Critical Inquiry Critical Inquiry

This essay documents how human longevity has emerged as a nonnegotiable across ideological differences in all debates and discussions on human development and human futures in a warming world. Presenting a quick history examining the relationship between Cold War ideologies of capitalist growth, increased dependence on fossil-fuel based energy, and the great expansion of human lifespans after 1950—especially in the US—the article goes on to discuss how this has profoundly shifted the human relationship to death, and it explores some of the implications of such a shift for any Socratic philosophical examination of life.

This article examines the oldest extant purpose-built boundary stone in the medieval west, the so-called Guthlac Stone. Taking up Erich Auerbach’s arguments about the rise of medieval parataxis, which modulated a stylistic feature into an ethical judgment about the postimperial conditions of historical fragmentation, I argue that the reappearance of the boundary stone as a distinctive object signaled a sculptural investment in coercively shaping space. Alluding to earlier modes of English commemorative sculpture that construed the body’s marker as a shining sign, twelfth-century bounding objects were devices for producing relations of subordination to a prominent center. Inspecting their formal and figurative aspects thus yields a picture of territorial division that departed radically from inherited classical notions of divisible, gridded space. The payoff is threefold: a new understanding of how boundary markers reemerged in the West, an account of the place-making work of sculpture that sees place as an effect—rather than a precondition—of the object, and a refinement of Auerbach’s formalism.

Esports—video gaming as a spectator sport—currently boast an estimated global viewership of five hundred million and annual revenue exceeding one billion dollars. Yet the very notion of making a living playing video games has rendered esports a perennially novel and foreign phenomenon in North America. This article reconsiders esports’ persistent novelty through the lens of their history and popularity in East Asia, particularly South Korea and China, and North American cultural representations of the East Asian “geeks” who continue to dominate the global esports scene. The article demonstrates how the drama and profitability of esports turns on a potent set of fantasies about race, gender, national identity, and ideal sportsmanship. Through esports, video games are transmuted into immersive technocultural instruments of transpacific soft power and global finance. Asian/American racialization, set against the backdrop of a rising China, undergirds the ludic’s remarkable capacity to revise traditional modes of masculinity, athleticism, and the relationship between remote work and virtual play.

Responding to recent critical interest in the formal qualities of political arrangements, and the political significance of literary and cultural forms, this essay turns to the preeminent philosopher of political form: Carl Schmitt. My contention is not at all that recent interest in political form is, or ought to become, Schmittian. Rather, Schmitt’s theorization of—and difficulties with—political form illuminate the ambit and potential of political form in the present. A literary thread runs from Schmitt’s political formalism to those of our present moment: the legacy of Romanticism. Schmitt’s critique of Romanticism represents a sustained effort to think the limits of the political, yet his theorization of political form leads him back to the poets Byron and Shelley. This essay traces the dual development of political formalism and anti-Romanticism in Schmitt in order to present an immanent critique. Grappling with Schmittian political formalism challenges us to think about political form and Romanticism in new ways.

What are the politics of technical knowledge in the world of contemporary art? Intellectual apprehensions of art, by privileging the insights of texts, (critical) theory, and abstract ideas over and above the empirical truths of objects themselves, do not simply explain contemporary art—they sustain it. They define how contemporary art can and should be known and, in turn, the forms of experience that are conceptually relevant to this understanding. Always already present within the art world, however, if largely invisible across its ranks, is an entirely different way of knowing that concretely contests these defining ways by which art is conventionally understood.

Technical knowledge is a vital presence in the world of contemporary art. Technical practitioners—fabricators, riggers, engineers, and conservators, among others—work behind the scenes to set into place the material conditions of what contemporary art is, how it is evolving, and how museums and gallery spaces are, in their architectures, evolving along with it. In this article, I draw on firsthand interviews with fabricators at the Walla Walla Foundry, a commercial art foundry in Walla Walla, Washington, to dissect how these individuals engage art on their own terms, thus challenging the academic epistemology of the institutional art world they invisibly define. This epistemic tension (between academic and technical ways of knowing), I argue, is relevant to our scholarly understanding of what the philosopher Peter Osborne has called “postconceptual” art. It also raises critical methodological questions for the discipline of art history writ large.

During the recession of the 1970s, and in response to limited commercial outlets for advanced art, David Salle and Cindy Sherman transposed their thrift-shopping habits into a compositional strategy. The practice broadly reflected trends in middle-class fashion, which aggregated vintage cultural material to evidence one’s taste and powers of connoisseurship (one’s ability to make a look). As it turned out, their rather fashionable aggregation of cultural material mirrored the curated aggregation of objects by the growing network of art fairs where Salle’s and Sherman’s work was eventually distributed. This essay argues that both the artists and art fairs of the 1980s took up tactics of thrift as they also took on the role of connoisseur, a role that had been abandoned by art critics and historians in the 1970s. Along the way, the essay takes aim at a calcified account of appropriation, one that steered 1980s debates about artistic originality and identity. Abandoning this late modernist vocabulary in favor of a decidedly late twentieth-century notion of thrift, the article maps the origins of Salle’s and Sherman’s meritorious aggregation, the origins of the curated-aggregate logic of the art fair, and the integration of Salle’s and Sherman’s work at the 1984 Art Cologne booth, “Szene New York.”

It seems that Palestine has found a convenient spot in the cloud, as a complex, yet seemingly cohesive, digital nation comes into being. The growing possibilities of online connectivity through social media, search engines, and streaming services, along with the newly designed features of online articulation (posting, sharing, commenting, reacting, and so forth), are intensifying the idea of a single people, a single heritage, and a single national destiny. This article presents the concept of digital Palestinian nationalism as a critical prism for examining how online political activism in support of Palestine reveals the multiple, somewhat conflicting, layers of present Palestinian temporality. My contention is that digital Palestinian nationalism operates in an algorithmic present that significantly intensifies the historical temporality of national imagination but is simultaneously in conflict with various ongoing temporalities of Palestinian displacement. Deeply entangled in the sociometer of user engagement, algorithmic processes amplify deep national sentiments among Palestinians everywhere in reaction to footage of Israeli violence in the occupied West Bank and the besieged Gaza Strip (since 7 October 2023) within a constant frame of “real-time” and “right-time.” However, in buttressing national sentiments, this algorithmic presentness hinders attempts to imagine differently so that the Palestinian story might branch out to comprehend the multiple ongoing political and cultural developments of Palestinian experience in the various contexts of displacement in Israel-Palestine and the world at large.

CRITICAL RESPONSE

CRITICAL RESPONSE