Infantile “Left-wing” Disorder: An Update

We recognize it when we see it: someone is PMC when they turn to language or rules or theories or style or attitude or affect or critique or (more broadly) culture to measure what they stand for or what they stand against. Compare this to the right for whom cultural coherence, even logical coherence, is the enemy and the uncultured unreason of money and force sovereign. Or compare it to the left for whom what matters as measure is the political organization of workers.

White-Collar Blues: Allan Sekula Casts an Eye Over the Professional-Managerial Class

During the 1970s and early 1980s, Sekula built a theory and practice of photography on his understanding of the aporias inherent to the theory of the PMC, paying particular attention to the figure of the engineer whose task is not confined to the reproduction of capitalist ideology, but plays a central role in the realisation of value.

Introduction: Contemporary Art and the PMC (Parts One and Two)

PMC art rewards a viewer who does not enjoy emotional exchanges, but who does have strong, positive, hopeful feelings every time they figure out how a system works. Contemporary art has helped the PMC feel good about their choices and justified in their limits, in part, because an overriding emphasis on abstraction and system validates the type of solutions that our most lucrative skills tend to generate.

The First Privilege Walk

How Herbert Marcuse’s widow used a Scientology-linked cult’s methodology to gamify Identity Politics and thus helped steer the U.S. Left down the dead-end path of identitarian psychobabble.

The Whole Country is the Reichstag

A crucial characteristic of the current situation is that the antagonism between the pragmatic and the visionary that liberals have often used as a cudgel against left aspirations and programs—the ubiquitous “now is not the time” or “don’t let the perfect be the enemy of the good”—is passé. The way forward, both to avert the most dangerous possibilities and to begin working seriously to change the terms of political debate, is to push for and propagate a public good framework for government.

Issue #36: The Legal Issue

In this issue we focus on debates—new and old—in the legal and literary sphere, examining topics ranging from birtherism, plea bargaining, forensic architecture and evidence, and robotic free speech. Edited by Lisa Siraganian and Rachel Watson.

Against Theory, now with bots! On the Persistent Fallacy of Intentionless Speech

Arguing for the First Amendment rights of computer content, recent legal scholars Ronald Collins and David Skover have adapted Reader Response literary criticism from the 1970s, as well as related debates about literary meaning from the 1980s, to develop the idea of “intentionless free speech.” This essay examines and challenges these ideas. To think that intention can be meaningfully severed from free speech is to fundamentally misunderstand both speech and language. Siraganian situates and contextualizes this legal scholarly development in relation to both literary theory (Steven Knapp, Walter Benn Michaels, Stanley Fish, Toril Moi) and legal theory (Leslie Kendrick).

Study: The Architecture of Forensics

Indicating more than a set of investigative practices that respond to crime, forensics has come to connote a kind of secular faith in an animate material world—a phantasmagoria, in which material appears to both “hold secrets” and “speak back to us.” As such, forensics makes crime investigation appear not only the moral and administrative responsibility of a state, but also a magical power in and of itself. This response offers a brief analysis of the forensics imagination, as exemplified by Forensic Architecture’s rhetoric around its own work, and suggests some of the entanglements that come along with it.

Case: Forensic Architecture

Forensic Architecture claims to mobilize its own ethics, aesthetics, and rhetoric in the pursuit of forensic knowledge. Weizman and his collaborators have suggested that their methodologies operate outside of, or adjacent to, traditional legal procedures, and lend “new material and aesthetic sensibilities” to legal conceptions of proof. The result is that Forensic Architecture’s evidentiary assemblages have an uncertain, ambivalent relation to spaces of legal deliberation even while they act upon them.

Plea Bargaining in the Shadow of Narrative

Plea bargaining is a vital element of the criminal justice system, and it deserves more attention from scholars interested in law and culture. Legal scholars have proposed reforms to curb the more extreme abuses of the plea-bargaining system in the U.S. To these recommendations, I add the suggestion that we think of plea bargaining as occurring “in the shadow of narrative.” By looking beyond the trial, the paradigmatic narrative form that has engaged scholars of law and literature, we might appreciate the significance of legal processes that conform less easily to conventional narrative representation, while also revising our understanding of what legal narrative includes.