencies in the electromagnetic spectrum (EMS). This reliance enables light-speed signalic connectivity, interconnectivity, operability, and interoperability of the systems and devices that perpetuate twenty-first century modes of information, remote, hybrid, and digital warfare. Informed by cultural theorist Paul Virilio’s commentaries on speed, light-speed, and war, this article examines speed as an inflection that insidiously underpins the Australian Government’s 2023 National Defence: Defence Strategy Review (DSR) (public version). This is not an exhaustive study of light-speed or the DSR. Rather, this article aims to show how speed and light-speed, used as investigatory lenses, can provide critical insights into relationships between contemporary technology, and war. To this end, the article refers to US and UK defence and government electromagnetic spectrum policy statements, interpolating them into motivations for AUKUS, and the DSR’s positioning.

Parallel Narratives: Trauma, Relationality, and Dissociation in Psychoanalysis and Realist Fiction

The reciprocal relationship between cultural trauma studies and psychoanalytic discourse on the one hand, and trauma studies and fictional representations of trauma on the other, has been commented on by scholars within the field of literary studies. What connects the representation of trauma in cultural trauma theory, trauma fiction, and psychoanalysis is that it is regarded as something that overwhelms an individual’s capacities for processing and functioning. However, while cultural trauma theory has come under scrutiny for prioritizing too narrow a view of trauma and its representations, the considerable critiques of and revisions to Freud’s theories, developed in the 1980/90s, have been mostly ignored by cultural trauma theorists. In this interdisciplinary article, we draw on relational psychoanalytic perspectives to demonstrate how relational revisions to psychoanalytic theory and techniques, as well as views on dissociation, can offer new perspectives for approaching literary works of fiction, such as the realist novel, which engage with the subject of trauma outside of established trauma conventions. We demonstrate that trauma novels by Lisa Appignanesi and Aminatta Forna parallel these revisions to psychoanalytic theory and techniques, allowing for a more pluralistic and nuanced representation of responses to trauma and suffering.

Paris Diary

Abstract Sergei Eisenstein's Paris Diary, a fragment of which is presented here for the first time in translation, traces two months of the filmmaker's sojourn in Paris between December 1929 and February 1930. It captures the singular way in which he interwove theoretical reflections with free associations, political remarks, and random observations. Containing drawings and notes, these pages also bear witness to significant encounters with the biologist and micro-cinematographer Jean Painlevé, the ethnographer Georges-Henri Rivière, and, the subject of speculation for many decades, the philosopher and cultural theorist Georges Bataille. Critical discussions of Surrealism, including Luis Buñuel's and Salvador Dalí's film Un chien andalou, are also reported. The diary's fragmentary notes and metamorphic associations perform Eisenstein's transposition of experimental Surrealist techniques, such as free association, onto his own autotheoretical writing.

Affective encounters in higher education

ABSTRACT In this article, we examine how thinking with affect theory offers fertility within higher education studies to see and do teaching and learning differently. For many educators in universities, the idea that teaching is a cognitive process of information transmission is still taken-for-granted. These beliefs are visible through the persistence of nomenclature such as ‘content’, predictable learning ‘outcomes’, and by the dominance of linear teaching aids (such as PowerPoint slides) across the sector internationally. An alternative conception of what teaching and learning is, and does, posits the classroom as a space of emergent relational connections in which learning is experienced as an affective force that constitutes being-in-the-world. To sketch shapes for understanding the affective encounters of teaching and learning, we think with the concept of inconvenience from the work of cultural theorist Lauren Berlant. We offer three illustrative examples of how teaching might be understood as an opportunity to surface, to welcome, and to problematise the inconvenience of others. Our argument is that an engagement with the affective in education can help us in understanding how power relations make themselves felt within the affective currents of educational encounters, as well as enabling educators to recraft their teaching in creative and meaningful ways. We conclude by contending that critical theories of affect can enhance educators’ work towards fostering social justice in the classroom, as well as in moving closer to an enriched understanding of the discomfort and challenge of what it means to teach and to learn.

Grids: Re-considering Infrastructural Politics of Urban Space

For many centuries, the principle of linear planning based on a grid pattern has played a significant role in the spatial organization of urban boundaries. Additionally, the grid principle has formed the basis for policies and practices related to the emergence of “disciplinary societies”, leading to the modern networked society. Drawing on the concept of the grid as a cultural technique by media philosopher Bernhard Siegert, this article examines the functioning of the grid as epistemic frameworks and the media of representation, order, and filteration. The article also provides insights into the manifestation of the grid principle in the context of the emerging field of social research on infrastructures, including the digital infrastructure of smart cities. This encompasses a wide spectrum, from smart devices and everyday communication to pervasive sensors and big data, from the sharing of images and impressions to advanced prosthetics, from the development of smart cities to the deployment of surveillance technologies and predictive algorithms. Through a range of case studies, from the study of structured territorial control of the Roman limitatio to the efficient grid patterns of pre-fabricated housing districts worldwide, the research examines the potential and transhistorical nature of the grid principle. The article is intended for media philosophers, anthropologists, urbanists and digital culture theorists.

Information security narrative for cultural scientists, theorists and cultural workers

The purpose of the study is to determine the role, possibilities and theoretical principles of participation of cultural scientists, theorists and cultural workers in the development and implementation of measures to counter threats associated with the use of computer technologies and Internet communications. The subject of the study is the cultural narrative of scientific publications on information security in 2021–2023. The object of the study is the current risks to traditional values and identity caused by universal digital transformation and, after the start of a Special military operation in Ukraine in 2022, the aggravation of international relations with technologically leading countries and global Internet services based in the United States. The relevance of the topic is determined, in particular, by the approval by the Russian Government on December 22, 2022 of the «Concept of formation and development of the culture of information security of citizens of the Russian Federation». The research methodology is characterized by the application of a cultural paradigm (an approach to the culture of information security as a dynamic system of human activity), structural, functional and evolutionary methods. Publications in the journals HAC K1, K2 and Scopus Q1, Q2 were used as materials. The novelty of the article lies in the study of the potential of the cultural narrative of information security in solving the problem of forming a general civil culture of information security, professional and mass. The research was carried out within the framework of the state assignment of the Moscow State Pedagogical University on the topic of research «Cultural identity in the modern world: analytical models, methods of construction and forms of presentation» (state registration number AAAA-A19-119072590048-4). The result of the study is a conclusion about the increasing share and importance of socio-cultural factors in information security in comparison with technical ones. Cultural theory and cultural studies are defined as specialized disciplines for improving both professional and civil information security culture. The cultural paradigm of information security includes a system of interaction between the profile specialization of professional and general civil, mass culture of information security. The effectiveness of the creation of specialized training for cultural scientists, theorists and cultural workers in the field of professional and mass information security culture is predicted and proved.

Geek nostalgia: The reflective and restorative defence of white male geek culture

During recent decades, geek culture has become increasingly visible, and the geek has left the cultural margins, becoming more popular than ever. At the same time, nostalgia has emerged as a central component of geek culture. Framed by a post-structural understanding of gender and race and drawing on cultural theorist Svetlana Boym’s distinction between reflective and restorative nostalgia, this article explores how and why geeks nostalgically long for a time when they were largely marginalized. We combine readings of Swedish online geek podcasts and YouTube channels with ethnographic visits to geek conferences and pop-cultural “geek fairs,” such as Comic Con and SciFiWorld. We argue that geek nostalgia represents a clinging on to a “constitutive wound,” allowing the geek figure to mobilize masculine victimhood in ways that simultaneously underpin geek privilege and allow the geek to continue operating as a white male gatekeeper of geek culture.