Crisis Of Representation Research Articles

Biometric Bodies, Or How to Make Electronic Fingerprinting Work in India

The rapid spread of electronic fingerprinting not only creates new regimes of surveillance but compels users to adopt novel ways of performing their bodies to suit the new technology. This ethnography uses two Indian case studies – of a welfare office and a workplace – to unpack the processes by which biometric devices become effective tools for determining identity. While in the popular imaginary biometric technology is often associated with providing disinterested and thus objective evaluation of identity, in practice ‘failures to enrol’ and ‘false rejects’ frequently cause crises of representation. People address these by tinkering with their bodies and changing the rules, and in the process craft biometric bodies. These are assembled bodies that link people and objects in ways considered advantageous for specific identity regimes. By using assemblage theory, the article proposes an alternative interpretation of new surveillance regimes as fluid practices that solidify through the agency of multiple actors who naturalize particular power/knowledge arrangements.

“Crouching Terrorist, Lurking Author”: On the Terror Narrative in Zhang Chengzhi's and Xiao Bai's Historical Fiction

This article takes up a comparative reading of Zhang Chengzhi's Islamic fiction Investigation of Assassinations in the Western Province (1989) and Xiao Bai's historical thriller Blockade (2017), arguing that the two terrorism-themed novellas are constituents of world literature in the Age of Terror, an age that features crises of both history and representation. By conceiving world literature as a narrative event born out of the rupture of history, this article analyzes how two Chinese novelists, from the periphery and the center of national subjectivity, aim to act out the dubious complicity between the terrorist and the author. While Zhang's obsession with Jahriyya and extremist violence is entwined with his suspicion of the agency of narrative, Xiao Bai is inclined to consecrate the author as a divine source of explosive imagination, and to disenchant the readers' obsession with the closure of event. A universal claim based on my case study of contemporary Chinese literature thus emerges: placed in a broad continuum of post-9/11 crisis representation, these two novellas bear witness to the performative forces of world literature in rectifying the dominant national historiography and the subalternity of the dispossessed.

Acerca de las élites gubernamentales subnacionales. Los gobernadores y vicegobernadores peronistas de Santa Fe, Argentina (1983-2007)

El artículo analiza los modos de reclutamiento de los gobernadores y vicegobernadores peronistas de la provincia de Santa Fe (Argentina) entre 1983 y 2007. Mediante el método prosopográfico se reconstruyen las biografías de los actores a partir de diversas variables y se siguen sus trayectorias. El análisis advierte dos formas de ingreso al Poder Ejecutivo: una, el “puente sindical” (1983-1991) y la otra, la confianza del líder, acompañada por posesión de “credenciales” técnicas (1991-2007). Los hallazgos muestran que el peronismo santafesino experimentó un proceso tardío de desindicalización partidaria y una crisis de representación a principios de la década de 1990. Desde ese momento, el liderazgo de Carlos Reutemann surgirá como el nuevo ordenador del reclutamiento. <p> </p>

Neoliberalismo, desigualdade e democracia: discussão fundamentada nos conselhos econômicos e sociais

Este artigo procura alinhavar o contexto econômico e político da segunda metade do século XX à discussão sobre democracia e participação social, a fim de analisar criticamente arranjos institucionais, como os conselhos econômicos e sociais, que é uma alternativa para a ampliação do diálogo social. As políticas neoliberais implementadas no final do séc. XX e início do séc. XXI têm levado a democracia representativa à crise de legitimidade, que é um problema, porque tende a distanciar a sociedade de seus governantes e, ao mesmo tempo, viabilizar a implementação de políticas favoráveis à elite influente. Uma das alternativas frequentemente apontadas para resolver ou amenizar essa questão é a maior participação social e, dentro disso, a criação de um diálogo social institucionalizado. Com base na experiência dos conselhos econômicos e sociais, este artigo questiona essa saída para superar a crise da democracia representativa. Argumenta-se que sua raiz está no neoliberalismo porque, ao reduzir a regulação estatal e aprofundar a desigualdade social, libera o poder econômico para capturar de diversas maneiras os representantes políticos. Isso pode contaminar os espaços democráticos representativos e os diálogos alternativos, além de ampliar a possibilidade de torná-los instâncias meramente legitimadoras de seus interesses, como parece ser o caso dos conselhos econômicos e sociais.

Queering the Palimpsest: Affective Entanglement Beyond Dichotomization

ABSTRACTIn Cultural Studies, the affective turn is a response to the so-called crisis of representation. Insisting on a crucial difference, some theorists separate representation as it is addressed in psychoanalytic accounts of the subject, from pre-individual bodily capacities, as they are developed in affect theory. In our article, we are revisiting Freud’s model of the mystic writing pad and present a metaphor enhancing an inclusive approach to both: the palimpsest. Following Ahmed and Butler, we understand subjectivity as a constant process of affective surfacing, in which intrapersonal and interpersonal dimensions constitute each other. The metaphor of the palimpsest offers a way to theorize subjectivity as structured by power relations yet open to potentiality, paying attention to the intrapsychic as affective force within encounters between subjects. “Queering the palimpsest” disrupts the dichotomization of ontology versus epistemology, the dichotomous ways of gendering the subject and the “either-or-option” of affect theory and psychoanalysis.

Crisis of Representation and New Media Policies in Latin America

The emergence of new communication policies in Latin America from 2004 to 2015 took place in the midst of an unprecedented public antagonism between governments and media groups in Latin America. To understand the emergence of this conflict, the following variables are proposed: (1) the populist features of the governments involved, (2) a crisis of representation, (3) high levels of media concentration in a context of historically permissive regulation and a crisis of the traditional media, and (4) the governments’ perception of the media as opponents and even as threats to their power. La emergencia de nuevas políticas de comunicación en América Latina desde 2004 a 2015 tuvo lugar en medio de un conflicto público inédito entre gobiernos y grupos de comunicación. Con el fin de explicar la emergencia de este conflicto, las siguientes variables de análisis se plantean: (1) las características populistas de los gobiernos, (2) la crisis de representación, (3) la concentración mediática en escenarios de históricas regulaciones permisivas en conjunto con la crisis de los medios tradicionales y (4) la percepción de los medios como fuerza opositora o destituyente por parte de los gobiernos.

The art of dialogic silence in the way of tea: rethinking space and time for contemplation

In this article I explore silence as dialogue in human communication and address its relevance to silence in heritage sites and museums. Instead of treating silent responses as negative or pedagogical failure, I approach silence from an eclectic perspective informed by linguistic philosophy, social anthropology and cultural psychology and present an analysis of dialogic silence in relation to the nearly 500-year-old ritual practice of Chado, commonly known as the Japanese tea ceremony. I engage with key concepts of dialogue and silence in order to draw parallels between museums and heritage sites on one hand, and the practice of Chado, performed in the tearoom, on the other. I suggest how the performance of ritual in the Chado tearoom takes place in a heterotopic and heterochronic space of dialogue and of contemplation in silence, where people set aside the concerns of everyday life in a suspended time away from an otherwise unpredictable and violence-prone world. I then argue that heritage sites and museums can be seen as spaces of contemplation akin to the space of the tea ceremony, a comparison which offers an alternative perspective on the crisis of representation, the limitations of language and the problem of visitor fatigue.

Conjuring "the people"

In June 2013, a breakdown in the routine functioning of state bureaucracy sparked the largest and up to that point most significant wave of protests in postwar Bosnia-Herzegovina, named the Bosnian Babylution. The protest centered on the plight of newborn babies who, because of this particular administrative problem, could no longer be issued key documents, even to travel outside the country for life-saving medical care. These events exposed the profound nature of the representational crisis gripping this postwar, postsocialist, and postintervention state that has emerged at the intersection of ethnic hyper-representation and the lived experience of the collapse of biopolitical care. Yet, as this analysis shows, this crisis has also helped unleash new forms of political desire for revolutionary rupture and reconstitution of the postwar political.

The populism/anti-populism frontier and its mediation in crisis-ridden Greece: from discursive divide to emerging cleavage?

Along with other South-European countries, since 2008, Greece has experienced deep economic and social dislocation, leading to a crisis of representation and triggering populist mobilisations and anti-populist reactions. This article focuses on the antagonistic language games developed around populist representations, something that has not attracted much attention in the relevant literature. Highlighting the need to study anti-populism together with populism, focusing on their mutual constitution from a discursive perspective, it articulates a brief yet comprehensive genealogy of populist and anti-populist actors (parties and media) in Greece, exploring their discursive strategies. Moving on, it identifies the main characteristics this antagonistic divide took on within the newly contested, crisis-ridden sociopolitical field, highlighting the implications for a contemporary understanding of cleavages, with potentially broader implications.

Modos de construcción de la memoria en la primera novela chilena experimental antidictadura: El paso de los gansos (1975) de Fernando Alegría

Este artículo se dedica a evidenciar los modos de construcción de la memoria y la crisis de representación en la novela El paso de los gansos(1975) de Fernando Alegría (1918-2005). El volumen, otorga un lugar preferencial a Cristian Montealegre fotógrafo y víctima de la represión, cuyas fotografías operan como testimonio de su experiencia en el contexto de los dos primeros meses de la dictadura. De esta forma, una de las dos primeras novelas chilenas antidictadura expone el golpe y las crisis que este hecho desata por medio de la intensificación de la relación entre palabra e imagen.

The impeachment was a fascist and conservative turn against culture

In this talk, Brazilian media theorist Ivana Bentes (who was briefly Secretary of Citizens’ Rights and Cultural Diversity in Dilma Rousseff’s second government) revisits the protests of 2013, driven by progressive and emancipatory agendas but subsequently hijacked by a media-induced anti-corruption discourse that led to the parliamentary impeachment of the elected head of state and the installation of vice-president Michel Temer at the helm of a right-wing coalition. Why, Bentes asks, has the Left not been able to capitalize on this crisis of representation and what can cultural and media activisms do to rebuild the coalition that took to the streets five years ago against the World Cup and Olympic spending spree and in favour of land rights and the right to the city?

Party competition and political representation in crisis

The aim of the special issue is to investigate through a comparative lens the impact of the recent economic crisis and consequent austerity measures on party competition and political representation in Europe. All six contributions focus on the substance of political conflict and provide new insights about the impact of the crisis on (a) the policy agendas of political parties, (b) the relationship between government and opposition parties, and (c) how citizens’ preferences are represented by political parties. Theoretically, the contributions link the literatures on party competition, responsiveness, agenda-setting, and social movements. Empirically, they provide new empirical material, in particular on the countries in Southern Europe which were hard hit by the crisis. The introduction presents the rationale of the special issue and summarizes the focus and findings of the six contributions.

Rethinking Polish assemblages of the 1960s: The (re)turn to things

The article aims to analyse the status of the object in the neo-avantgarde practice of selected Polish artists in 1960s assemblages, from the perspective of the ‘material turn’, initiated by postructuralism’s crisis of representation in the social sciences and humanities. Trespassing on the intellectual ground associated with traditional painting, which was conceived as a flat two-dimensional surface, led the artists to introducing objects from real life into their art, this gave the artwork containing objects new life and ‘personality’. The paper focuses on the works by four prominent modernist Polish artists: Erna Rosenstein, Włodzimierz Borowski, Tadeusz Kantor and Alina Szapocznikow. Taking into account the differences between their artistic attitudes and personal experiences, one may observe a common interest in the materiality of the world that resulted in a variety of object interpretations (Rosenstein, Borowski, Kantor) as well as the reification the body (Szapocznikow). Reference to Latour’s Actor-Network-Theory also creates a new perspective for research on the objects in works of art (Kantor).

Suspended Crisis in Arab-American and Arabic Literatures: Modernity, Violence, and Afflicted Textuality

Through a comparative and poststructuralist reading, I will examine the artistic manners in which a selection of Arab-American and Arabic literary texts builds a strategy of a poetics-of-suspended-crisis. By conceptualizing crisis through the discourse of violence, I examine three of its dimensions: crisis as a matter of discursive silencing and silence; crisis as a problem of structure in orientalism, and finally crisis as a textual event, which ultimately announces the detonation of silencing and silence. On this account, I distinguish between two modes of representation of crisis. The first concerns itself with narrating the repository of discursive censures over crises in the Middle East, and therefore aims to depoliticize the silences built over crisis. The second mode exemplifies a trend of inscribing crisis as an antagonistic condition of the text and language itself. My argument pays attention to some of the most esoteric and visceral literary strategies that may have remained repressed in Western frameworks of reading “world” or “ethnic” literatures. My selection of these texts is but a small sample concerned with aestheticizing violence as a fundamental mode of imagining crisis in order to allow new counterpoints of thinking it differently outside modern visions of apocalypse, paralysis, and psychosis.

Figuration Libre: On the History of the Association

This article is devoted to the Figuration Libre association which became a landmark in the French art of the 1980s. The activity of the group members was perceived as a fundamental break with the non-spectacular art practice of the previous generation. In the reflection of the curator of the Figuration Libre Hervé Perdriolle, artist Ben Vautier, who participated in the promotion of young artists, and critics Suzanne Pagé, Otto Hahn, and Catherine Strasser, their main strategy was to establish new relations with everyday life and revise the boundaries and territories of art. In the works of the Figuration Libre, artists focus on the tendencies of the return of decorative and ornamental principles; also, the reconstruction of the pictorial medium is associated with the revival of “spontaneity”, the appeal to the lower, marginal language, and the restoration of the autonomous grammar of art. The members of the association form a specific vocabulary, close to the language of comics, graffiti, and mass media printed products, embodying the characteristic tendencies of the art of postmodernism, trying to overcome the crisis of representation. Their imagery is addressed to profane forms of culture, kitsch travesty and play quoting of “high” sources, where infantile optics transforms the logic of the avant-garde into entertainment. Emotionality and plastic emancipation in the spirit of “barbarous” syncretism is opposed to the intellectual elitism of conceptual gestures. Such strategies characterise the international phenomenon of the late 1970s and early 1980s, i.e. the art of the New Wave, bringing together the search of German neo-expressionism, the Italian Trans-avantgarde and artists of the East Village. The commonality of these aspirations was determined by the arrangement of the exhibition “5/5 Figuration Libre, France / USA”, which united French masters and their American colleagues, such as Keith Haring, Jean-Michel Basquiat, and Kenny Scharf. However, in the second half of the 1980s, the collective activity of artists ceased, completing the history of the association and the New Wave in France.

The Paxton Pamphlet War as a Viral Media Event

The Paxton Pamphlet War as a Viral Media Event Will Fenton (bio) Digital Paxton www.digitalpaxton.org As an open-access digital collection, scholarly edition, and teaching platform, Digital Paxton provides the primary-source and contextual materials necessary to explore Pennsylvania's 1764 Paxton "pamphlet war," situating that debate within a wider crisis of representation that stretches from the Seven Years' War (1756–63) to the Northwest Ordinance (1787). That crisis escalated in December 1763, when a mob of backcountry settlers from Paxton Township murdered twenty unarmed Conestoga Indians along the Pennsylvania frontier. Soon after, hundreds of "Paxton Boys" marched on Philadelphia to menace a group of Moravian Indians who had, in response to the violence, been placed under government protection. Though direct confrontation was diffused, the incident ventilated long-festering religious and ethnic grievances, pitting the colony's German and Scots-Irish Presbyterian frontiersmen against Philadelphia's English Quakers and their indigenous trading partners. Supporters of the Paxton Boys and their critics spent the next year battling in print: the resulting public debate constituted about one-fifth of the Pennsylvania's printed material for 1764.1 Central to that print debate was the role of race and religion in settler colonialism, the obligations of the governing to the governed, and the proliferation of unverifiable media, or in today's terms, "fake news."2 While John Raine Dunbar's 1957 edition of twenty-eight pamphlets, The Paxton Papers, has traditionally served as the gateway to the debate, the Paxton story cannot be fully understood through pamphlets alone.3 Digital Paxton's primary source collection therefore comprises all known pamphlets, including alternate editions and German-language translations, as well as hundreds of additional pages of broadsides, political cartoons, and correspondence.4 This expanded corpus provides a case study in viral media that feels unexpectedly urgent today. Pamphleteers mobilized anonymity and pseudonyms to amplify talking points, [End Page 593] discredit opponents, and boost legislative allies, while Paxton supporters forged unlikely coalitions by stoking fears of renewed racial violence and promising security. Surviving documents feature a trove of genre experimentation, including dialogues and epitaphs, poems and songs, and farces and satires. These forms illuminate a print culture whose multiplicity enabled innovation and idiosyncrasy, but also fragmentation and slippages of meaning. More than a collection of scanned documents, Digital Paxton furnishes interpretation and analysis by way of the latest scholarship, historiography, and pedagogy while emphasizing values central to American studies. The project's interdisciplinary imperative is embodied in its keyword essays, which include contributions from historians, literary scholars, and community leaders.5 Digital Paxton expands the corpus to encompass indigenous perspectives, embracing what the editors of the Yale Indian Papers Project have described as a "common pot" or "a kind of communal liminal space, neither solely Euro-American nor completely Native."6 To that point, Digital Paxton features forty-seven rare manuscripts from the Friendly Association Papers, including letters between Quaker leaders and their native partners, accounts of diplomatic conferences, and the writings of Wyalusing leaders.7 To support integration into secondary and postsecondary classrooms, Digital Paxton hosts pedagogical resources intended to collapse the distance between historical records and contemporary interpretation.8 Built on Scalar, an online publishing platform developed by the Alliance for Networking Visual Culture (scalar.me/anvc/), Digital Paxton pairs rich media support for digital collections with sequences of content ("paths") that narrativize those records. When visitors load the site, they automatically enter a path that guides them through interpretive historical overviews before depositing them in the digital collection itself. Scalar both provides and extends key technologies of the book. As with a book, readers can scan the index, browse the table of contents, or add annotations,9 but unlike a physical book, Digital Paxton is richly extensible, accommodates multimedia, and is fully searchable. The project supports print-quality images from a host of archival partners, including newsprint from the American Antiquarian Society, correspondence from the Historical Society of Pennsylvania, congregational diaries from the Moravian Archives of Bethlehem, and never-before-digitized records from the American Philosophical Society and Library Company of Philadelphia. Polyvocal by design, Digital Paxton's interpretative materials speak to one another but can also be read as...

O caminho da participação popular para a consolidação da democracia

Aiming to make a brief analysis of popular participation and the ways to reach its full application, this article presents inquiries and findings about the importance of popular participation to ensure the democratic model. It uses a deductive methodology and a historical-critical analysis to understand the most relevant aspects of the subject. In addition, it illustrates the crisis of representation faced by democracy, with all the difficulties it had to combat in its early years of reestablishment, considering that almost all of the Latin American countries have come out of dictatorial government regimes in recent years. It is this alliance between popular participation and the continuity of democracy, where the first is inherent to the last, that allows building a truly egalitarian society, where citizens can know their rights and duties, as well as enjoy and practice them with responsibility.For society to reach this level of commitment, citizen education is essential, as well as the training of people to participate actively in debates of ideas and decisions that correspond to their interests and to common interest. In conclusion, it is perceived that one of the founding elements of democracy is popular participation, sovereignty that comes from the people, which, together with the dignity of the human being, is the basis of this governmental regime. Such principles must be protected and applied in order to consolidate democracy.

Representation crisis and the populist phenomenon

Participe de la Catedra O'Donnell en Queretaro (2016) sobre las modalidades de democracia que aparecieron en las sociedades europeas y en Latinoamerica donde la democracia liberal (o tradicional) no alcanza a satisfacer a quienes desean un progreso socioeconomico, incluso mediante modalidades de un poder fuerte y personal que modifica las practicas tradicionales de la vida politica y del Estado de derecho. Preocupaba a O'Donnell “la ambivalencia y la indeterminacion en diversos casos de participacion ciudadana”. La convocatoria, por otra parte, permitio abordar “el bonapartismo, las democracias plebiscitarias, los cambios de modelo economico y el populismo”. Me parecio una agenda inteligente y necesaria. A la vez que inmensa. Consecuentemente, me detuve en una sola tematica. La del populismo. Mostraremos que existe desde hace un buen tiempo. Y aparece espectacularmente cuando los sistemas politicos en vigencia no alcanzan a incorporar a la vida politica, nuevas clases, sean acomodadas o mas bien pobres.

Survival sex and trafficked women: The politics of re-presenting and speaking about others in anti-oppressive qualitative research.

Qualitative research grounded in a social constructionist epistemology troubles the assumption, integral in positivist research, that a researcher can be neutral and apolitical. In fact, many scholars are drawn to constructionist epistemologies because they situate the research process as a site of ontological resistance and social change. This essay explores the politics of voice and representation in anti-oppressive qualitative research. Using an example from one author's research on stigma management among formerly incarcerated women, and the particularly pernicious stigma women faced if they had engaged in sex work, we detail the benefits and pitfalls of either re-presenting research participants in their exact words or changing participants' words, a process we refer to as re-languaging. Drawing upon philosophical and social scientific scholarship on the "crisis of representation" in qualitative research and recent scholarship and news articles about human sex trafficking, we underscore the powerful political effects of language. We argue that researchers' choices about language are neither inherently liberatory nor oppressive, but they are always political. We call for a more reflexive scholarly dialog on voice in qualitative social work research and press scholars to explicitly engage the question of whom and what we represent when we claim to represent marginalized others.

The Crisis of Representation in Contemporary Art

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