Abstract: This essay asks how the political identity and the domain of civic participation we reference with the term citizenship has been transformed in the contexts of neoliberalism. Michel Foucault famously argues that the subject of a market-centered, neoliberal governance structure is best understood as an entrepreneur of him- or herself. Recent influential scholarship in the (interdisciplinary) humanities and social sciences builds on Foucault's model of an entrepreneurial self-manager in order to posit a new mode of "self-enterprising citizen-subject," not defined by her claims on the state. This essay considers how, to what degree and in what spheres of public life, the neoliberal self-manger exercises the political capacities of a citizen. The analysis dwells particularly on what many have observed is a contemporary dissolution of the modern nation-state synthesis, predicated on the exercise of popular sovereignty, but also, in complementary fashion, on the creation of civic pedagogies: on educational institutions that set specific norms of social and political identity, and thereby transform the "mob" into a national "people." I argue that these kinds of normative (or disciplinary) pedagogies no longer seem functional to the aims of neoliberal governance and speculate on the parameters of an emerging "neocitizenship," in which citizens and noncitizens alike appear primarily as the targets of knowledge and control, rather than of social discipline.

Abstract: This essay explores the politics of representation in contemporary Venezuelan television, which in its mainstream forms has produced an urban imaginary that models national citizenship on the geographic, class, and racial divisions of the Venezuelan metropolis. The nation's airwaves have been a crucial theater of partisan class conflict in Venezuelan society since the election of President Hugo Chávez, a radical social democrat who has counted on the residents of the nation's huge urban slums, or barrios, as a major constituency. This study concentrates on the two major antagonists in this televisual battle by exploring their visual content and production methods in the context of the history of Caracas's barrios and the nation's television industry. On one side, Globovisión, a private cable news channel, commands the loyalty of the nation's middle-class anti-Chávez opposition; on the other, Catia TVe, a nonprofessional UHF station based in west Caracas's barrios, mobilizes its urban constituency with some state financing. The essay examines the different forms of political citizenship that these stations offer and explores how they complicate popular liberal notions of "civil society." It also reconsiders questions about the political role of mass media--to what extent are citizens manipulated as objects of the television media, and can they become subject-participants in their own representation? Finally, this study provides a critical examination of the formally innovative model of "alternative" media production that Catia TVe offers.

Abstract: This paper offers a Marxist analysis of the creative agency conceptualized by the new creative economy. Analyzing the differences and continuities between the creative economy and the traditional industrial economy, I explore how creative labor is selectively invested with the logics of both artistic production and industrial production, so that the creative economy, like and unlike the traditional industrial economy, could operate and proliferate amid the tensions between scarcity and abundance. Labor does not evaporate in the creative economy, but it is only more intricately shaped to accommodate to and justify a condensed and twisted late-capitalist economic logic.

Abstract: This essay develops the concept of biospectacle, in which the politics of managing populations becomes sensational visual display. It does so as it explores a series of events in 1999 surrounding the arrest and trial of "El Directo," a gang member in El Salvador who, at age seventeen, was accused of seventeen murders. The episode occurred at a key political conjuncture, at the end of a brutal decade in which staggering crime rates belied the Central American country's claim to an internationally lauded "peace." The El Directo biospectacle emerged from the convergence of a widely shared sense of out-of-control postwar criminality with the potent memory of past "terrorist subversion" of the war era and before. It was orchestrated by media moguls, powerful politicians, and law-enforcement leaders who opposed legal limits on sentences for juveniles imposed by United Nations conventions. They also hoped to reassert the mano dura (or iron-fist style) penal order that had been loosened after the war. But as a symbolically dense figure, crystallizing the contradictions of the moment, El Directo's meaning would be reconfigured on multiple planes. The biospectacle represented both anxiety and affinity, meeting a desire in the larger population to grasp palpable insecurity, to understand what was happening in a future once imagined as "peace."

Abstract: Following a brief discussion of Chinua Achebe's THINGS FALL APART, this essay examines the newly burgeoning genre of "oppressed Muslim women" narratives. For each of the texts under consideration--Jean Sasson's PRINCESS, Latifa and Shékéba Hachemi's MY FORBIDDEN FACE, Azar Nafisi's READING LOLITA IN TEHRAN, and Suzanne Fisher Staples's SHABANU: DAUGHTER OF THE WIND--Ahmad examines its claims toward authenticity and also notes the places in which those claims are undermined. Ahmad focuses on how the texts at once generate and challenge essentialized misreadings, misreadings that then proliferate within a prevailing interpretive field that posits feminism and multiculturalism as irreconcilable goals. The emphasis in the essay is on reader reception as well as content: whereas some of the texts responsibly recognize and depict local specificities, that nuance often disappears as readers situate texts within a "clash of civilizations" discourse. Ahmad considers as well the effect of publishing apparatuses like covers, appendices, and reviews, which can encourage a reductive and simplistic reception. The essay concludes with an emphasis on interpretive and pedagogical practices that discourage reductive ethnographic readings.

Abstract: From its inception, SOCIAL TEXT has regularly published work in translation. Although translations have perhaps been less prominent than in some other journals (the early New Left Review, New German Critique, and Telos, for example), the commitment to making significant texts in foreign...

Abstract: This introduction to the translation of Theodor W. Adorno's "Kultur and Culture," originally a lecture not intended for transcription and publication, situates the talk amongst Adorno's analyses of U.S. society and traces his distinctions between European and American understandings of culture. The talk is a rare example where Adorno discusses culture per se, as opposed to his work on "culture industry" and "cultural criticism." The object of the critical and dialectical critique--a prime example of "immanent critique" as understood by the Frankfurt school--is the Enlightenment, both as a historical epoch and as human beings' increasing technical mastery over nature. In its historical sense, the Enlightenment has been victorious in the United States, where free and equal citizens engage in market exchanges as free agents, without feudal and precapitalist residues. Examining the concept of culture in American and European context suggests that in the United States, culture is seen as an exertion of control over human nature and one's natural surroundings. On the other hand, the Old World is "cultured" because it preserved, cared for nature: the Enlightenment as humans' increasing technical mastery over nature has not been completely victorious. In its critique of the Enlightenment both in the historical and philosophical sense, "Kultur and Culture" seeks to transcend the dichotomy of uncritically identifying oneself with or hypercritically isolating oneself from the United States. It rejects the opposition between the allegedly profound German Kultur and the "mere civilization" of the United States. The introduction concludes by highlighting the main challenges of translating "Kultur and Culture": the author's complex sentences and the characteristics of a spontaneous, freely held speech, which are mirrored in the syntax of the translation.

Abstract: This lecture examines American and European understandings of the concept of culture and highlights the need for developing critical thought instead of yielding to the strength of the status quo in either setting. At the heart of the contrast between American and German culture lie two approaches toward the word culture: (1) gaining mastery over one's natural surroundings and human nature; and (2) caring for and preserving nature that the human power simultaneously destroys. These approaches are not without negative aspects: American culture, based on the idea of taming nature, does not go beyond shaping the external world and relationships between people. In Germany, grounding the concept of culture in the idea of conserving nature for its own sake has led to spiritualization, to Geisteskultur but has made people forget the idea of culture as a conscious confrontation of external and internal nature that shapes political reality. On the basis of these two approaches to culture, Americans tend to regard European culture as limited to aesthetics, and Germans see Americans as "uncultured." Opposing this anti-American stance, the lecture points out that in American society of pure exchange, democracy is more substantial than in Germany: the universality of the exchange principle leads to a greater freedom from authority, does not allow one to isolate oneself in one's own individual interests, and brings benevolence to human interactions. However, the exchange society generates the pressure of conformity, particularly dangerous for emigrant intellectuals. The talk thus seeks to overcome the dichotomy of uncritically identifying oneself with, or hypercritically isolating oneself from, the United States. Adorno proposes that it is not enough simply to understand one another or realize that everything has positive and negative sides: in both the United States and Europe it is crucial not to let go of critical thought and surrender to the status quo.

Abstract: This article explores the notion of contribution and the role of emigrant intellectuals in relation to their new cultural context. Using the example of German exiles in the United States, Adorno suggests that if emigrants find the demands for intellectual independence in discord with the dominant habits of American intellectual life, they should not conform to the American Geist. In academic fields, the notion of contribution is visible in the positive sciences but becomes more problematic in the humanities, where contribution appears not as a palpable result but as a reflection about the results and the nature of the contribution itself. The idea of contribution presupposes the merit of the order to which the contribution is being made: it is precisely this merit of the order that needs to be scrutinized. Emigrant intellectuals--by making contributions without critically reflecting upon them--and the organization of American intellectual life itself--by insisting that the intellectual either integrate him- or herself or remain an outsider--are to blame for furthering standardized contribution. The emigrant intellectual should not accept the idea of "this is the way it is done here" but needs to develop critical thought in relation to the new context. The article proposes four demands to intellectual emigration: (1) one should not cancel out previous life experience and consider emigration as beginning life anew; (2) one must resist the pressure of the industrial apparatus; (3) one must express one's thoughts without regards for ends and the sake of communication; and (4) one must not curtail insight, imagination, and speculation. The article thus propounds the idea that we can only contribute to the building of a better society by not "blindly devot[ing] ourselves to the existing" one.

Abstract: Drawing on recent theories of affect and affectivity, this essay argues that depression is an "affect" that connects the individual and the social. In particular, depression serves as both a response to, and a cause of, economic fears and uncertainties--a "quasi-cause" that opens up negative feelings into political potentials. In examination of two NEW YORK TIMES feature articles from the mid-1970s, the essay suggests that depression and economic crisis have been ineluctably linked in the recent period of neoliberalism.