Lit Reviews You Can Use
I always appreciate the "Year's Work" lit reviews, published by Oxford. When I was going through the agony of comp exams study, they helped me avoid several texts - entire debates, actually - whose recent movements I might otherwise have felt compelled to follow. Instead, reading the reviews, I felt empowered to ignore them, which saved me time. And for those of you who've done it, you know comps prep is all about time.
So I was perplexed to find this whopper of an abstract for an article on digital media in the recent Year's Work issue.
"This chapter is divided into three sections: 1. Resonance (Sinister or Otherwise); 2. Biopolitics (Arachnophilia and Spit); 3. Blogging (and Not Being Dead). It begins with a study of listening and with a mode of exploration that invites rethinking the sonic in ecological terms—and that might lead to a medium-theoretically informed mode of sonic politics. Moving from a discussion of sense perception—and the sonic as a force operating not on individuals but on collective bodies, the next turn is to a consideration of insect media which declares itself ethologically informed, once again more interested in swarms than subjects, and once again seeking to work at the level of operations rather than representations. This leads to a consideration of the incorporation of the genomic into digitally reconfigured modes of public circulation and consumption; a swallowing up (an incorporation) that might be said to change our perceptions of the materiality of the networks in which we are enmeshed—and increasingly obviously enfleshed. It might also lead to a reconceptualization of those codes that are said to define ‘life’ and to an expanded biopolitics of public science. In the final section the focus shifts to blogging."
I won't even pretend to know what this means, but it sounds impressive. Or annoying. This is all somehow indicative of the depth of disciplinary divisions within the humanities. We don't understand each others' subfields and often, don't take them seriously. The discussion of the final section - about blogging - asks a very basic, reasonable and reasonably interesting question: what drives blogging? -- and then argues that we need the word communicational capitalism to answer it. Because I know something about Marxism and I know how common it is to conceive of various social processes as "economies" this is something I can work with. But "a mode of communicational capitalism, from (an impossible) without" is still a stunning and agonizing phrase for an abstract.
This kind of language communicates a very important message of its own: go away, we're busy. The idea is that if you're not already hip to the problems, this article won't help you. And to some degree that makes sense in the context of a year's work article: you are speaking to people who are probably already interested in these debates, so they need no introduction to the basic vocabulary. Probably, from the persepective of those who study digital media for a living, ""a mode of communicational capitalism, from (an impossible) without" is as basic as saying "My name is Alex. I come from Canada" to an ESL student. Or, as I would say, as a German as a Second Language student: "Ich heiße Alex. Ich komme aus Kanada." At least if I come across someone with a different mother tongue while traveling through Europe, I can always mime. Have fun trying to find the new media studies equivalent of the next train to Frankfurt in this very foreign language.
So I was perplexed to find this whopper of an abstract for an article on digital media in the recent Year's Work issue.
"This chapter is divided into three sections: 1. Resonance (Sinister or Otherwise); 2. Biopolitics (Arachnophilia and Spit); 3. Blogging (and Not Being Dead). It begins with a study of listening and with a mode of exploration that invites rethinking the sonic in ecological terms—and that might lead to a medium-theoretically informed mode of sonic politics. Moving from a discussion of sense perception—and the sonic as a force operating not on individuals but on collective bodies, the next turn is to a consideration of insect media which declares itself ethologically informed, once again more interested in swarms than subjects, and once again seeking to work at the level of operations rather than representations. This leads to a consideration of the incorporation of the genomic into digitally reconfigured modes of public circulation and consumption; a swallowing up (an incorporation) that might be said to change our perceptions of the materiality of the networks in which we are enmeshed—and increasingly obviously enfleshed. It might also lead to a reconceptualization of those codes that are said to define ‘life’ and to an expanded biopolitics of public science. In the final section the focus shifts to blogging."
Years Work Critical and Cultural Theory
(2012)
20
(1):
67-81.
I won't even pretend to know what this means, but it sounds impressive. Or annoying. This is all somehow indicative of the depth of disciplinary divisions within the humanities. We don't understand each others' subfields and often, don't take them seriously. The discussion of the final section - about blogging - asks a very basic, reasonable and reasonably interesting question: what drives blogging? -- and then argues that we need the word communicational capitalism to answer it. Because I know something about Marxism and I know how common it is to conceive of various social processes as "economies" this is something I can work with. But "a mode of communicational capitalism, from (an impossible) without" is still a stunning and agonizing phrase for an abstract.
This kind of language communicates a very important message of its own: go away, we're busy. The idea is that if you're not already hip to the problems, this article won't help you. And to some degree that makes sense in the context of a year's work article: you are speaking to people who are probably already interested in these debates, so they need no introduction to the basic vocabulary. Probably, from the persepective of those who study digital media for a living, ""a mode of communicational capitalism, from (an impossible) without" is as basic as saying "My name is Alex. I come from Canada" to an ESL student. Or, as I would say, as a German as a Second Language student: "Ich heiße Alex. Ich komme aus Kanada." At least if I come across someone with a different mother tongue while traveling through Europe, I can always mime. Have fun trying to find the new media studies equivalent of the next train to Frankfurt in this very foreign language.
posted by aolivez at
12:42 PM
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