On the fissures of Culture(s)
“Difference” marks the space of culture precisely because it is never neutral. It is at once bounded, marginalized, and authorized to appear as itself. Difference gives culture form by rendering it tangible and legible, yet it also animates desire. This desire is not simply identificatory but relational, a pull toward alignment, attachment, and proximity that binds subjects to the very differences that distinguish them. Culture thus emerges not as a stable domain of shared meaning but as an affective and spatial configuration in which difference circulates as form, orientation, and force...
A Distortion of Imaginaries? Modernity Between Early Cinema and Classical Cinema
How does the epistemic insufficiency of temporality rupture the foundations of modernity, and what functional role does temporality play in sustaining what might be understood as an enduring aesthetic and epistemological anxiety? Mary Ann Doane’s The Emergence of Cinematic Time: Modernity, Contingency, the Archive invites us to revisit cinematic time by periodizing early and classical cinema not spatially but materially, through the technological and capitalist regimes that structure their emergence. Accelerated modernity teaches us that the organization of time requires reproductive mechanisms of consistency and, consequently, the suppression of discontinuity embodied in human experience, which paradoxically serves as a precondition of modern subjectivity.