[csaa-forum] Culture Machine: Online porn; Badiou; Auge

[gary hall]

Culture Machine <http://www.culturemachine.net> is pleased to announce
the following new publications:

CULTURE MACHINE INTERZONE

* Dougal Phillips, ‘Can Desire Go on Without a Body? Pornographic
Exchange and the Death of the Sun’.
http://culturemachine.tees.ac.uk/InterZone/dphillips.html

Every day there are 68 million search engine requests for pornographic
material, making up no less than a quarter of all searches. Porn
websites account for as much as a quarter of all websites online. In
this article Dougal Phillips considers the structural operation of the
economy of desire found in online pornography, in particular the
resonances it has with questions of the future of human technology and
of the relationship between thought, desire and the body. Closely
engaging with the work of Jean-François Lyotard, Phillips addresses two
pressing issues: first, how we view the relation between technology and
the body; and second, how a rethinking of the economies of the
pornographic makes problematic the current theorisation of desire and of
pornography.


CULTURE MACHINE REVIEWS

* Matthew Wilkens (ed.) (2005) ‘The Philosophy of Alain Badiou’, special
issue of Polygraph 17. Reviewed by Benjamin Noys.
http://culturemachine.tees.ac.uk/Reviews/rev51.htm

In his book on Deleuze Alain Badiou notes, with obvious approval, that
Deleuze ‘felt only contempt for debates’, preferring instead
‘disputatio’ – dispute. It is only fitting then that Badiou’s work has
generated so much dispute and so much antagonism. True to his own Maoist
roots Badiou does not seek to settle safely within the regulated spaces
of academic debate. The centrality of being (ontology), the event, the
subject, and truths are what serve to divide Badiou’s ultra-modernist
philosophy from all the main currents of both Continental and analytic
philosophy. For Anglophone readers the resulting disputes have been
traced in a number of recent collections devoted to Badiou’s work.
Benjamin Noys considers a recent contribution to this ‘Badiou wave’, the
special issue of the journal Polygraph edited by Matthew Wilkens, which
comes with an impressive list of contributors.

* Marc Augé (2004) Oblivion. Minneapolis and London: University of
Minnesota Press. Reviewed by Les Roberts.
http://culturemachine.tees.ac.uk/Reviews/rev50.htm

For Les Roberts, Augé’s dialectic of memory and forgetting, as outlined
in his recent book, Oblivion, may be looked upon as a ‘mapping’ of
temporal lacunae and discontinuities. Roberts’ use of a geographical
metaphor is intended on the one hand to bring to the fore some of the
spatial implications of Augé’s thesis – and in this regard comparisons
with Augé’s earlier work on non-places (1995), or his more recent Le
temps en ruines (2003) prove instructive. One the other, this metaphor
is aimed at countering the (a)spatial essentialism of the Bergsonian
durée, in which space is subordinated to a temporal logic of flow and
continuity, an instrumental logic that informs the radical
deterritorialisations of the ‘rhizome’ and ‘nomad’.


CULTURE MACHINE <http://www.culturemachine.net> publishes new work from
both established figures and up-and-coming writers. It is fully refereed
and has an International Editorial Advisory Board which includes
Geoffrey Bennington, Robert Bernasconi, Sue Golding, Lawrence Grossberg,
Peggy Kamuf, Alphonso Lingis, Meaghan Morris, Paul Patton, Mark Poster,
Avital Ronell, Nicholas Royle, Tadeusz Slawek and Kenneth Surin.


--
Dr Gary Hall
Senior Lecturer in Media and Cultural Studies, Middlesex University
http://www.mdx.ac.uk/subjects/mcc/mcs/index.htm
Co-editor of Culture Machine http://www.culturemachine.net
My website http://www.garyhall.info