Introducing Cultural Politics

Welcome to the first issue of Cultural Politics, a new international and interdisciplinary peer-reviewed journal, co-edited by the authors of this editorial and assisted in its aims and scope both by an Editorial Board and an Editorial Advisory Board composed of internationally recognized and active scholars in cultural and political studies. The journal publishes cutting-edge work triannually, exploring new forms and meanings of the cultural and the political from the mainstream to the marginal and presents innovative conceptions of cultural politics whilst contributing to contemporary and future debates.Cultural Politics was born out of our frustration with the traditionally limited definition of and space accorded to cultural politics, understood as a subdiscipline of cultural studies. The central aim of Cultural Politics is then to question these delimitations through an exploration of precisely what is cultural about politics and what is political about culture. The journal is therefore committed to opening an international forum for discussion, from a variety of critical methodological perspectives, of alternatives to a limited comprehension of cultural politics.Rethinking cultural politics and cultural studies is intentional and significant. Explicitly addressing the emergent discipline of cultural politics denotes a healthy skepticism of suggestions that cultural and political theories and interpretations can easily be wholly incorporated within cultural studies. Alternatively, the journal aims to support the examination and discussion of interdisciplinary understandings, developments, potentialities and alternatives that may constitute the contemporary nature and future of cultural politics. Consequently, Cultural Politics embraces the study of local, national and transnational cultural identities and processes in addition to the analysis of political problems as well as examining the character and agency of cultural and political explanations.To facilitate this range of global possibilities, the journal actively solicits transnational and interdisciplinary fields of knowledge production. These include cultural studies, the humanities and the social sciences: from media and performance studies to literature, anthropology, sociology and politics. Cultural Politics considers papers from any related disciplinary setting, but particularly encourages interdisciplinary research conducted by contributors from all parts of the globe. Cultural Politics intends to play a key part in the construction and development of the growing field of critical cultural politics, in the quest for newly globalized forms of cultural and political production, education, exchange, debate and action.Accordingly, in this inaugural issue of Cultural Politics, we present nine original contributions, by ten interdisciplinary authors, among them cultural critics and sociologists, anthropologists, political philosophers and activists, media theorists, artists and communications specialists. The contributors include Cultural Politics Editorial and Editorial Advisory Board members such as Andrew Ross, Paul Virilio, George E. Marcus, Douglas Kellner and Mark Poster, and internationally renowned writers and artists Jean Baudrillard, Jodi Dean, Richard Kahn, Joy Garnett and Joss Hands. As a result, this issue is replete with innovative contributions and distinguished contributors, a condition we aim to sustain in all future editions as Cultural Politics maps new-found borderlands of theory and practice. In this issue, for example, contributors deliberate and discuss imaginative and contemporary conceptions of cultural politics that range over Maoism and war, terrorism, the anthropology of witnessing, communicative capitalism, the Internet and oppositional politics, Hardt and Negri's Empire, mass media imagery and electronic or "e-democracy."Hence, in the first contribution of this collection, "Mao Zedong's Impact on Cultural Politics in the West," Andrew Ross argues that whereas the heritage of Maoism is selectively recalled in China, in the West there remains an inadequate comprehension of the effect of Maoism on its cultural politics. Ross's article thus chronicles the multifaceted influence of Maoism in the West on everything from education and legislation to notions of self-criticism, consciousness raising, cultural justice and, above all, on the Culture Wars. Jean Baudrillard's "Pornography of War," in contrast, begins with the ruins of the World Trade Center following the "electric shock" imposed on the United States by the suicidal terrorists of September 11, 2001. Yet the focus of Baudrillard's contribution is the connection between 9/11 and the Abu Ghraib prisoner abuse imagery. Indeed, for him, the latter is an even worse symbolic dishonor than 9/11 since the US wreaked this ignominy on itself in the form of "shame and bad conscience." Alternatively, in "Cold Panic," Paul Virilio contends that the Cold War threat to obliterate the modern metropolis has been substituted by fright in the face of a mass terror campaign that can produce tragedies resembling previous forms of global conflict. George Marcus's "The Anthropologist as Witness in Contemporary Regimes of Intervention" concentrates on the dilemmas of anthropological research in sites of cultural and political chaos and considers questions of identity and authority for anthropologists working under such conditions. In so doing, Marcus asserts that these thorny self-reflexive issues for anthropologists are not ameliorated by the rhetorical position of "the witness," as currently invoked. Nonetheless, witnessing might offer the restoration of impartiality that makes the presence of the detached anthropologist both feasible and difficult if deployed more critically.A Special Section on the Cultural Politics of Information and Communications Technologies (ICTs) begins with Jodi Dean's "Communicative Capitalism: Circulation and the Foreclosure of Politics." Dean maintains that ICT-driven communicative capitalism is intensely depoliticizing, as it is stimulated by fantasies of abundance, activity and wholeness. Dean's objective, then, is to offer an explanation of communicative capitalism and to elucidate why, in the era of ICTs, there is frequently no reply from power to its opponents. Conversely, Richard Kahn and Douglas Kellner's "Oppositional Politics and the Internet: A Critical/Reconstructive Approach," claims that the expansion of the Internet necessitates that technopolitics be retheorized from critical and reconstructive perspectives. Hostile to the commercialization of the Internet, Kahn and Kellner nevertheless support the use of, for instance, web logs or "blogs" by radical cultural and political activists and discuss intervention by Internet activists within global and local social movements and the construction of situations and projects of a revolution of everyday life. Closing the Special Section, Mark Poster's "Hardt and Negri's Information Empire: A Critical Response" proposes that Empire comprises an inadequate conception of ICTs. Thus, in his contribution, Poster asserts that "humachines" are simultaneously a crucial feature of globalization, a hazardous reserve for contemporary forms of power and sites of decentralized and multicultural, global and networked resistance.The Special Section is followed by Cultural Politics' first Field Report, an open space within the journal wherein practitioners of cultural politics (artists, architects, creative writers, musicians, photographers, activists, etc.) are encouraged to present a written and/or visual account of their current activities from their own standpoint. As a result, in "Follow the Image," New York artist Joy Garnett explores her techniques as a painter in addition to illustrating her practice by way of her accompanying and truly extraordinary paintings drawn from sampled or found images. Discussing her empathy with scientific, military and news media imagery, Garnett explains the technical, socio-political and legal disputes and impediments for the work of painting in the age of digital reproduction.In the final contribution, Joss Hands' book review, "The (Not So) Disparate Voices of E-Democracy," considers Henry Jenkins and David Thorburns' 2003 edited collection, Democracy and New Media. Hands describes and evaluates the state of debate in this important domain. Yet Hands argues that even these purportedly "critical" voices suffer from a variety of self-imposed limitations, most notably their reluctance to attend to questions regarding labor, the public sphere and Green or anarchist models of radical democracy and new media.In conclusion, this first issue of Cultural Politics inaugurates what promises to be an ongoing and challenging critical engagement germane to many scholars in a wide range of fields, and we wish to thank the Editorial and Editorial Advisory Boards for helping make this engagement a reality. Additionally, Cultural Politics enjoys an agreement with the Chinese journal Cultural Studies, published in Beijing, that allows selected articles to be published in both journals nearly simultaneously, thus furthering intellectual exchange between English and Chinese-speaking academicians and artists. The editors would like to thank Fan Jinghua, who has been instrumental in securing the agreement. To reiterate, the journal welcomes submissions and special issue proposals from any interested parties and we hope that this issue speaks to its readers' imaginations and lives

Cultural analysis · Environmental ethics · Epistemology · Mainstream · Political science · Politics · Skepticism · Social science · Sociology · Anthropology · Cultural Industries and Urban Development · Cultural Studies · Law

• Citizenship, space and time

  Open Access•Nick Ellison•Thesis Eleven•2013

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