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"Gil, Isabel Capeloa"
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Hazardous future : disaster, representation and the assessment of risk
Since culture, the media and the arts deal with the perception and the processing of catastrophe, what kind of social knowledge does this process produce and how does it contribute to the sustainable development of societies?
The book seeks to understand how societies and cultures deal with disaster and the rhetorical means they resort to in order to represent it. It is situated on the cusp between the response to natural catastrophe, the renewed awareness of human vulnerability in the face of environmental hazard and irresponsible policies and the social role of traditional knowledge and humanistic ideas for the preservation of human communities. It aims to be diverse, in disciplinary allegiance and cultural situation, and relevant, by bringing together articles by well-known scholars and policy makers to jointly discuss the possibilities of reframing hazard for the future, so that one may learn from restored behavior instead of repeating the mistakes of the past.
eBook
Plots of War
Plots of War: Modern Narratives of Conflict discusses the dynamics of change and transformation that underlie the troubled project of modernity and shows how deeply it has been shaped by war and violence. The narrative of war, the emplotment of violence in historic and mainly in symbolic terms, is deeply embedded in the construction of individual and collective memories, but it also helps to shape the mediation of future conflicts.What is ultimately at stake here is the complex figuration and mediation of the violence of war in ever more hyper-mediated ways with direct consequences to the production of identities and processes of cultural memory.
eBook
The Cultural Life of Money
The book discusses how culture simultaneously shapes and is shaped by the economy. Over the past few years, as the world has staggered from one financial crisis to another, the neat separation of economics and culture has been consistently challenged. To understand the current state of affairs, it has become increasingly necessary to understand the conjuncture that rules the production of value in economic systems, how money shapes social relations and affects discursive practices. By discussing the vocabulary, by understanding the rhetoric and interpreting the narratives, be it of crisis, austerity, growth, welfare, neo-liberalism or socialism, new modes of imaging the economic system may be made possible. The book is structured in four chapters dealing with theory and conjuncture (“Philosophies of Money”), with the visual arts and investment (“The Arts and Finance”), with literary representation and narrativity (“Literature and Money Matters”) and with the cognitive impact of fiduciary representation (“Cognitive Moneyscapes”). This collection analyses the process whereby a material icon invested with the symbolical power to rule social exchange becomes an explanatory narrative determining the way societies produce meaning.
eBook
The Risky NPV of Literature in Dos Passos and Pessoa
In this exchange between production/consumption and re-production, the literary is produced as a flow, an exchange of creative capital inflows and outflows, without loss. In managerial terms, a creative cash flow of sorts defines literature’s NPV (Net Present Value). This financial metaphor is representative of a wider question, the nature of the relation between literature and the economy, which I am less interested in discussing from the fiduciary point of view, what Marc Shell has named the real role and the real value of literary work in economic affairs, but rather from the representational perspective of a certain discourse that uses the language and the tropes of the economy to articulate the shape of our common forms of living together. Literature as a system and a structure of exchange aggregates the vocabulary and the images of money culture to understand the rhetoric and interpret the narratives of neo-liberalism or socialism, welfare, crisis, austerity, growth, and risk. My reflections seek to articulate a representational NPV, the result of the creative flow between literature and the economy, by looking at the specific problem of financial risk in John Dos Passos’ The Big Money (1936) and Fernando Pessoa’s The Anarchist Banker (1922).
Journal Article
Fragile Matters: Literature and the Scene of Torture
Literary communication faces challenges when addressing torture, an unmediated and untranslatable event that antagonizes representation. Given the radical difference between the act of reading torture and the experience thereof, the representation of the event is never mastered and never truly “works,” revealing literature's fragile dimension. Fragility not only addresses the vulnerability of bare human life but conveys the condition of literary and cultural studies, torn between ethical responsibility and the continuous threat to fail in the process. With a genealogical approach, the article proposes a fourfold typology of torture by looking at representative examples from Aeschylus's
to Franz Kafka's “In the Penal Colony” and Jean Améry's
. The article contends that the incommunicability of torture challenges not only the literary ethics of responsibility for the other but also its ethics and aesthetics of hospitality epitomized in the very structure of literary representation and its intent to create and accommodate (an)other. The fragile nature of the literary, and its precariousness, renders literature a strategic tool for a new humanism based on the recognition of vulnerability and on the reevaluation of affect.
Journal Article
The Visuality of Catastrophe in Ernst Jünger's Der gefährliche Augenblick and Die veränderte Welt
Ernst Jünger conceived, edited and wrote from 1928 to 1933 introductory essays to seven photo albums depicting contemporary catastrophic events. In these books he put across his radical ideas of a total mobile society energized through continuous violence. The photo books were the visual counterpart to his opus magnum, Der Arbeiter (1932), where he devised the ideal type of the worker as the herald of a new political order. The article discusses Jünger's theory of representation and the role played by photography in the aesthetics of catastrophe by looking at the enclosed visual system of the images selected for Der gefährliche Augenblick (1931) and Die veränderte Welt (1933) within the larger framework of Weimar's visual aesthetics. Whilst Jünger's visual rhetoric is the contingent product of Weimar's haunted relationship to the war, the catastrophic image also creates a discursive practice of its own. The image of disaster, either artificial or man-made, became a cultural palimpsest turning the past into an emerging present that provided instruction for the future. The article contends that the catastrophic image allows at times a double encoding that, albeit naturalizing disaster and thus becoming a producer of myths, may also suggest a reverse appropriation within the framework of the wider Weimar visual literacy.
Journal Article
