Why does it seem like our everyday life is shadowed by something menacing? This book identifies and illuminates paranoia as a significant feature of contemporary U.S. society and culture. Centering on what it identifies as three key dimensions - power, truth, and identity - in three different contexts - society, literature, and critique - the book explores and explains the increasing influence of paranoid thinking in U.S. society during the second half of the twentieth century and first decades of the twenty-first, a period which has seen the rise of control systems and neoliberal ascendency. Inquiring about the predominance of white, male, American subjects in paranoid culture, Frida Beckman recognizes an antagonistic maintenance and fortification of a conception of the autonomous individual that perceives itself as under threat. Identifying such paranoia as emerging from an increasingly disjunctive relation between this conception of the subject and the changing nature of the public sphere, she develops the concept of the paranoid chronotope as a tool for theoretical analysis of social, literary, and critical practices today. Investigating 21st century paranoid fictions, phenomena, and debates such as New Sincerity novels, conspiracist online culture, and postcritique, Beckman shows how the paranoid chronotope constitutes a recurring feature of modern consciousness.
Raymond Carver's fiction is widely known for its careful documentation of lower-middle-class North America in the 1970s and 80s. Building upon the realist understanding of Carver's work, Raymond Carver's Chronotope uses a central concept of Bakhtin's novelistics to formulate a new context for understanding the celebrated author's minimalist fiction. G. P. Lainsbury describes the critical reception of Carver's work and stakes out his own intellectual and imaginative territory by arguing that Carver's fiction can be understood as diffuse, fragmentary, and randomly ordered. Offering a fresh analysis of Carver's body of work, this book offers an extensive meditation on this major figure in postmodern U.S. fiction.
There is a link between finance and paranoia, and that link may well be inescapable. At the core of financial imagination lies a notion of value – of ‘value creation’ – that is loaded with trouble. This is the trouble of a fragile metaphor: a metaphor of fecund money and future return, of true value and false value, of true value that should be protected from the perils of dilapidation, expropriation and speculation, but whose substance is in fact nowhere to be found. Contemporary conspiratorial, millennialist discourse on money, banking and wealth does not embody a delirious misrepresentation of the logic of finance: rather, it exacerbates the paranoid potentials inherent in mainstream financial imagination. This is the radical hypothesis developed in this book: that of paranoid finance as a sedimentation of the demons that haunt the conventional categories of financial value. Tutorials abound today that guarantee access to secret knowledge about the financial system, to magical currencies that release eternal returns, to legal schemes conducive to personal sovereignty, and to a way out of economic enslavement. They often combine disparate elements of esotericism, conspiratorialism, antisemitism, populism, libertarianism or spiritualism. But as Muniesa shows, they also provide a testbed for a critique of the limits of financial imagination.
Theory Conspiracy provides a state-of-the-art collection that takes stage on the meeting and/or battlegrounds between conspiracy theory and theory-asconspiracy. By deliberately scrambling the syntax—conspiracy theory cum theory conspiracy—it seeks to open a set of reflections on the articulation between theory and conspiracy that addresses how conspiracy might rattle the sense of theory as such. In this sense, the volume also inevitably stumbles on the recent debates on postcritique. The suspicion that our ways of reading in the humanities have been far too suspicious, if not paranoid, has gained considerable attention in a humanities continuously questioned as superfluous at best and leftist and dangerous at worst. The chapters in this volume all approach this problematic from different angles. It features clear engaging writing by a set of contributors who have published extensively on questions of paranoia, conspiracy theory, and/or the state of theory today. This collection will appeal to readers interested in conspiracy theories, critical theory, and the future of humanities.
This book develops a new framework for analyzing the spatio-temporal workings of law and other forms of governance. Chronotopes of Law argues that studies of law and governance can be reinvigorated by drawing on a bundle of quite heterogenous analytical tools that do not have a single provenance or a single political or normative aim but that work well in combination. Analyses of legal temporality carried out by anthropologists and studies of law and space undertaken by geographers and legal scholars have proliferated in recent years, but these research traditions have remained largely separate. By adapting notions such as intertextuality, dialogism, and the ‘chronotope’ from Mikhail Bakhtin, notions designed specifically to synthesize considerations of space and time in a framework that is open-ended, interactive and dynamic, Mariana Valverde develops an anti-metaphysical theory and method for legal studies. This approach will be useful both to theorists and to researchers seeking to illuminate the actual workings of law and other forms of governance. Indeed, a key aim of the book is to break down the institutional and disciplinary barriers that prevent theorists from learning from empirical studies and viceversa. Written by one of the foremost sociolegal scholars writing today, this theoretically innovative work constitutes a major contribution to contemporary studies in law and society.
A multitude of ideas about individual and distributed agency circulated in Scandinavian culture during the 1960s, a period often designated as the early information age. Through an analysis of six novels, this dissertation discusses how prose fiction in and around the 1960s in Norway, Sweden and Denmark responded and contributed to this circulation of ideas of agency. The study argues that a transition is played out in the novels, from an idea of agency as individualistic and possessive, which I designate as melodramatic, towards an idea of agency as distributed and ecodramatic, emerging in an active environment, where multiple agents, human and non-human, co-exist (these concepts are derived and developed from works by Timothy Melley and Mark Seltzer). This transition is claimed to be conveyed through vague feelings expressed by the characters, signalling problems with the representation of agency, which are discussed in the thesis through the concept of affects (as understood by Sianne Ngai, primarily). The study overall applies a media ecological perspective to the literary works, situating questions of both literary form and ideas of agency in the techno-cultural development of the 1960s, investigated through the lens of the cultural history of cybernetics and understood as part of a larger epistemological and ontological change – a process of ecologization (Erich Hörl). This process accelerated during the period and is characterized in this study by a focus on relations, networks and self-reflexivity. From this theoretic approach, ideas of agency must be understood as intrinsically entangled with changes in the environment (environment understood in a broad sense as a setting in the novels, including both technologically mediated environments and natural environments), and this is conceptualized through the newly coined term agotope, an adjusted version of Mikhail Bakhtin’s concept of the chronotope. Three agotopes organize the readings in the study, each referring to key aspects of 1960s culture: “Traffic,” “Contamination” and “Media.” The six novels studied are Bilburen (Carborne, 1963) and Miniput (Miniput, 1969) by Swedish writer Nils Leijer, Den siste prøven (The Final Test, 1968) and Sommeren på heden (Summer on the Heath, 1970) by Norwegian writer Vigdis Stokkelien, Pap (Cardboard, 1967) by Danish writer Cecil Bødker, and Termush, Atlanterhavskysten (Termush, the Atlantic Coast, 1967) by Danish writer Sven Holm. Under 1960-talet, en period som ofta betecknas som den tidiga informationsåldern, cirkulerade en mängd idéer om individuell och distribuerad agens i den skandinaviska kulturen. Genom att analysera sex romaner från Norge, Sverige och Danmark diskuterar denna avhandling hur prosan från perioden bidrog till och svarade på denna cirkulation av idéer om agens. Studien hävdar att romanerna sammantaget pekar på en övergång: från en idé om agens som individualistisk och melodramatisk till en idé om agens som distribuerad och ekodramatisk vilken framträder i en aktiv miljö, där flera agenter, mänskliga och icke-mänskliga, samverkar (dessa begrepp har övertagits och utvecklats från tidigare forskning av Timothy Melley och Mark Seltzer). I studien argumenteras för att denna förskjutning i förståelsen av agens förmedlas genom vaga känslor uttryckta av romanernas karaktärer. Vaga känslor signalerar också problem med representationen av agens och diskuteras i under-sökningarna genom affektteori (såsom det teoretiseras av främst Sianne Ngai). Sammantaget tillämpar studien ett medieekologiskt perspektiv på de litterära verken genom att placera frågor om både litterär form och idéer om agens i relation till den teknokulturella utvecklingen under 1960-talet, förstådda som en del av en större epistemologisk och ontologisk förändring – en process av ekologisering (Erich Hörl). Denna process accelererade under perioden i fråga och beskriver i ljuset av cybernetikens framväxt en relationell, nätverksbaserad och självreflexiv vändning inom teknologi och tänkande. Ur detta teoretiska perspektiv måste ideer om agens studeras som intrikat sammanflätade med förändringar i den omgivande miljön (här förstådd i bred mening som både teknologiskt medierade och naturliga miljöer) och detta konceptualiseras i studien genom den nybildade termen agotop, som är en vidareutveckling av Michail Bachtins koncept kronotop. Tre olika agotoper organiserar läsningarna i studien i tre hovudkapitel, vilka var och en hänvisar till nyckelaspekter av 1960-talets kultur: ”Trafik”, ”Kontamination” och ”Media”. De sex romaner som studeras är Bilburen (1963) och Miniput (1969) av den svenske författaren Nils Leijer, Den siste prøven (1968) och Sommeren på heden (1970) av den norska författaren Vigdis Stokkelien, Pap (1967) av den danska författaren Cecil Bødker samt Termush, Atlanterhavskysten (1967) av den danske författaren Sven Holm.
Anyone interested in the intersection of theory and practice in architecture will appreciate the insight offered by Hejduk's Chronotope. With essays by Stan Allen, Peggy Deamer, K. Michael Hays, Catherine Ingraham, Detlef Mertins, Edward Mitchell, and Robert Somol, the volume examines today's tendency towards theoretical production, as exemplified by John Hejduk, known for his ventures outside the realm of the practical. Hejduk, the Dean of the School of Architecture at The Cooper Union, has created a unique body of theoretical work: publications such as Mask of Medusa; and small-scale constructions such as his compelling "masques,"structures that fall between architecture, scenography, sculpture, and poetry. Additionally, Hejduk has several built works to his name—housing in Berlin and a renovation of The Cooper Union—which display the same themes and tectonics as his theoretical creations.
Time travel and brothels; unusual visitors from different eras, dimensions, and realities; human zoos maintained by curious aliens who like to watch; private eyes who are zombies; leafy-green literary collaborators; moral steampunk issues; a dreamer at the edge of the solar system; an astronaut who's gone insane; and the conspiracies of chrono-assassins--just a few of the fantastic themes in these 16 stories from Michael Hemmingson's first collection of speculative fiction: page-turners, every one of them!
Hermeneutics and criticism explores the status of ideals in contemporary society. It demonstrates how ideals have become less meaningful over time, and questions the role of critical theory in their decline. To unpick the relationship between hermeneutics, ideals, and criticism, the book reengages the traditional methods of dialectic and rhetoric. It challenges the claims of recent critical theory, such as the ontological turn and new materialism/realism, that reality can be speculated upon aside from ideals. The author argues that speculation on reality without ideals becomes self-fulfilling; the more that conceptions of reality are detached from ideals, the more disaffirming those understandings of reality become. Critical reengagement with ideals is imperative to give consequence to the meaning of ethics, morality and discussions of what society and humanity should resemble. The hermeneutic method that the book employs revitalises ideals without regressing to idealism verses realism. The book reconceptualises ‘contrast’ as a means to reinstate the consequences of ideals without distortion. It's a vital read for those daring to challenge the status quo of critical theory, whilst incorporating their relevance to the philosophy of communication.
Against World Literature: On the Politics of Untranslatability argues for a rethinking of comparative literature focusing on the problems that emerge when large-scale paradigms of literary studies ignore the politics of the “Untranslatable”—the realm of those words that are continually retranslated, mistranslated, transferred from language to language, or especially resistant to substitution. In the place of “World Literature”—a dominant paradigm in the humanities, one grounded in market-driven notions of readability and universal appeal—Apter proposes a plurality of “world literatures” oriented around philosophical concepts and geopolitical pressure points. The history and theory of the language that constructs World Literature is critically examined with a special focus on Weltliteratur, literary world systems, narrative ecosystems, language borders and checkpoints, theologies of translation, and planetary devolution in a book set to revolutionize the discipline of comparative literature.
