Jack Z Bratich
Biographic Data
| ID | 259156 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Jack Z Bratich |
| GIVEN NAMES | Jack Z |
| FAMILY NAME | Bratich |
| SIGNATURE | BRATICH J Z |
| AFFILIATIONS | Rutgers, the State University of New Jersey |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-7275-347X |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 32 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 130 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 31 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 1 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2002 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2025 |
| H-INDEX | 7 |
Patriarchal pacts in the neo-archaic manosphere
This paper situates contemporary manospheric culture within archaic forms of masculine identity formation foundational to patriarchal political orders and fascism. What happens when 21st century emergent masculinity is also what Deleuze and Guattari call a neo-archaism? Drawing from Celia Amoros’ understanding of patriarchy as being primarily composed of masculine pacts and packs, I analyse the manosphere as an neo-archaic space for the formation…
Revealing Challenges of Teaching Secrecy
All teaching has something to do with transmission of hidden knowledge, secrecy, and revelation. But the teaching of secrecy itself faces particular challenges. Drawing on the authors’ experiences teaching secrecy-themed seminars to first-year university students, this paper pinpoints four such challenges: how to determine the range of phenomena to cover in a short course, how to prevent excessive interpretation of secrets, how to encourage stude…
‘Give me liberty or give me Covid!’
This paper examines the ‘anti-lockdown’ protests in the US beginning in April 2020 through the concepts of necropolitics (Mbembe) and microfascism (Deleuze and Guattari). The paper argues that these protests are examples of what it coins, necropopulism. What if the libertarian, hyper-individualistic, and reactionary populism we witness in these and other manifestations (e.g. mass shooters, alt-right street fights) are both fixated on their identi…
Civil Society Must Be Defended
In this article, I propose that we think of the recent concern over fake news, misinformation, disinformation, and conspiracy theories as a moral panic. I revisit Stuart Hall and his co-authors’ concept, updating it in two ways. First, I focus on how the current panic has altered what they called “primary definers” (which now includes professional journalism, as a result of their own waning authority). Second, the new alliance of panic actors (jo…
U.S. Feminism, 1968 and Mediated Collective Intellectuality
In response to the editorial call to examine the legacy of 1968 and critical intellectual formations, this short paper maps some of the feminist intellectual practices in and out of the university system around that era. The paper focuses on intellectuality defined via three features: publication, pedagogy, and peer development; in sum, peer transmission of analysis and know-how. Along the way, we find parallel educational institutions, small sca…
Guest Editor's Introduction
Guest Editor's Introduction." Communication and Critical/Cultural Studies, 11(1), pp. 1–4 Notes[1] I thank the contributors not only for their substantive interventions, but their astounding turnaround time, given the short notice to submit. I also want to give special thanks to James Hay for giving space/time to such (un)timely interventions into the academic journal cycle.[2] The issue is not limited only to Occupy Wall Street, nor even to the …
Adventures in the Public Secret Sphere
What are the contours of the contemporary public secret sphere? Some key manifestations can be found in the hybrids of network and sovereign power shaped by communications warfare. This article examines recent entanglements of social media and political dissent, specifically those sovereign networks designed to foment and prevent youth-oriented social movements. Using a number of recent examples (including the U.S. State Department organized Alli…
To Receive Well—It's Critical
This essay explores a non-negationist approach to the “critical” by recounting cultural studies's recent articulation of intellectual work to social movement practice. The academicization of cultural studies is evaluated not as cooptation of criticality, but as subsumption, which creates new platforms for action. Ultimately, Cultural Studies would benefit from its own “reception study” in which its powers to be affected could be enhanced to recon…
Occupy All the Dispositifs
This article assesses Occupy Wall Street as an amalgamation of mediated processes of subjectivation associated with marginal popular culture (memes, meme-platforms, Anonymous operations). This accumulation, I argue, is part of a broader convergence of agencements, of subjectifying processes that took place on and offline, in and out of concentrated occupied zones. OWS gives us one example in response to Toni Negri's call for a genealogy of dispos…
From Audiences to Media Subjectivities
In this chapter, Jack Bratich argues that, even as “the audience” is in crisis in the digital media era, we can still learn much from examining the construction of that audience. The audience itself is a convergence of discursive problematizations of what Bratich calls “media subjectivities.” This chapter explores a number of these problematizations in order to extract the specific dynamics of “the audience” that are still relevant, including rel…
Foucault, Cultural Studies, and Governmentality
User-Generated Discontent
In a time when interactive technologies and participatory usage are equated with DIY citizenship, how do we account for the return of sovereign power in the form of police interventions into usage? How are decentralized social media deployed as instruments by traditional social actors and political institutions? This article addresses these questions by analyzing the structuring context that links convergence and warfare. It focuses on the Allian…
What is a Trilogy? Editor’s Introduction
This essay introduces the reader to the special issue commemorating Michael Hardt and Toni Negri’s trilogy ( Empire, Multitude, Commonwealth)
Fabricating Activism
This article examines the recent resurgence of interest in what we call “fabriculture.” Three dimensions of fabriculture are explored: the gendered spaces of production around new domesticity and the social home; the blurring of old and new media in digital craft culture; and the politics of popular culture that emerge in the mix of folk and commercial culture. Ultimately, we conceptualize craft as power (the ability or capacity to act), as a way…
Pox Populi
This article examines recent developments in U.S. network politics. Focusing on the rise of the Tea Party as well as the standoffs in Madison, WI, it analyzes the emergent forms of populism via network forms. In addition, this conjuncture produces new mutations in the relationship between networks and sovereignty. Finally, the affective charge of these future networked movements, from fear to hope to love, need investigation
What's Left? On Turning Backs and Facing Facts
This essay, written a couple weeks after Barack Obama's inauguration, examines the changing politics of faciality and the implications for dissent
Activating the Multitude
To speak of active audiences today is an act that runs the risk of self-de-activation. What branch of media cultural studies has been so thoroughly pilloried as active audience studies? With the pendulum swing toward economic analyses over the last ten years, what does it mean to revisit reception, especially one as “excessive” as active audience studies? I turn to the “active audience” moment in reception and cultural studies (exemplified by Stu…
Conspiracy Panics
From Embedded to Machinic Intellectuals
This essay examines how the increasing dependence of the academy, specifically communication studies, on corporate and federal funding is creating a sector of embedded intellectuals. Using the theoretical lens of what is loosely called “autonomism,” I argue that the concept of General Intellect forces us to reconsider traditional notions of intellectual work. The significance of communication, as both a growing academic field and infrastructure f…
A Summer of Double Super Secrecy
This article examines the news events of summer 2005, focusing on the Valerie Plame leak investigation, the revealing of the identity of Watergate's Deep Throat, and various stories pertaining to the Terror/War. In analyzing the ways evidence is deployed rhetorically, it begins to question an oppositional strategy that relies on publicity and exposure. The article instead calls for a refocus on the 'secret sphere' of politics (especially within j…
Popular Secrecy and Occultural Studies1
Is cultural studies becoming-strategic in accordance with its context? In this era where traditional conceptual tactics have not provided the desired results, perhaps we can experiment with new techniques. This essay explores one such tactic and commitment, namely the faith in publicity as a truth-telling strategy to expose, and ultimately neutralize, power's machinations. We are witnessing a regime-of-truth change, one that requires us to rethin…
Nothing Is Left Alone for Too Long”
This article examines reality television as a cultural form of what Gilles Deleuze calls “control societies.” For Deleuze, the shift from disciplinary societies (enclosures, bounded spaces, institutions) to control societies (circuits, modulated spaces, networked relations) is marked by a change in the processes of subjectification. The “postindividual” or the “dividual” is characterized by interchangeability, flexibility, and mobility (in accord…
Public Secrecy and Immanent Security
Amassing the Multitude
This article examines early problematizations of “the audience” in communication studies (in Michel Foucault's sense of problematization). Using Michael Hardt and Toni Negri's concept of the “multitude,” the author argues that the audience is a product of discursive constructions, but that these constructions themselves draw upon the ontological practices of what may be called “audience powers” or “mediated multitudes.” Problematizations of the a…
I've Got You Under My Skin
This essay, written within a week of the November 2004 U.S. election, was intended as a fog cutter in the miasma of postelection gloom. Finding more than silver linings, it assesses our crucible moment, in the historical and the alchemist sense. We are witnessing a variety of extraparliamentary experiments on the political landscape. What can cultural researchers do in these times? What are our experiments, our own transformations, in this crucib…
Public Secrecy and Immanent Security
Fabricating Activism
This article examines the recent resurgence of interest in what we call “fabriculture.” Three dimensions of fabriculture are explored: the gendered spaces of production around new domesticity and the social home; the blurring of old and new media in digital craft culture; and the politics of popular culture that emerge in the mix of folk and commercial culture. Ultimately, we conceptualize craft as power (the ability or capacity to act), as a way…
Amassing the Multitude
This article examines early problematizations of “the audience” in communication studies (in Michel Foucault's sense of problematization). Using Michael Hardt and Toni Negri's concept of the “multitude,” the author argues that the audience is a product of discursive constructions, but that these constructions themselves draw upon the ontological practices of what may be called “audience powers” or “mediated multitudes.” Problematizations of the a…
Civil Society Must Be Defended
In this article, I propose that we think of the recent concern over fake news, misinformation, disinformation, and conspiracy theories as a moral panic. I revisit Stuart Hall and his co-authors’ concept, updating it in two ways. First, I focus on how the current panic has altered what they called “primary definers” (which now includes professional journalism, as a result of their own waning authority). Second, the new alliance of panic actors (jo…
Popular Secrecy and Occultural Studies1
Is cultural studies becoming-strategic in accordance with its context? In this era where traditional conceptual tactics have not provided the desired results, perhaps we can experiment with new techniques. This essay explores one such tactic and commitment, namely the faith in publicity as a truth-telling strategy to expose, and ultimately neutralize, power's machinations. We are witnessing a regime-of-truth change, one that requires us to rethin…
Occupy All the Dispositifs
This article assesses Occupy Wall Street as an amalgamation of mediated processes of subjectivation associated with marginal popular culture (memes, meme-platforms, Anonymous operations). This accumulation, I argue, is part of a broader convergence of agencements, of subjectifying processes that took place on and offline, in and out of concentrated occupied zones. OWS gives us one example in response to Toni Negri's call for a genealogy of dispos…
Nothing Is Left Alone for Too Long”
This article examines reality television as a cultural form of what Gilles Deleuze calls “control societies.” For Deleuze, the shift from disciplinary societies (enclosures, bounded spaces, institutions) to control societies (circuits, modulated spaces, networked relations) is marked by a change in the processes of subjectification. The “postindividual” or the “dividual” is characterized by interchangeability, flexibility, and mobility (in accord…
Adventures in the Public Secret Sphere
What are the contours of the contemporary public secret sphere? Some key manifestations can be found in the hybrids of network and sovereign power shaped by communications warfare. This article examines recent entanglements of social media and political dissent, specifically those sovereign networks designed to foment and prevent youth-oriented social movements. Using a number of recent examples (including the U.S. State Department organized Alli…
Trust No One (On the Internet)
This article examines the “metastory” surrounding Gary Webb’s 1996 “Dark Alliance” series as a moment of crisis in mainstream journalism. Two forces converge in Webb’s series and its aftermath: (1) establishment journalism confronts and manages the reemergent phenomenon of conspiracy theory, and (2) establishment print-based journalism attempts to organize a relationship with the emergent medium of the internet. When these two forces collide in t…
Patriarchal pacts in the neo-archaic manosphere
This paper situates contemporary manospheric culture within archaic forms of masculine identity formation foundational to patriarchal political orders and fascism. What happens when 21st century emergent masculinity is also what Deleuze and Guattari call a neo-archaism? Drawing from Celia Amoros’ understanding of patriarchy as being primarily composed of masculine pacts and packs, I analyse the manosphere as an neo-archaic space for the formation…
From Embedded to Machinic Intellectuals
This essay examines how the increasing dependence of the academy, specifically communication studies, on corporate and federal funding is creating a sector of embedded intellectuals. Using the theoretical lens of what is loosely called “autonomism,” I argue that the concept of General Intellect forces us to reconsider traditional notions of intellectual work. The significance of communication, as both a growing academic field and infrastructure f…
A Summer of Double Super Secrecy
This article examines the news events of summer 2005, focusing on the Valerie Plame leak investigation, the revealing of the identity of Watergate's Deep Throat, and various stories pertaining to the Terror/War. In analyzing the ways evidence is deployed rhetorically, it begins to question an oppositional strategy that relies on publicity and exposure. The article instead calls for a refocus on the 'secret sphere' of politics (especially within j…
Apocryphal Now
This article examines current events through the lens of secrecy. From public relations management of political images to new leadership figures in the electoral process, the importance of visibility in the New Normal is discussed. Culture as strategy is posited as a way of thinking through the current crisis
Regime-of-Truth Change
It is crucial to understand the changing conditions of truth telling in the new normal of the Terror War. This article examines recent developments in the generalization of state secrecy as well as the materialization of information warfare. These recent changes in the production of truth also offer possibilities for rethinking our own strategic attachments to truth. What the current conjuncture tells us is that the constellation of truth, secrec…
Cultural Studies, Immanent War, Everyday Life
Notes from Laboratory NYC
Drawing a Line in the Fog
Cultural Studies, Immanent War, Everyday Life
Cultural Studies, Immanent War, Everyday Life
Trust No One (On the Internet)
This article examines the “metastory” surrounding Gary Webb’s 1996 “Dark Alliance” series as a moment of crisis in mainstream journalism. Two forces converge in Webb’s series and its aftermath: (1) establishment journalism confronts and manages the reemergent phenomenon of conspiracy theory, and (2) establishment print-based journalism attempts to organize a relationship with the emergent medium of the internet. When these two forces collide in t…
Apocryphal Now
This article examines current events through the lens of secrecy. From public relations management of political images to new leadership figures in the electoral process, the importance of visibility in the New Normal is discussed. Culture as strategy is posited as a way of thinking through the current crisis
Regime-of-Truth Change
It is crucial to understand the changing conditions of truth telling in the new normal of the Terror War. This article examines recent developments in the generalization of state secrecy as well as the materialization of information warfare. These recent changes in the production of truth also offer possibilities for rethinking our own strategic attachments to truth. What the current conjuncture tells us is that the constellation of truth, secrec…
Amassing the Multitude
This article examines early problematizations of “the audience” in communication studies (in Michel Foucault's sense of problematization). Using Michael Hardt and Toni Negri's concept of the “multitude,” the author argues that the audience is a product of discursive constructions, but that these constructions themselves draw upon the ontological practices of what may be called “audience powers” or “mediated multitudes.” Problematizations of the a…
I've Got You Under My Skin
This essay, written within a week of the November 2004 U.S. election, was intended as a fog cutter in the miasma of postelection gloom. Finding more than silver linings, it assesses our crucible moment, in the historical and the alchemist sense. We are witnessing a variety of extraparliamentary experiments on the political landscape. What can cultural researchers do in these times? What are our experiments, our own transformations, in this crucib…
Notes from Laboratory NYC
Nothing Is Left Alone for Too Long”
This article examines reality television as a cultural form of what Gilles Deleuze calls “control societies.” For Deleuze, the shift from disciplinary societies (enclosures, bounded spaces, institutions) to control societies (circuits, modulated spaces, networked relations) is marked by a change in the processes of subjectification. The “postindividual” or the “dividual” is characterized by interchangeability, flexibility, and mobility (in accord…
Public Secrecy and Immanent Security
A Summer of Double Super Secrecy
This article examines the news events of summer 2005, focusing on the Valerie Plame leak investigation, the revealing of the identity of Watergate's Deep Throat, and various stories pertaining to the Terror/War. In analyzing the ways evidence is deployed rhetorically, it begins to question an oppositional strategy that relies on publicity and exposure. The article instead calls for a refocus on the 'secret sphere' of politics (especially within j…
Popular Secrecy and Occultural Studies1
Is cultural studies becoming-strategic in accordance with its context? In this era where traditional conceptual tactics have not provided the desired results, perhaps we can experiment with new techniques. This essay explores one such tactic and commitment, namely the faith in publicity as a truth-telling strategy to expose, and ultimately neutralize, power's machinations. We are witnessing a regime-of-truth change, one that requires us to rethin…
Activating the Multitude
To speak of active audiences today is an act that runs the risk of self-de-activation. What branch of media cultural studies has been so thoroughly pilloried as active audience studies? With the pendulum swing toward economic analyses over the last ten years, what does it mean to revisit reception, especially one as “excessive” as active audience studies? I turn to the “active audience” moment in reception and cultural studies (exemplified by Stu…
Conspiracy Panics
From Embedded to Machinic Intellectuals
This essay examines how the increasing dependence of the academy, specifically communication studies, on corporate and federal funding is creating a sector of embedded intellectuals. Using the theoretical lens of what is loosely called “autonomism,” I argue that the concept of General Intellect forces us to reconsider traditional notions of intellectual work. The significance of communication, as both a growing academic field and infrastructure f…
What's Left? On Turning Backs and Facing Facts
This essay, written a couple weeks after Barack Obama's inauguration, examines the changing politics of faciality and the implications for dissent
User-Generated Discontent
In a time when interactive technologies and participatory usage are equated with DIY citizenship, how do we account for the return of sovereign power in the form of police interventions into usage? How are decentralized social media deployed as instruments by traditional social actors and political institutions? This article addresses these questions by analyzing the structuring context that links convergence and warfare. It focuses on the Allian…
What is a Trilogy? Editor’s Introduction
This essay introduces the reader to the special issue commemorating Michael Hardt and Toni Negri’s trilogy ( Empire, Multitude, Commonwealth)
Fabricating Activism
This article examines the recent resurgence of interest in what we call “fabriculture.” Three dimensions of fabriculture are explored: the gendered spaces of production around new domesticity and the social home; the blurring of old and new media in digital craft culture; and the politics of popular culture that emerge in the mix of folk and commercial culture. Ultimately, we conceptualize craft as power (the ability or capacity to act), as a way…
Pox Populi
This article examines recent developments in U.S. network politics. Focusing on the rise of the Tea Party as well as the standoffs in Madison, WI, it analyzes the emergent forms of populism via network forms. In addition, this conjuncture produces new mutations in the relationship between networks and sovereignty. Finally, the affective charge of these future networked movements, from fear to hope to love, need investigation
From Audiences to Media Subjectivities
In this chapter, Jack Bratich argues that, even as “the audience” is in crisis in the digital media era, we can still learn much from examining the construction of that audience. The audience itself is a convergence of discursive problematizations of what Bratich calls “media subjectivities.” This chapter explores a number of these problematizations in order to extract the specific dynamics of “the audience” that are still relevant, including rel…
Foucault, Cultural Studies, and Governmentality
To Receive Well—It's Critical
This essay explores a non-negationist approach to the “critical” by recounting cultural studies's recent articulation of intellectual work to social movement practice. The academicization of cultural studies is evaluated not as cooptation of criticality, but as subsumption, which creates new platforms for action. Ultimately, Cultural Studies would benefit from its own “reception study” in which its powers to be affected could be enhanced to recon…
Occupy All the Dispositifs
This article assesses Occupy Wall Street as an amalgamation of mediated processes of subjectivation associated with marginal popular culture (memes, meme-platforms, Anonymous operations). This accumulation, I argue, is part of a broader convergence of agencements, of subjectifying processes that took place on and offline, in and out of concentrated occupied zones. OWS gives us one example in response to Toni Negri's call for a genealogy of dispos…
Sociology (27 works) · Political science (24 works) · Law (15 works) · Politics (14 works) · Media studies (13 works) · Epistemology (12 works) · Law (12 works) · Computer Science (10 works) · Philosophy (10 works) · Aesthetics (9 works)