Mode Of Critique Research Articles

A formalist in the trenches: Graham K. Riach’s The Short Story After Apartheid

This essay offers a brief assessment of the potential of a formalist approach to the criticism of South African literature. Examining Graham K. Riach’s recent study The Short Story After Apartheid, it suggests that the “New Formalism” Riach employs provides an innovative mode of criticism that sees the literary text as interactive with its context rather than as a space of passive representation. Viewing the literary text as a spur to insight allows for a creative engagement with and vivification of many of the sedimented categories of South African critical thought. The essay expresses misgivings, however, about, first, the possibility of harnessing this mode of reading to a determinate political end, and second, its general bias toward the conceptual aspects of literary experience over and against the affective.

Life criticism and De Quincey's ethical concern over the aestheticiability of murder

AbstractThe self‐reflexive tendency in De Quincey's seemingly Kantian aestheticization of murder allows some leeway in deciphering his underlying ethical concerns. As “On the knocking at the gate in Macbeth” shows, De Quincey engages in a special kind of life writing that can be termed “life criticism,” which is not naively referential but revelatory, translating the autobiographical records of memories, experiences, and emotions into mediatory possibilities for argumentative assessments of literary and aesthetic questions. James Wood's critiques function as a compelling touchstone of De Quincey's life criticism, exhibiting how self‐referential episodes, as both the starting and end points for literary criticism, can be incorporated into serious and illuminating theoretical interrogations. Through the new prism of De Quincey's habitual mode of life criticism, his aesthetics of murder can be interpreted as a meta‐reflection upon his literary experiences with Westmorland Gazette and Blackwood's Magazine. His awareness of the facile aestheticiability of murder in the periodical press has an obvious moral implication: it shows his self‐reflexive concern over the commercialized public taste that makes him torn between insisting upon classical highbrow culture and contributing sensational magazine reading matter.

Opening a Virtual Space before the Door of the Law: The Transnational Togani Effect from Silenced to Angels Wear White

Through an examination of what the author calls the transnational Togani effect, which challenges legislative failures across both screens and borders, the author hopes to show how social justice films are deployed as a mode of critique that directly impacts the criminal justice system. The author's analysis of the transnational Togani effect therefore encompasses and connects the dimensions of virtuality and actuality in their interactive relation in the contemporary media environment. The author situates this interactive relationship between the virtual and the actual within a transnational framework because awareness of sexual assault is raised in cross-border contexts that are intertextual and interconnected. Drawing on the Deleuzian notion of the virtual and the actual and Giorgio Agamben's concept of inclusive exclusion, the author suggests that screen intervention is a virtual layer added to heterotopic space that serves as a possible resistance against the entrapment of human subjects by neoliberal governance, in which the law is “in force without significance.” As Deleuze shows, the virtual and the actual are fully real, and the relationship between them takes the form of a circuit. By exploring how the interlocking of virtuality and actuality comes to bear on the legal sphere, this article poses fundamental questions for cinema, or for audiovisual media in general, such as to what extent cinematic critique is capable of opening an alternative space for social justice.

Critical Conversations: Emerging BIPOC Critics Reimagine Theatre Criticism through the Digital

Abstract: Theatre criticism in the Global North currently finds itself at a pivotal point, as the internet eclipses legacy media as the central space for critical discourse and as ongoing antiracist and anticolonial activism highlights the underrepresentation of BIPOC artists across the theatre industry. Within this context, stakeholders in the theatre community, recognizing the importance of a vibrant critical discourse, are faced with finding more sustainable and equitable models. This article considers the future of theatre reviewing through a case study of Taking on the World (TotW), a mentorship program for emerging BIPOC critics run in conjunction with Toronto's Soulpepper Theatre Company and Intermission magazine. TotW participants' innovative critical practice demonstrates that de-hierarchizing theatre criticism necessitates reimagining the form, and specifically centering conversation as a key quality of process and product. Exploiting the capabilities of the digital, TotW participants embed conversation within their work and model a mode of criticism that challenges traditional notions of expertise and is ultimately more inclusive. Applying recent scholarship on theatre criticism to examples of work produced in the program and participant interviews, this article advances new ways of practicing and teaching theatre criticism at this crucial moment.

Technopolitics of failure: modes of critique and resistance to new punitive tools

Resumo: Forças policiais brasileiras têm sido equipadas com tecnologias de segurança que incluem câmeras corporais, sistemas biométricos e algoritmos preditivos. Gestores públicos justificam os investimentos nesse setor alegando ganhos de eficiência, transparência e accountability. No entanto, movimentos sociais e pesquisadores da área de segurança pública argumentam que muitos dos sistemas implementados falham em aprimorar a atividade policial. Multiplicam-se denúncias de que erros na identificação de suspeitos e vieses na definição de áreas prioritárias de patrulhamento ampliam padrões de violência estrutural e automatizam mecanismos de exclusão. Este artigo busca mapear o uso da “falha” enquanto dispositivo de crítica e resistência às novas tecnologias de segurança, refletindo sobre suas consequências analíticas e políticas. Em que pesem as contribuições para os debates sobre discriminação algorítmica, o artigo indica que muitas das críticas têm sido incorporadas por desenvolvedores em processos de otimização de seus sistemas. Desse modo, as denúncias podem operar, paradoxalmente, enquanto motor da inovação, legitimando a disseminação de ferramentas punitivas. Mais do que uma demanda por precisão e eliminação de vieses, a crítica a partir da falha deve funcionar como uma forma de explicitar os múltiplos atores e interesses inerentes ao processo de desenvolvimento tecnocientífico. Para isso, é preciso, contudo, repolitizar a falha.

Between policing and literary criticism: Habsburg censorship of literature in Lombardy-Venetia

The article looks at censors’ statements from the Venice State Archive and asks whether the parallels between censors speaking on literary texts and the mode of literary criticism can be productively analyzed with the help of these archival materials. The Venetian censorship bureau, established in 1814/15 in the context of the Kingdom of Lombardy-Venetia and forming part of Habsburg Empire, is a welcome source given the comparative paucity of censors’ statements in other parts of the Empire in the early nineteenth century and during the pre-revolutionary Vormärz period. In particular, the paper examines a set of censors’ statements from 1818, containing on the whole arguments in favor of the publication of manuscripts (or circulation of foreign books). Among them figure a number of justification strategies employed by the censors, which point beyond the usual censorship categories of offences against religion, the authorities and morals. The paper looks at various statements on “modern classical” texts (e.g. Schiller’s “Song of the Bell”, Ossian, James Thomson), as well as the ways censors developed in order to engage with contemporary literature. The main case study in this respect is dedicated to the Italian translation of a historical novel by Jane Porter, The Scottish Chiefs (1810), published as I capi scozzesi in 1822–23. The way censors reflected critical discourses on the one hand, and reacted to materials from the books on the other, immediately situates them in the context of literary criticism and the statements themselves are found to constitute a valuable source for book history, the history of reading, as well as for the development of censorship in the nineteenth century.

“Half Savage and Hardy, and Free”: The Search for Self in Wuthering Heights

ABSTRACT Over the last half-century, much of the scholarly discourse concerning Wuthering Heights has considered Catherine Earnshaw’s struggle for belonging in the social order, using a transgressive mode of gender criticism to challenge the constraints of traditional femininity found in the space of Brontë’s world and within the norms of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Using Lacanian and Althusserian theoretical analysis, this article argues that Brontë’s novel effects an uncanny interpretation of womanhood, placing Catherine between two impossible, failed identities. The first, beginning in childhood, is rooted in an Imaginary form of identification with Heathcliff, who acts as the image with whom she identifies. The second emerges through her participation in the Symbolic order as a socially recognized wife, mother, and upper-class lady. Unable to find satisfaction in the self-mediation necessitated by these Imaginary and Symbolic identities, she lacks any identity at all. Instead, it is only in death that Catherine attains freedom from the agony of identification. By tracing this search for a fully realized sense of self throughout her life, this article endeavors to illustrate how Lacan offers a framework for understanding Catherine’s inner conflict, revealing the fundamental futility of searching for oneself in an external object or system.

Scales of subversion

Scales of subversion

The notion of criticism at the present time: from postcriticism to an ethics of reading well

ABSTRACT This article reads Rita Felski’s The Limits of Critique (2015) as an exemplary effort to move beyond paranoid 'critique' in literary study – an effort that oddly echoes the ongoing intensification of postmodernity, or a socio-economic state no longer capable of imagining a future. Alternative modes of expression and identity are now only ever, in Mark Fisher’s terms, 'precorporated' – structured and anticipated by an always exploitative capitalist culture. Literary criticism’s on-going investment in micro-genres and increasingly atomized modes of criticism seems, in this sense, troublingly and paradoxically caught in the inertia of 'depthlessness.' The postcritical turn, more specifically, presents as both a consequence and an overt advocation of imprisoning surfaces. It strives to reclaim the experience of authentic expression and true, authorial affects by actively eschewing distance, or depth; but this refusal of distance and depth is tantamount to a refusal of otherness and incommensurable affect. To be affected by otherness is to touch upon what is unknown and unnamable. If we are to begin 'reading well' we cannot simply bask in the coherence of a surface. To 'read well,' we must instead tarry with the infinite potential of unmappable depth, a kind of Hegelian negative.

Staging Interruption: Quotation, Montage, and Feminist Thought in Carla Lonzi’s Autoritratto

ABSTRACTThis article reads Carla Lonzi’s collective self-portrait Autoritratto (1969) through the interpretive lens of interruption. I identify interruption as a critical and unexplored stylistic feature and formal strategy that is fundamental to the text’s nascent feminist sensibilities and praxis, and to the alternate personal history it imagines. Interruption functions as a structuring principle and mode of critique that is generative rather than destructive: by interrupting the content of audio interviews and re-staging her experiences textually, Lonzi creates a space where the acts of listening and dialoguing are revealed as essential to creative expression and auto-narration. Although the text predates Lonzi’s radical feminist writings, it engages with gestures central to Italian second-wave feminist discourses: namely, the personal and communicative goals of autocoscienza. In part, this article addresses how the social and historical critiques within Lonzi’s feminism find earlier expression in the narrative techniques and ambivalent self-assertion in Autoritratto.

The new spirit of technoscience: recalibrating symmetrical STS critique

ABSTRACT This article situates Responsible Innovation (RI) as part of a larger shift in science and technology governance demanding a ‘social fix’ for innovation, which we argue amounts to a new spirit of technoscience. Inspired by Luc Boltanski and Eve Chiapello's analysis of the development of a ‘new spirit of capitalism’ from late twentieth century, we observe the rise of a new governance rationality in technoscientific innovation which places society, its needs, and desires at the center of scientific and technological development. This shift has significant implications for the field of science and technology studies, and the modes of critique that STS scholars mobilize in understanding and intervening in the politics of sociotechnical change. The new spirit of technoscience calls for a reassessment of familiar formulas of STS critique, with a renewed symmetrical approach to the prescription and production of democracy for science and technology governance.

Platforms for Dwelling

Under contemporary capitalism and platform urbanism, domesticity distorts to take on new forms. Dwelling is simultaneously decentralised and re-distributed via digital and urban networks. This article argues that these new forms of dwelling necessitate new modes of critique – ones primed for this networked, spatially distributed condition. It proposes to supplement typological and topographical approaches to dwelling with the more ‘anexactly rigorous’ relational cartography offered by the field of topology. The article begins with an outline of topology, drawing on mathematics, philosophy and geography towards a reconceptualisation of architecture as a boundary-drawing apparatus. The topological condition of modern dwelling is then retraced as a genealogy of interpenetrating edifices, mediating membranes, and prosthetic equipment, which have prefigured present-day formations of domesticity. The second half of the article trains this topological lens onto three architectural tendencies in response to platform urbanism: convivial arrangements of networked living, commoning platforms and thresholds, and counter-protocols of distributed domesticity. Through unpacking these trajectories, the article illustrates the potential that a topological approach engenders via new modes of mapping, critiquing, resisting and subverting the unequally distributed agency and power underlying the circuits of platform urbanism.

Религия и эволюция науки (памяти Пиамы Гайденко)

In 2022, the author of this article spoke at the conference “Breakthrough to the Transcendent” dedicated to the outstanding historian of philosophy and an original Russian thinker – Piama Pavlovna Gaidenko (1934–2021). The speech was expanded by him in the essay “Piama Gaidenko and the philosophers of the Sixties”, published in the Istoriko-Filisofskii Ezhegodnik (Iss. 37). In these texts however, the large-scale scientific work done by P.P. Gaidenko did not find proper coverage. In the current publication, the author is trying to fill this gap. The article is a detailed comparison of two editions: P.P. Gaidenko’s monography “The Evolution of the Concept of Science”, published in 1980, and the book “Philosophical and Religious Origins of Science” (1997), prepared under her sci­entific editorship and with her author’s participation. One of the main ideas de­fended in these works, first covertly, then directly, is the idea that historically the construction of scientific concepts is largely determined by the image of God that culture sets. The author supports this idea, equips it with new arguments and raises it to the interpretation of religious studies as an obligatory prerequisite for a thorough, qualified science. Special attention is paid to the stimulating influence of religion on science, which distinguished the Renaissance and Reformation; the phenomenon of Renaissance Titanism; the socio – cultural context of the scien­tific revolution of the XVI–XVII centuries. A special topic is the methodology of building a memorial narrative and preserving heritage as a living, creatively ef­fective tradition, discussed in the mode of responsible benevolent criticism.

Novas Mídias Digitais e Democracia: desafios à educação republicana

ABSTRACT The study addresses the challenges posed to education in a scenario where the operating mode of digital media presents difficulties in establishing a democratic way of life and shaping a common human world. It contextualizes the current sociopolitical landscape in light of modes of appropriation, criticism, and abandonment of rationality, highlighting practical consequences linked to certain postmodern positions. In an effort to recover ‘utopian energies’ present in the ideals of enlightenment modernity, both in education and politics, it relies on a reason anchored in linguistic intersubjectivity as a means of legitimizing social and political orders and as a foundation and guiding force in the process of educating new generations.

The Author as Cannibal: Rewriting in Francophone Literature as a Postcolonial Genre, 1969–1995. By Felisa Vergara Reynolds

In this monograph, Felisa Vergara Reynolds develops a compelling framework for analysing postcolonial francophone literature — ‘literary cannibalism’ — to foreground the political dimensions of novels that explicitly rewrite canonical works from hegemonic cultures. Through Vergara Reynolds’s new theoretical lens, the pejorative label traditionally used to justify colonization and denigrate indigenous peoples is transformed into a mode of critique, through which authors may absorb and assimilate imperial canonical works to subvert them and destabilize their supposedly inviolable status. For Vergara Reynolds, the postcolonial text that devours another literary work constitutes a form of ‘postcolonial revolt’ (p. 31) that surpasses the dialogic relation of intertextuality underpinning all literary creation. While this gesture of re-inscription raises the question of colonial mimicry, Vergara Reynolds convincingly argues that literary cannibalism is no mere submissive imitation but, rather, ‘an act of menace’ (p. 27; original emphasis) that actively seeks to upend dominant power relations within a canonical text to restore agency to marginalized or oppressed characters. This is exemplified by Aimé Césaire’s rewriting of Shakespeare’s The Tempest (1623) as Une tempête (1969), in which the author empowers the most oppressed character, Caliban, who vomits out the colonizer in his first act as a free man — an apt metaphor for the liberating effect of literary cannibalism itself. The remaining chapters explore similar instances of literary cannibalism in works from across the former empire — Senegal, Algeria, and Guadeloupe — that all grapple with the implications of writing and publishing in the language of the colonizer, and also contribute distinct approaches to literary cannibalism. For example, Boubacar Boris Diop’s cannibalization of Prosper Mérimée’s Tamango (1829) in Le Temps de Tamango (1981) parallels Césaire’s critique of departmentalization to denounce the residual colonialism in post-independence Senegal, but Vergara Reynolds contends that Diop’s method of literary cannibalism also decolonizes the novel. In L’Amour, la fantasia (1985), Assia Djebar shifts our focus to imperial historiography as the source of literary cannibalism, constructing her novel as a means of restoring silenced female voices and writing women of colour back into history. Finally, a distinct aspect of this book that sets it apart from traditional literary criticism is the fact that Vergara Reynolds has drawn her theorization from a close working relationship with Guadeloupian author Maryse Condé, which has allowed for a more collaborative development of the concept of literary cannibalism. The last chapter draws on personal interviews with Condé on the rewriting of Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights (1847) into La Migration des cœurs (1995), during which the author reflects on literary cannibalism’s emancipatory potential within the narrative. While this monograph focuses on francophone authors of the former French colonial empire, Vergara Reynolds’s elaboration of literary cannibalism will certainly be of interest to other scholars of global postcolonial literatures: as Oswald de Andrade declared in the Manifesto antropófago (1928), ‘Only cannibalism unites us.’

Ireland, Literature, and the Coast: Seatangled by Nicholas Allen

<i>Ireland, Literature, and the Coast: Seatangled</i> by Nicholas Allen

The Event of a Poem: Denise Riley’s ‘Lone Star Clattering’

Abstract If we think of a literary work as an event experienced by a reader or listener, and if one mode of literary criticism is an honest report on that event, a poem whose singularity lies in part in its resistance to the conventional protocols of interpretation, such as coherence and continuity, presents a particular challenge. In this short essay, I give an account of my reading of Denise Riley’s ‘Lone Star Clattering’ that attempts to reflect the obstacles it places in the way of such a critical mode, using, and testing, an approach developed to describe the operation of the traditional lyric poem, Don Paterson’s theory of ‘conceptual domains’.

Plastic and Queer Desire — A Queer Ecological Reading of Josef Winkler’s Contemporary Writing

This paper examines the relationship between plastic matter and the queer in Roppongi. Requiem für einen Vater (2007) and Der Stadtschreiber von Kalkutta (2019), two texts by contemporary Austrian author Josef Winkler that depict the narrators’ travels to India and Japan. Two modes of critique within queer ecological theory are found to be fruitful for the analysis of Winkler’s text: a ‘queer as noun’ model focusing on queer people, here the narrator and his relationship to the environment, as well as the ‘queer as a verb’ critique, questioning and defamiliarizing foundational categories such as humanity and futurity. Based on Heather Davis’ invitation to imagine plastic, rather than biological children, as our planetary legacy, the function of plastic matter and its potential to question inside-outside dichotomies and divisions such as human vs human-made or waste vs nature are discussed. Despite a near dystopian vision on India, Winkler’s work also conveys a ‘queer desire’ — a desire that cannot undo the effects of plastic’s omnipresence or its participation in waste colonialism, but suggests ways of living with plastic. The work is permeated with what Davis calls ‘a queer ecological sensibility’, which instead of yearning for a pristine past offers a curious and openminded perspective on the present.

Novel Relations: Victorian Fiction and British Psychoanalysis, by Alicia Mireles Christoff

Reviewed by: Novel Relations: Victorian Fiction and British Psychoanalysis by Alicia Mireles Christoff Gregory Tate (bio) Novel Relations: Victorian Fiction and British Psychoanalysis, by Alicia Mireles Christoff; pp. xiv + 271. Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2019, $39.95, $27.95 paper, £30.00, £22.00 paper. The scope of Novel Relations: Victorian Fiction and British Psychoanalysis exceeds the remit of its subtitle. Alicia Mireles Christoff writes that her "goal is not to 'apply' psychoanalytic ideas to novels nor to make a one-way historical argument that proves that the novels had a direct impact on later psychoanalytic theory." Instead, she "want[s] to allow the novels and the psychoanalytic texts to mutually illuminate one another" (5). This approach is founded on a key theory of twentieth-century British psychoanalysis: that subjectivity is built on "object relations," mental representations of the other people about whom one thinks, feels, and fantasizes (3). Throughout the book, Christoff deftly shows how the writings of psychoanalysts such as W. R. Bion and D. W. Winnicott can help readers to rethink how they interpret and internalize canonical Victorian novels. But the book's ambitions are broader than this, and its rereadings of the fiction of George Eliot and Thomas Hardy are informed by a wide range of theoretical perspectives. Chapter 2, for example, uses José Esteban Muñoz's notion of disidentification to suggest how readers might be moved by Victorian fiction while also remaining alert to issues, particularly concerning race and sexuality, which it habitually occludes. And this example highlights another way in which Novel Relations exceeds the Victorian fiction/British psychoanalysis binary. The book consistently deploys its impressively detailed close readings of its primary texts in the service of two wider projects: the task of undisciplining Victorian studies—which Christoff and her coeditors set out to do in the Spring 2020 issue of this journal—and a comprehensive rethinking of what it means to read and write as a literary scholar. Novel Relations is an important contribution to the presentist mode of criticism that has been prominent in Victorian studies in recent years. Christoff observes that "we have for the most part confined Victorian novels, geographically and temporally, to the single historical context of their scenes of production," and the book does valuable work in diversifying the contexts of Victorian literature by demonstrating how the writings of twentieth- and twenty-first-century theorists can offer new ways of understanding these novels (2). To undiscipline Victorian studies, to reimagine its "disciplinary boundaries," scholars must be willing to "learn to think and write using a wider range of knowledges [End Page 351] and methodological approaches" (193). Or, as Christoff puts it in her discussion of The Mill on the Floss (1860), "part of the power of the novel is that it allows for us to wish for things that are not there" (107). But the wide-ranging theoretical arguments of Novel Relations are firmly grounded on what is there in the novels. Christoff educes the "formal implications" of object relations theory, showing how the language of Victorian fiction offers a model for the expansion of possible relations both in the minds of readers and in Victorian studies as a field (10). Her detailed analysis of Eliot's representations of reading in The Mill on the Floss in chapter 2, for instance, and her discussion in chapter 4 of the narrator's rapid switches between different explanatory metaphors in Middlemarch (1871–2), skillfully remind us that Victorian fiction is concerned with the forging of relations between individuals and new frameworks of meaning. The work of the critic thus becomes a continuation of that of the text. The titles that Christoff assigns to her discussions of Eliot's novels—"Wishfulness" in chapter 2 and "Aliveness" in chapter 4—helpfully summarize the revivifying and expansive impetus which, she argues, British psychoanalysis can bring to the study of Victorian fiction. In chapter 3, though, which focuses on Hardy's The Return of the Native (1878), the connection between the theory and the fiction is less clearly articulated; this chapter also highlights the limitations of Christoff's presentist focus. Although its title is "Restlessness," the chapter's keyword is "atmosphere...

Against Automation Mythologies: Business Science Fiction and the Ruse of the Robots by J. Jesse Ramírez

Reviewed by: Against Automation Mythologies: Business Science Fiction and the Ruse of the Robotsby J. Jesse Ramírez Miguel Sebastián-Martín De-Automating Capitalist Automation. J. Jesse Ramírez. Against Automation Mythologies: Business Science Fiction and the Ruse of the Robots. Routledge, 2021. 116 pp. $21.95 pbk, $59.95 hc, $20.65 ebk. [End Page 191] A specter is haunting the world—the specter of imminent, impending, inevitable automation. All theorists, critics, and commentators across the political spectrum have gathered to exorcise this specter in their own ways: Silicon Valley gurus, Wiredmagazine, techno-utopian liberal theorists, and even—albeit from a distance—proponents of one form or another of so-called Fully Automated Luxury Communism. Against the common belief that full automation is imminent, impending, or at least inevitable at some point, J. Jesse Ramírez's brief monograph presents itself as a "technoclasm" and—like my previous paragraph—it is inspired and driven by the anti-capitalist impetus and the critical provocation of Marxian and Marxist thinking. Self-consciously updating Roland Barthes's mode of critique—the "semioclasm" of his classic Mythologies—Ramírez's book approaches contemporary (post-2008) automation discourses as a mythological "business sf" that mystifies the functioning of capitalism under the promise of an imminent technological singularity: "Extrapolating from the premise of capitalism's technological dynamism, today's leading prophets of automation foresee a civilization-changing redistribution of mental and manual labor through robots, artificial intelligences, and myriad other automated systems" (3). Thus, by untangling the ideological framework of automation mythologies, Ramírez—joining efforts with critics such as Aaron Benanav—shows that whether or not this transformation is welcome, and whether it is imagined as a utopia or as a dystopia, the underlying telos and the associated assumptions about contemporary technologies all fall under the same mythological structure—and it is the structure of these automation mythologies that becomes the main target of the book's "technoclasm." Dividing his book into three parts, Ramírez moves from a definition of "Business Science Fiction" in part I, to a story of "Original Automation" in part II, and finally a collection of critical analyses of "Disenchanted Objects" in part III. It must be said, although it may have already been inferred by the reader, that even though Ramírez's focus may be broadly cultural and technological—especially as it draws from a considerable variety of fields of inquiry, from academic, journalistic, and marketing materials—his book is envisioned as "most importantly … a work of science fiction studies," a work focused on what Istvan Csicsery-Ronay's The Seven Beauties of Science Fiction(2008) defined as "science-fictionality" (2). In this manner, Ramírez's definition of "business sf" will clearly resonate with other approaches that are interested in the recuperation of sf tropes, forms, and discourses by capitalist corporations. It is precisely by examining automation discourses as sf that Ramírez insists and clarifies that "the future of automation is not a fact; it is an economic science fiction seeking to create facts" (7). Singling out the works of Martin Ford, Erik Brynjolfsson and Andrew McAfee, Jerry Kaplan, and Nicholas Carr, the first part of the book makes the argument that "Some of the most widely read and cited treatises on contemporary automation are works of business science fiction—they are just not labelled as such" (17). Ramírez's idea here is that, once we "unlock the sf side of automation discourse" (19), we may recognize how "business sf" [End Page 192]functions as a discursive attempt to foreclose futures alternative to those dictated by capitalism. A couple of details will be highly illustrative of Ramírez's propositions here. On the one hand, he interestingly proposes that "Moore's Law can be understood as thebusiness sf, the genre's ur-myth" (22), insofar as it is based on speculation and sustained by corporate make-believe. Moore's Law's function would therefore be that of naturalizing the market logic of compounding growth, thus turning a political-economic project into a seemingly unavoidable technological "evolution." On the other hand, Ramírez proposes that "business sf" also has a...