In this special issue, we examine how publics are brought into being through historically specific media practices. We treat the question of new media as an invitation to explore changing conditions of communication across a number of ethnographic locations. We argue that these changing conditions have challenged our capacity to understand the nature of publics. It is important to emphasize that none of the contributors perceive new media as a coherent object of attention that can easily be isolated as an entity; nor do they locate its novelty in its digital format. Instead, they examine modes of mediation that entail the technological but are not reducible to it. This approach allows anthropologists to keep the referent of new media open and remain attentive to emerging forms of public life that are working outside of or adjacent to the logics of both the digital and the technological. Our hope is that this collection of essays contributes to an anthropological understanding of media that illuminates important aspects of the political economic present, attends to the erosion and reanimation of anonymity in public life, and captures dynamics of staging, projection, and response within and across ethnographic sites. 2In the opening scenes of Fahrenheit 451, firefighters raid a private home in search of books to burn. They are trainees whose search concentrates on the hiding places favored by those who illegally keep books in the interior of electric devices like lamps or heaters.In a scene of the film, a firefighter takes off the screen of a TV set and finds in its hollow space a stack of books. Instead of drawing our attention to the technological apparatus of the television we are directed to another medium: the book. What we are told in the film, however, is that the prime reason why books must be burnt has to do with the effects they produce upon the reading public. "Books disturb people. They make them anti-social," says Montag, the film's main character. The view of the authorities, we learn, is that books unnecessarily deepen and complexify the emotional and intellectual life of their readers, creating an obstacle to the light cheeriness and shallow conversation that make social happiness possible. Moreover, as fire chief Captain Beatty asserts, books are unfit to accommodate the rhythms brought by new media. The new technology in question is interactive television, a device that extends across much of the interior wall space within the home. Instead of the encumbering depths of human experience encountered in the book, television captivates its audience 3 with banal, mind numbing programs engineered to engender and protect the shallow psychology upon which both happiness and social harmony depend.Surveillance is omnipresent in Truffaut's imagined future. Throughout the entire film, a dim spot light illuminates the center of the screen, framing the action's capture by media, and signaling the presence of an invisible gaze originating at the same location occupied by the film's spectator. Within thi...
My aim in this article is threefold. First, to identify the function of tautology in Catholic Charismatic religious practices. Second, to analyze the formal structure of tautology as an embodied regime of citationality. Third, to expose how Charismatic practice both mirrors and anticipates the unfolding dramaturgy of sovereignty within current populism in Brazil and elsewhere. These aims converge in a reflection on the nature of political theater within and beyond political theology.
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Inspired by key concerns of this collective project, this afterword article highlights two main aspects in the discussion of governance through suspension. The first aspect is how geographically widespread the rhetoric of ‘indeterminacy’ (as the fuel of the temporal medium of suspension) has become, soliciting analyses of differentiation across cultures and time. The second aspect relates to the politics of punctuated time in light of changes happening in our current culture of temporality. These two aspects integrate my interest in rethinking the classic concept of the (sovereign) decision conceived as separation from towards that of incision as cut through, particularly in light of rising expressions of authoritarian populism, globally, across regimes.
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