Radical Potential Research Articles

Artistic research and climate science: transdisciplinary learning and spaces of possibilities

Taking a wider view, departing from the specific case of the Hamburg exchange between artists and climate scientists, this comment envisages some radical potential for the collaboration of artists and climate scientists: moving beyond the traditional boundaries of social systems, artistic research and climate science may engage in a shared transdisciplinary learning process. They may communicate with the rest of society by engaging with others to develop ‘spaces of possibilities’, thus nurturing the creative resilience of communities.

Paradigm Dressed as Epoch: The Ideology of the Anthropocene

The Anthropocene is a radical reconceptualisation of the relationship between humanity and nature. It posits that we have entered a new geological epoch in which the human species is now the dominant Earth-shaping force, and it is rapidly gaining traction in both the natural and social sciences. This article critically explores the scientific representation of the concept and argues that the Anthropocene is less a scientific concept than the ideational underpinning for a particular worldview. It is paradigm dressed as epoch. In particular, it normalises a certain portion of humanity as the ‘human’ of the Anthropocene, reinserting ‘man’ into nature only to re-elevate ‘him’ above it. This move promotes instrumental reason. It implies that humanity and its planet are in an exceptional state, explicitly invoking the idea of planetary management and legitimising major interventions into the workings of the earth, such as geoen-gineering. I conclude that the scientific origins of the term have diminished its radical potential, and ask whether the concept's radical core can be retrieved.

Beyond Falstaff in 'Die lustigen Weiber von Windsor': Otto Nicolai's Revolutionary 'Wives'

This article explores how Otto Nicolai and Salomon Hermann von Mosenthal’s Die lustigen Weiber von Windsor (Berlin, 1849) might contribute to an alternative reception history of Shakespeare’s The Merry Wives of Windsor, in which the play’s unusual features—in particular the central role it gives to female agency, family life, and the natural world—are positively valued. These unusual aspects have long been overshadowed in critical approaches to both the play and its operatic adaptations by their focus on the character of Sir John Falstaff, particularly in the wake of Verdi’s Falstaff. However, this article demonstrates that Die lustigen Weiber, by placing its women firmly at its heart, reveals an engagement with those issues which literary criticism has only lately addressed. This article also suggests that approaching the opera in its 1849 post-revolutionary historical context reveals nuanced resonances both with Shakespeare’s play and the opera’s own moment of production, particularly in the opera’s storyline of assertive bourgeois women resisting an abusive aristocrat, culminating in a bourgeois-led reconciliation of the classes. The opera thus reveals the radical potential in Shakespeare’s comedy.

Feminism, generation and intersectionality

Alison Winch considers the ways neoliberal policies encourage generational mistrust by deploying blame for 'austerity' on the so-called baby boomer generation and argues that these divisions have an important gendered dimension. She examines forms of feminist conflict that can result from precarity in the domain of work and the attendant fight for resources. In addition, the article explores neoliberal feminisms that celebrate individualism and personal responsibility and examines the way these issues are taken up by the mainstream media in order to obscure and silence anti-capitalist feminist collectives and their histories. Recognising the radical potential of digital culture, the writer argues for the importance of forging alliances across online and offline networks in order to address the problems of funding and political sustainability outside (and against) the control of corporate patriarchal hegemony.

“Flemish Friends, Let us Separate!”: The Discursive Struggle for Flemish Nationalist Civil Society in the Media

This article presents a discourse-theoretical analysis of the discursive struggle against the Flemish radical right from within Flemish nationalist civil society as it was fought out in debates about the Flemish National Songfest in the period 1991–1995. Using a discourse-theoretical redefinition of nationalism, the article develops the argument that the discursive struggle against the radical right from within Flemish nationalist civil society has been structured around attenuations of nationalism. Whilst the radical right takes the nationalist premise of the existence of a sovereign and limited nation to its radical conclusions, opposition to the radical right contests the authoritarian and racist consequences of radical nationalism. The radical right's critics attenuate Flemish nationalism's radical potential by articulating it with signifiers originating in other discourses: democracy, tolerance, peace and openness. But they do not question the nationalist premises in which the radical right's authoritarianism and racism are grounded. By analysing these mechanisms, the article contributes to understanding the discursive struggle among Flemish nationalists, and especially the tension inherent in the resistance against radical right politics from the part of more moderate nationalists.

Stories tell us? Political narrative, demes, and the transmission of knowledge through culture

This paper compares two institutions of storytelling, mainstream national narratives and self-represented digital storytelling. It considers the centenary of World War 1, especially the Gallipoli campaign (1915) and its role in forming Australian ‘national character’. Using the new approach of cultural science, it investigates storytelling as a means by which cultures make and bind groups or ‘demes’. It finds that that demic (group-made) knowledge trumps individual experience, and that self-representation (digital storytelling) tends to copy the national narrative, even when the latter is known not to be true. The paper discusses the importance of culture in the creation of knowledge, arguing that if the radical potential of digital storytelling is to be understood – and realised – then a systems (as opposed to behavioural) approach to communication is necessary. Without a new model of knowledge, it seems we are stuck with repetition of the same old story.

(Queer) Family Time: Brothers & Sisters and Managing Temporal Anxieties

Temporal anxieties are pervasive in the 21st century, particularly within the context of the American family. Although scholars apply Kenneth Burke's “symbolic medicine” to explain how audiences manage these anxieties through consumption of popular media, I argue that representations of queer-inclusive families are a common form of symbolic medicine used to ameliorate time panics within the traditional family unit. Drawing upon the concept of “queer temporality” and the ABC television drama Brothers & Sisters, I explain how these texts function as “equipment for living,” arguing for the acceptance of queer-inclusive families, not as a moral necessity, but because such acceptance can return stability to a conservative family time currently under threat. As such, queer experiences of time are drained of their radical potential, and queer lives function to serve the very heteronormative structures they seek to resist.

Bathetic Masochism and the Shrinking Woman

Abstract This essay examines the privileged position given to masochism in some recent critical-theoretical work and argues that a controversy of size is often involved in recalibrations of subjectivity. The masochist is frequently described as a shrinking subject who paradoxically has the potential to function on a grand scale. I track questions of size through certain radical accounts of subjectivity, arguing that such spatial thinking has a complex relation to female subjectivity, which has a long history of being imagined (and stigmatised) as an inherent propensity to smallness and masochistic self-diminution. As a case in point, I address the recent Fifty Shades novels, which romanticise masochism as a shrinking of the female subject accompanied by an increase in her orgasmic and consumer power. The gender-specific implications of shrinking here highlight the potential bathos, or failure, of a radical re-calibration of size effected through masochism. Bathos is seen as an effect of disproportion and I explore the ways in which gendered conventions bathetically 'shrink' female subjects. Finally, I argue that a valorsiation of masochism might reflect the disappointment of certain radical aspirations and demonstrate expansive hopes of transformation shrinking into bathetic adaptation.Key words masochism, size, shrinking, bathos, Bersani, Marx, Fifty Shades of Grey, Berlant[T]he masochist is a revolutionist of self-surrender.Theodor Reik, Masochism in Modern Man (1941)[M]asochism becomes an act of resistance, inseparable from a minority sense of humor.Gilles Deleuze, On Philosophy' in Negotiations, 1972-1990 (1995)I wish to propose that, most significantly, masochism serves life ... What has been repressed from the speculative second half of Freud's text is sexuality as productive masochism. The possibility of exploiting the shattering effects of sexuality in order to maintain the tensions of an eroticized, denarrativized, and mobile consciousness has been neglected, or refused ...Leo Bersani, The Freudian Body (1986)Great claims have recently been made for the power of masochism as a productive mode of resistance. These claims seek to re-imagine masochism as the precursor to radical communal change, rather than positioning it as an individual sexual pathology, and have gained such an aspirational charge that one commentator, remarking on the upsurge in academic interest in masochism at the start of this century, describes it as the 'politically correct form of [postmodern] self-improvement'.1 In this article, I examine the privileging of masochism in some recent critical-theoretical work, and focus on the controversy of size that I believe is at stake in many explorations of radicalized masochism. The radically masochistic subject is often described as a shrinking subject who paradoxically has the potential to function on a grand scale (to produce larger effects - narrative, intersubjective or political; to operate as a model for large-scale change). Questions about the relative size of the subject have long been raised by writers who seek to explore, satirise and critique current configurations of power: these questions of size, I will argue, have a complex relation to radical theories of masochism (a simultaneous shrinking and explosion of the subject), and to female subjectivity, which has a long history of being imagined (and stigmatised) as an inherent propensity to smallness and masochistic self-diminution.An exploration of the radical potential of masochism and its complex relation to questions of size and gender seems particularly apt right now, in the midst of the popularity of the Fifty Shades of Grey series (and forthcoming film), and my approach here is partially a response to the Fifty Shades novels and their deployment of masochism as an aspirational life-style fantasy. This fantasy romanticises masochism as a shrinking of the female subject (smaller, thinner, more child-like), accompanied by an increase in her orgasmic and consumer power (more clothes, more houses, more spectacular climaxes). …

'The medical' and 'health' in a critical medical humanities.

As befits an emerging field of enquiry, there is on-going discussion about the scope, role and future of the medical humanities. One relatively recent contribution to this debate proposes a differentiation of the field into two distinct terrains, ‘medical humanities’ and ‘health humanities,’ and calls for a supersession of the former by the latter. In this paper, we revisit the conceptual underpinnings for a distinction between ‘the medical’ and ‘health’ by looking at the history of an analogous debate between ‘medical geography’ and ‘the geographies of health’ that has, over the last few years, witnessed a re-blurring of the distinction. Highlighting the value of this debate within the social sciences for the future development of the medical humanities, we call for scholars to take seriously the challenges of critical and cultural theory, community-based arts and health, and the counter-cultural creative practices and strategies of activist movements in order to meet the new research challenges and fulfill the radical potential of a critical medical humanities.

Kinetics and thermodynamics of reversible disproportionation–comproportionation in redox triad oxoammonium cations – nitroxyl radicals – hydroxylamines

Kinetics and equilibrium of the acid‐catalyzed disproportionation of cyclic nitroxyl radicals R2NO• to oxoammonium cations R2NO+ and hydroxylamines R2NOH is defined by redox and acid–base properties of these compounds. In a recent work (J. Phys. Org. Chem. 2014, 27, 114‐120), we showed that the kinetic stability of R2NO• in acidic media depends on the basicity of the nitroxyl group. Here, we examined the kinetics of the reverse comproportionation reaction of R2NO+ and R2NOH to R2NO• and found that increasing in –I‐effects of substituents greatly reduces the overall equilibrium constant of the reaction K4. This occurs because of both the increase of acidity constants of hydroxyammonium cations K3H+ and the difference between the reduction potentials of oxoammonium cations ER2NO+/R2NO• and nitroxyl radicals ER2NO•/R2NOH. pH dependences of reduction potentials of nitroxyl radicals to hydroxylamines E1/3Σ and bond dissociation energies D(O–H) for hydroxylamines R2NOH in water were determined. For a wide variety of piperidine‐ and pyrrolidine‐1‐oxyls values of pK3H+ and ER2NO+/R2NO• correlate with each other, as well as with the equilibrium constants K4 and the inductive substituent constants σI. The correlations obtained allow prediction of the acid–base and redox characteristics of redox triads R2NO•–R2NO+–R2NOH. Copyright © 2014 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

Antioxidant fractions and phenolic constituents from leaves of Pluchea carolinensis and Pluchea rosea

Objective: The objective is to evaluate the antioxidant potential of several polar fractions of Pluchea carolinensis and Pluchea rosea as well as pure chemicals, some of them quantified in both species by high-performance liquid chromatography (HPLC). Methods: The antioxidant potential of polar fractions and pure chemicals were assayed by 2,2-diphenyl-1-picrylhydrazyl (DPPH) and oxygen radical potential methods. The phenolic content was performed by using Folin-Ciocalteu’s reagent. Specific phenolic acids and flavonoids were quantified by diode array detector-reversed phase-HPLC. Results: The highest DPPH antioxidant potential expressed in milligrams of trolox equivalents per gram of dry extract (mg TE/gDE) were frequently measured in fractions from n-butyl alcohol, i.e., 2 (192.1 ± 0.3); 6 (181.0 ± 0.1) of P. carolinensis and in fraction 7 (188.1 ± 5.5) of P. rosea while for oxygen radical scavenging capacity (mg TE/gDE) assay fraction 2 (543.0 ± 64.6) and 4 (501.4 ± 49.7) of P. carolinensis and 3 (401.3 ± 16.1) and 6 (401.3 ± 16.1) of P. rosea showed the best results. Some flavonoids and phenolic acids were also assayed; all of them showed highest oxygen radical absorbance capacity values. Conclusion: We report the antioxidant potential of polar fractions, as well as of some pure phenolics responsible of the antioxidant potential. Some phenolics were identified and quantified for the first time in both species. Apparently, caffeoylquinic acid derivatives contribute more significant to the total antioxidant potential of the extracts.

Derrida and Political Resistance: The Radical Potential of Deconstruction

This paper begins from the claim that the currently dominant approaches to the study of political resistance in global politics, namely the (Neo-)Gramscian and Foucauldian traditions, suffer from a common problem in that the forms of resistance they conceptualise are highly susceptible to appropriation by, or reinscription within, prevailing forms of global ordering. In an attempt to respond to this shortcoming, or, more properly, to explore how this reinscription of resistance might itself be resisted, the paper offers an account of political resistance developed using the thought of Jacques Derrida. Having established the parallel between the way in which prevailing relations of sovereign power and governmental ordering all too quickly co-opt and engulf resistance, and the way in which metaphysics calls thought back to order and tends towards onto-political totalisation, it is argued that by means of a deconstructive approach, acts of resistance may be further radicalised by adding to them second- and third-order onto-political critiques—namely of the resistance-act itself and the agent or actor of resistance herself. The core claim made is that inasmuch as deconstruction attempts to interrupt forms of thinking and knowing right up to and including processes of conscious and unconscious subjectification, it can provide valuable means by which the micro-gestures of onto-politics can be resisted at the (fundamentally interrelated) levels of political thought and concrete praxis.

Responding to Rupture

The 2014 confessional documentary play, A Wake: Kids Killing Kids present a unique opportunity to investigate rupture. It was a collaborative production by Australian company Too Many Weapons and Filipino company Sipat Lawin, which sought to address the limitations of a 2013 performance, Kids Killing Kids, created and performed solely by the Australians. Both of these shows were investigations into their previous collaboration, Battalia Royale.Battalia Royale was an immersive promenade performance written by the Australian playwrights and staged by Filipino theatre company Sipat Lawin in 2012. It was enormously successful in Manila, attracting large audiences, online fan-clubs and glowing reviews. However, the performance was also stridently condemned for the highly physical enactments of violence by adolescent performers, and the way audiences were encouraged to become implicit in this simulated violence.Battalia Royale is itself an adaptation of the cult Japanese novel (and subsequent manga and film) Battle Royale, written by Kōshun Takami (1999). The novel provides a visceral criticism of authoritarian policy, graphically depicting a class of adolescents committing acts of violence and murder upon one another under government order.These artworks provide a remarkable genealogy of rupture, over nearly two decades and across three countries. This essay seeks to trace how rupture is sustained and transformed through performance, providing insight into the radical potential of rupture, but also the difficulty in attempting to harness it.

Tintoretto's Time

Taking the practice of the sixteenth-century artist Jacopo Tintoretto as its point of departure, this essay attends to the problem of the temporality of artistic practice, and its critical implications for art-historical investigation. Specifically, it considers the stakes -philosophical and art historical- of the contention that a practice is 'not of its time', challenging the tendency, dominant in art-historical scholarship, to situate an object in its time. In their unorthodoxy, the works of Tintoretto challenge this contextualism, and the model of chronological and linear time it upholds, demanding an alternative to this model of a historical time. Drawing on the philosophy of Gilles Deleuze, such an alternative is developed -a time of difference and its untimely return- and some of its most radical potentials for the thought of the work of art againts its historicization are set out.

Improvement of pro-oxidant capacity of protocatechuic acid by esterification.

Pro-oxidant effects of phenolic compounds are usually correlated to the one-electron redox potential of the phenoxyl radicals. Here we demonstrated that, besides their oxidizability, hydrophobicity can also be a decisive factor. We found that esterification of protocatechuic acid (P0) provoked a profound influence in its pro-oxidant capacity. The esters bearing alkyl chains containing two (P2), four (P4) and seven (P7) carbons, but not the acid precursor (P0), were able to exacerbate the oxidation of trolox, α-tocopherol and rifampicin. This effect was also dependent on the catechol moiety, since neither gallic acid nor butyl gallate showed any pro-oxidant effects. A comparison was also made with apocynin, which is well-characterized regarding its pro-oxidant properties. P7 was more efficient than apocynin regarding co-oxidation of trolox. However, P7 was not able to co-oxidize glutathione and NADH, which are targets of the apocynin radical. A correlation was found between pro-oxidant capacity and the stability of the radicals, as suggested by the intensity of the peak current in the differential pulse voltammetry experiments. In conclusion, taking into account that hydroquinone and related moieties are frequently found in biomolecules and quinone-based chemotherapeutics, our demonstration that esters of protocatechuic acid are specific and potent co-catalysts in their oxidations may be very relevant as a pathway to exacerbate redox cycling reactions, which are usually involved in their biological and pharmacological mechanisms of action.

THE 2013 ANTIPODE RGS‐IBG LECTURE New Materialisms and Neoliberal Natures

AbstractThe rise of non‐deterministic understandings of nature, with their emphasis on intensive difference and non‐linear processes, has occurred in conjunction with the neoliberalization of environmental governance, which at once emphasizes and financializes the inherent productivity of nature. This paper accepts the position that there is a link between the two, but argues that if we are to maintain a crucial ontological distinction between capital and non‐capital, this link must be understood as contingent rather than necessary. Drawing upon Deleuze and Guattari's concept of “universal history”, I argue that the neoliberalization of nature must be understood, in part, as the strategic containment of the critical energies of new materialist thought, and that the role of critical historiography is to recognize within processes of containment the contents and qualities of more radical possibilities. If such critical efforts are to succeed they must continually distinguish between nature's innovative force and the mechanisms that seek to capture this force in the service of capital and state. In turn, if we are to remember the radical potential of these ideas, the neoliberalization of nature must be understood as a response to these critical energies, and not their origin.

Zombification?: Gamification, motivation, and the user

Abstract Gamification is often promoted as a user-centred initiative, engaging and motivating the alienated masses. Yet is such rhetoric reinforced by the design of these programmes? By incorporating a diverse suite of theoretical frameworks that accounts for the social, cultural and psychological effect of design features, this article argues that gamification too often invokes organization-centred design, treating users as zombies: senseless mechanisms urged onwards by a desire for extrinsic rewards. Gamification still often fails to acknowledge the user’s context and innate psychological needs. This can be accomplished in practice through an incorporation of motivational psychology and a concurrent shift towards user-centred design, accounting for the situatedness of the participant. Further, this article claims that for gamification to reach its full, radical potential, it must not only transform the way the user is evaluated and rewarded but also the activity the subject is tasked with performing.

Meat, Masculinity, and Pathologized Adolescence in Michael Logan’s Apocalypse Cow and Scott Westerfeld’s Peeps

Drawing on Carol J. Adams’s observations about discourses of meat and masculinity, this paper examines the role of flesh consumption in Michael Logan’s zombie satire Apocalypse Cow and Scott Westerfeld’s pseudo-vampire novel Peeps . By analyzing the discursive strategies that Westerfeld and Logan employ to reflect upon adult and adolescent masculinity, the paper reveals the radical potential in as well as the cultural limitations of consumptive epidemics in literature for and about young men. This potential and these limitations in turn reflect contemporary dialogues between different models of masculine subjectivity.

The No/Name of the Institution

Anthropologists have lately sought a subject not containable within the institutions that we analyze. This article suggests we should do the same for institutionality. I define “institutions” as things with the authority of the no/name—to confer the taboo—which includes discourses, rituals, and bureaucracies. The article calls for extending to the institution what we usually ascribe to the subject—violence, but also whatever we oppose to that, such as care or love. Anthropologists and psychoanalysts have an institution long considered a source of love through violence, and violence in love: kinship. This article works through contemporary anthropological queries on the subject, violence, and love in order to explore the possibilities in approaching all institutionality as acting like kinship. Drawing on Claude Lévi-Strauss, E.E. Evans-Pritchard, and Jacques Lacan, kinship is shown to be an institution comprised of a plurality of hierarchies, each of which might undermine the other, creating taboos that call for their own transgression. The article argues that this radical ambivalence in the institution finds desires within needs, displaces the individual as the source of possibility, and locates any radical potential of love within the institution. I call such ambivalence, following Lacan, the no/name of the institution.

Meat, Masculinity, and Pathologized Adolescence in Michael Logan’s Apocalypse Cow and Scott Westerfeld’s Peeps

Drawing on Carol J. Adams’s observations about discourses of meat and masculinity, this paper examines the role of flesh consumption in Michael Logan’s zombie satire Apocalypse Cow and Scott Westerfeld’s pseudo-vampire novel Peeps. By analyzing the discursive strategies that Westerfeld and Logan employ to reflect upon adult and adolescent masculinity, the paper reveals the radical potential in as well as the cultural limitations of consumptive epidemics in literature for and about young men. This potential and these limitations in turn reflect contemporary dialogues between different models of masculine subjectivity.