Author: webwitch

Sillies: Horses

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Warning: this episode of High Theory is very silly.

In our new summer series of “Sillies,” Saronik and Kim ask each other how simple things will achieve the grandiose task of saving the world. In this episode, Kim asks Saronik about how horses will save the world. 

The texts we mention (or meant to mention) in the episode are (in some vague order):

Peter Shaffer, Equus, 1973

Girish Karnad, Hayavadana, 1971

Sharon Patricia Holland, an other: a black feminist consideration of animal life (Duke UP, 2023)

Mackenzie Cooley, The Perfection of Nature: Animals, Breeding, and Race in the Renaissance (Chicago UP, 2022)

Raymond Malewitz, “On the Origin of ‘Oops!’: The Language and Literature of Animal Disease” Critical Inquiry 45 (Summer 2019). 

In this episode we used sound effects from freesound.org.  To make the episode we downloaded sounds created by the following users: BUNCHA SOUNDS BOI!; InspectorJ; felix.blume. Click the link to hear the sound.

This episode’s silly image was created by Saronik Bosu. It is a distortion of “Whistlejacket” (1762) by George Stubbs

Bombay Talkies

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In this episode of High Theory, Debashree Mukherjee talks about the pioneering film studio Bombay Talkies, founded in 1934 in the city of Bombay (now Mumbai) by Himansu Rai and Devika Rani. Its cast and crew of diverse global origins and training, offer new ways of writing the history of labor in Indian Cinema. In the accompanying B-Side, she focuses on her new book Bombay Talkies: An Unseen History of Indian Cinema, which features rare behind-the-scenes photographs from the personal archive of cinematographer Josef Wirsching. Wirsching brought the influence of German Expressionism to Indian cinema, and was responsible for the cinematic stylings of groundbreaking films like Achhyut Kanya (1936), Mahal (1949), and Pakeezah (1972).

Debashree Mukherjee is Associate Professor of film and media in the Department of Middle Eastern, South Asian, and African Studies (MESAAS) at Columbia University. Her first book, Bombay Hustle: Making Movies in a Colonial City (2020), approaches film history as an ecology of material practices and practitioners. Her second book project, Camera Obscura: Media at the Dawn of Planetary Extraction, develops a media history of  oceanic migrations and plantation capitalism. Debashree edits the peer-reviewed journal BioScope: South Asian Screen Studies and in a previous life she worked in Mumbai’s film and TV industries as an assistant director, writer, and cameraperson.

Image: Sourced from Bombay Talkies: An Unseen History of Indian Cinema with permission.

Shortage

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In this episode of High Theory, Eram Alam talks with us about shortage. A political tool, rather than a natural lack, the concept of a shortage changes the flows of goods and people across borders and space. The concept of a doctor shortage was used in the US immigration reform of the 1960s to recruit discount elite labor from newly postcolonial nations, creating the downstream effect of shortages in their countries of origin. These recruiting practices remain in effect, with a US physician workforce that is approximately 25% international medical graduates, while domestic and international doctor shortages abound. 

Eram Alam is an assistant professor of the History of Science at Harvard University. Her book The Care of Foreigners studies the enduring consequences of post-colonial migration from Asia to the US.  We’re so excited to read it when it comes out! In the meantime, you can read her article “Cold War Crises: Foreign Medical Graduates Respond to US Doctor Shortages, 1965–1975” Social History of Medicine 33 no. 1 (Feb 2020). 

This week’s image of a hospital corridor was uploaded to the image sharing site Pixbay by a user named Mitrey.

Queer Mysticism

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We close Pride Month of 2023 with Jamie Staples talking about queer mysticism. This includes instances in medieval Christianity where an embodied and erotic experience of life, within and between persons, became the basis for an apprehension of divinity. The conversation particularly focuses on the poem “Dark Night of the Soul” by 16th century Spanish poet St. John of the Cross and the work of 14th-15th century English mystic Margery Kempe. Jamie shares his own story to show how queer mysticism can offer resources from within Christianity to build a personal and communitarian politics against fundamentalist discrimination and hatred.

Starting this fall, Jamie Staples will be Visiting Assistant Professor of Medieval English literature at Trinity College in Hartford. His research takes seriously the productive intersection of mystical theology and poetry in the development of alternative modes of critical thinking in the late Middle Ages. He’s recently written two articles focused more specifically on the queer mysticism that he will be discussing today, one on the fifteenth-century Book of Margery Kempe, published in Romanic Review, and the other on the fourteenth-century poem Cleanness, published in Exemplaria.

Image: © 2023 Saronik Bosu

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The Environmental Unconscious

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Steven Swarbrick talks about poetic engagement with nature in the work of early modern poets ​​Edmund Spenser, Walter Ralegh, Andrew Marvell, and John Milton. Here language is influenced not by the manifest and the conscious, but the unconscious or void, as understood in Freudian and Lacanian psychoanalytic theory. This work is the basis for his hope for a reorganization of thought in contemporary ecocriticism around a politics of degrowth instead of additive policies that serve to greenwash capitalist economies.

Steven Swarbrick is an assistant professor of English at Baruch College, City University of New York. His research interests include early modern literature, contemporary continental philosophy, psychoanalysis, the environmental humanities, and sexuality and film studies. He is the author of The Environmental Unconscious: Ecological Poetics from Spenser to Milton (University of Minnesota Press, 2023) and co-author, with Jean-Thomas Tremblay, of Negative Life: The Cinema of Extinction (Northwestern University Press, under contract). He is currently working on two books: Unknowing Sex: Shakespeare against the Historicists and Destituent Ecology: Libidinal Politics for the Environmental Left.

Image: © 2023 Saronik Bosu

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Rhetoric of Decline

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In this episode of High Theory, Jed Esty talks about the Rhetoric of Decline. Declinism names the contradictory political narrative that America will always be the greatest country in the world, yet is in constant danger of losing its place in the global pecking order. Studying this rhetorical log-jam reveals its prominence on both the left and the right, and its toxic effects on our national discourse. But comparing the end of America’s empire to Britain’s imperial decline in the twentieth century can help us muddle out of this mess. 

The basis of our conversation is Jed’s recent book The Future of Decline: Anglo-American Culture at Its Limits (Stanford UP, 2022).  It’s a cool short book with an x-ray spaceman on the cover. You should read it, even if this isn’t usually your cup of tea. 

Jed Esty is the Vartan Gregorian Professor of English at the University of Pennsylvania, where he teaches and writes about Anglophone literature after 1850, with special interests in modernism, critical theory, history and theory of the novel, colonial and postcolonial studies, the Victorian novel, and post-45 U.S. culture. He is the author of Unseasonable Youth: Modernism, Colonialism, and the Fiction of Development (Oxford 2012) and A Shrinking Island: Modernism and National Culture in England (Princeton 2004). 

This week’s image was made by Saronik Bosu in June of 2023.

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Sillies: Jeans

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Warning: this episode of High Theory is very silly.

In our new summer series of “Sillies,” Saronik and Kim ask each other how simple things will achieve the grandiose task of saving the world. In this episode, Saronik asks Kim how jeans will save the world. Yes, we mean denim, not genes.

Some reading that might help assuage the silliness, and support our absurd arguments is listed below:

In this episode we used sound effects from freesound.org. To make the episode we downloaded sounds created by the following users: MATRIXX, aj_heels, deleted_user_5959249, LittleRobotSoundFactory, TarynMichelle101, Yellowbear, voxlab, NikiPlaymostories, TasmanianPower, trader_one, milkywaysurroundsme, josefpres, BugInTheSYS, paulnorthyorks. Click the link to hear the sound.

This episode’s silly image was created by Saronik Bosu.

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Party

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Sheila Liming talks about the party,  social gatherings that occasion joy and dread and various emotions in between. The party is both a pause and an acceleration in the life-work continuum, it can deaden political motivation and engender fresh politics. We discuss the horrible parties in The Office and the wonderful parties in Small Axe, among other things.

Sheila Liming is Associate Professor at Champlain College in Burlington, VT, where she teaches classes in American literature, writing, and media. She is the author, most recently, of Hanging Out: The Radical Power of Killing Time (Melville House, 2023), and also of the books Office (Bloomsbury, 2020) and What a Library Means to a Woman (Minnesota UP, 2020). Her writing has appeared in publications like the The New York Review of Books, The Atlantic, Lapham’s Quarterly, LitHub, The Globe and Mail, and The Los Angeles Review of Books, and elsewhere. 

Image: © 2023 Saronik Bosu

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Global Asia

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Cheryl Narumi Naruse talks about the transformation of Singapore over the past decades into a site of postcolonial promise, with economic prosperity and cultural soft power. She discusses a range of texts ranging from official state documents to the immensely popular book and movie adaptation of Crazy Rich Asians, which bear witness to and contribute to this change.

Cheryl Narumi Naruse is Assistant Professor of English and the Andrew W. Mellon Assistant Professor of the Humanities at Tulane University. Her research and teaching interests include contemporary Anglophone literatures and cultures (particularly those from Southeast Asia and the Pacific Islands), diasporic Asian and Asian American literature, postcolonial theory, cultures of capitalism, and genre studies. Her first book, Becoming Global Asia: Contemporary Genres of Postcolonial Capitalism in Singapore is forthcoming from University of California Press in 2023. She is also working on a second monograph which explores the illegibility of Singapore/Malaysia—as the comparatively “cold” Southeast nations in the context of the Vietnam War—in Asian American and postcolonial studies. 

Image: © 2023 Saronik Bosu

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Computer Graphics

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In this episode of High Theory, Bernard Dionysius Geoghegan talks with us about computer graphics. Emerging from tools for sailing and warmaking, like sea charts and radar, modern computer graphics are technologies of mapping and managing risk. They seem intent on absorbing the human sensorium into the machine.  

In the episode Bernard refers to computer graphics as “techniques of addressing,” a term he attributes to Ranjodh Singh Dhaliwal.  He also uses the term “operational images” which comes from the work of Harun Farocki, and talks about SAGE, the US Government’s Cold War era Semi-Automatic Ground Environment Air Defense System.  Bernard references Paul Edward’s book A Vast Machine: Computer Models, Climate Data, and the Politics of Global Warming (MIT Press, 2013). He also mentions the German scholar Christoph Borbach who has written on auditory computer interfaces, and American disability studies scholar Mara Mills, who has written on the Deaf history of computing.  He was kind enough to give us an extensive bibliography on this topic, which is posted below. 

Bernard Dionysius Geoghegan is a reader in the History and Theory of Digital Media at King’s College London.  He has a brand new book out on the cybernetic history of French theory, called Code: From Information Theory to French Theory (Duke UP, 2023). Kim met him when he came to give a talk at the Stanford Humanities Center in January 2023.  He wore denim and had a slightly manic affect. People came all the way from Berkeley to hear what he had to say, which is quite impressive in the Bay Area.  

Places I’ve developed these topics in print:

Galloway, Alexander, and Bernard Dionysius Geoghegan. “Shaky Distinctions: A Dialogue on the Digital and the Analog – Journal #121 October 2021 – e-Flux.” E-Flux, no. 121 (October 2021). https://www.e-flux.com/journal/121/423015/shaky-distinctions-a-dialogue-on-the-digital-and-the-analog/.

Geoghegan, Bernard Dionysius. “An Ecology of Operations: Vigilance, Radar, and the Birth of the Computer Screen.” Representations 147, no. 1 (August 2019): 59–95. https://doi.org/10.1525/rep.2019.147.1.59.

———. “The Bitmap Is the Territory: How Digital Formats Render Global Positions.” MLN 136, no. 5 (2021): 1093–1113. https://doi.org/10.1353/mln.2021.0081.

A video lecture talking about these topics:

My lecture starting around 3 hours, 7 min. mark on this YouTube Video: “Screening the Environment: From Rough Waters to Computable Grids.” Vivre par(mi) les écrans : passé et avenir, Université Jean Moulin Lyon 3, April 2022.

Scholars whose works have inspired my remarks and research:

Bredekamp, Horst, Vera Dünkel, and Birgit Schneider, eds. The Technical Image. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2015. A great collection of essays in the spirit I try to follow in my own work.

Cardoso-Llach, Daniel. “Architecture and the Structured Image: Software Simulations as Infrastructures for Building Production.” In The Active Image: Architecture and Engineering in the Age of Modeling, edited by Sabine Ammon and Remel Capdevila-Werning, 23–52. Cham: Springer, 2017.

Denson, Shane. Discorrelated Images. Durham: Duke University Press, 2021.

Dhaliwal, Ranjodh Singh. “On Addressability, or What Even Is Computing.” Critical Inquiry 49, no. 1 (Autumn 2022): 1–27.  https://www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/abs/10.1086/721167

Farocki, Harun. “Phantom Images.” Public, no. 29 (2004): 13–22. Where he briefly discusses the term operational images to which myself and so many others are indebted.

Gaboury, Jacob. Image Objects: An Archaeology of Computer Graphics. Cambridge (MA): MIT Press, 2021.

Hoelzl, Ingrid, and Rémi Marie. “Google Street View: Navigating the Operative Image.” Visual Studies 29, no. 3 (2014): 261–71. https://doi.org/10.1080/1472586X.2014.941559. 

Parikka, Jussi. “Operational Images: Between Light and Data.” E-Flux, no. 133 (February 2023). https://www.e-flux.com/journal/133/515812/operational-images-between-light-and-data/.

Schneider, Birgit. Textiles Prozessieren. Zurich: Diaphanes, 2007. A great early study of the relation of computation to graphical—as well as visual, practical, labor, and craft—histories.

Vardouli, Theodora. “Skeletons, Shapes, and the Shift from Surface to Structure in Architectural Geometry.” Nexus Network Journal, 2020. https://doi.org/10.1007/s00004-020-00478-0. (One of many inspiring texts and projects Theodora’s put into the world, on compters, graphics, and space.)

This week’s image is a radar loop of the December 16 2007 Eastern North America winter storm, found on Wikimedia Commons. The loop runs from Saturday Morning at 7 AM (Dec 15) to Sunday Night at 7 PM (Dec 16). The image is in the public domain because it was made by someone who works for the National Weather Service in Burlington, Vermont. The rate of change of the GIF was slowed down to avoid triggering folks with photosensitive epilepsy. 

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