Download or read book Cloning Terror written by W. J. T. Mitchell and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2011 with total page 239 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The phrase 'War on Terror' has quietly been retired from official usage, but it persists in the American psyche, and our understanding of it is hardly complete. Exploring the role of verbal and visual images in the War on Terror, the author finds a conflict whose shaky metaphoric and imaginary conception has created its own reality.
Download or read book Cloning Terror written by W. J. T. Mitchell and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2011-01-15 with total page 240 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The phrase “War on Terror” has quietly been retired from official usage, but it persists in the American psyche, and our understanding of it is hardly complete. Nor will it be, W. J. T Mitchell argues, without a grasp of the images that it spawned, and that spawned it. Exploring the role of verbal and visual images in the War on Terror, Mitchell finds a conflict whose shaky metaphoric and imaginary conception has created its own reality. At the same time, Mitchell locates in the concept of clones and cloning an anxiety about new forms of image-making that has amplified the political effects of the War on Terror. Cloning and terror, he argues, share an uncanny structural resemblance, shuttling back and forth between imaginary and real, metaphoric and literal manifestations. In Mitchell’s startling analysis, cloning terror emerges as the inevitable metaphor for the way in which the War on Terror has not only helped recruit more fighters to the jihadist cause but undermined the American constitution with “faith-based” foreign and domestic policies. Bringing together the hooded prisoners of Abu Ghraib with the cloned stormtroopers of the Star Wars saga, Mitchell draws attention to the figures of faceless anonymity that stalk the ever-shifting and unlocatable “fronts” of the War on Terror. A striking new investigation of the role of images from our foremost scholar of iconology, Cloning Terror will expand our understanding of the visual legacy of a new kind of war and reframe our understanding of contemporary biopower and biopolitics.
Download or read book Clones and Clones written by Martha Craven Nussbaum and published by W. W. Norton & Company. This book was released on 1998 with total page 360 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Distinguished scholars and writers from a broad range of disciplines address a troubling and fascinating issue.
Download or read book What Do Pictures Want written by W. J. T. Mitchell and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2013-12-23 with total page 419 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Why do we have such extraordinarily powerful responses toward the images and pictures we see in everyday life? Why do we behave as if pictures were alive, possessing the power to influence us, to demand things from us, to persuade us, seduce us, or even lead us astray? According to W. J. T. Mitchell, we need to reckon with images not just as inert objects that convey meaning but as animated beings with desires, needs, appetites, demands, and drives of their own. What Do Pictures Want? explores this idea and highlights Mitchell's innovative and profoundly influential thinking on picture theory and the lives and loves of images. Ranging across the visual arts, literature, and mass media, Mitchell applies characteristically brilliant and wry analyses to Byzantine icons and cyberpunk films, racial stereotypes and public monuments, ancient idols and modern clones, offensive images and found objects, American photography and aboriginal painting. Opening new vistas in iconology and the emergent field of visual culture, he also considers the importance of Dolly the Sheep—who, as a clone, fulfills the ancient dream of creating a living image—and the destruction of the World Trade Center on 9/11, which, among other things, signifies a new and virulent form of iconoclasm. What Do Pictures Want? offers an immensely rich and suggestive account of the interplay between the visible and the readable. A work by one of our leading theorists of visual representation, it will be a touchstone for art historians, literary critics, anthropologists, and philosophers alike. “A treasury of episodes—generally overlooked by art history and visual studies—that turn on images that ‘walk by themselves’ and exert their own power over the living.”—Norman Bryson, Artforum
Download or read book Buddha Wept written by Rocco LoBosco and published by . This book was released on 2003 with total page 184 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Ona Ny's childhood unfolds like a dream. She is treasured by her family, particularly her brother, and though her ecstatic trances sometimes make her feel like a bit of an oddball, her ability to translate her visions into art is always gratifying.But while her mystical nature may seem frivolous during her childhood, years later, after Ona has become a loving wife and mother, it enables her to detect the subtle changes around her that indicate that the blissful tranquillity of everyday life is about to come to an end -- not only for her family but for many others as well. When the Khmer Rouge soldiers enter Phnom Penh and the surrounding villages, Ona understands that the moment is at hand. A novel of terror and transcendence, Buddha Wept insists on the persistence of love and endurance in the face of affliction.The character of Ona Ny is so beautifully drawn, at once so ephemeral and so authentically human, that the reader cannot help but want to be at her side as her life's journey takes her from a world of bliss to a world of unspeakable cruelty. Her sufferings are the reader's sufferings, and her gift -- the ability to muster the spiritual resources needed to transcend suffering -- is the reader's as well.
Download or read book Normalization of Violence written by Irm Haleem and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2019-10-10 with total page 126 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book offers both a conceptual and an empirical analysis of how violence is normalized. In its conceptual analysis, Irm Haleem offers a framework of explanation that she argues is universal in its narratives, which she submits is premised on moralizing, legalizing, and popularizing violence. Haleem engages Stathis Kalyvas’s notion of the two stages of violence (process and outcome), and proposes the notion of "metaphysical" violence as distinct from physical violence. Through drawing upon works of scholars such as Hannah Arendt, Noam Chomsky, W.J.T. Mitchell, Michel Foucault, Jacques Derrida, George Kateb, and others, she illustrates why these distinctions (of stages and types of violence) are critical in understanding how violence is normalized. In its empirical analysis, Naoko Kumada argues that the contemporary changes in narratives and educational curriculum in Japan are intended to moralize the historic glory days of imperial Japan, which, she argues, may subsequently normalize militarism. Stefanie Kam focuses on how China has normalized violence in Xinjiang through narratives of the imperatives of security, thereby both legalizing and moralizing violence. Jennifer Dhanaraj argues how the denial of citizenship to the Rohingya community in Myanmar has provided both the moral and legal justifications for Buddhist extremists and the military to wage a brutal and unbridled war against the Rohingyas. Finally, Abdul Basit examines how the ex-communication of the Ahmadi sectarian minority in Pakistan has criminalized the minority, thus paving the way for unbridled violence against them from extremist mobs that have justified their violence in moral and legal terms. In all the cases in this book, we see how violence is popularized as being either a matter of the will of the people, or as being for the greater good of the people.
Download or read book Icons of War and Terror written by John Tulloch and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2012-07-26 with total page 234 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book explores the ideas of key thinkers and media practitioners who have examined images and icons of war and terror. Icons of War and Terror explores theories of iconic images of war and terror, not as received pieties but as challenging uncertainties; in doing so, it engages with both critical discourse and conventional image-making. The authors draw on these theories to re-investigate the media/global context of some of the most iconic representations of war and terror in the international ‘risk society’. Among these photojournalistic images are: Nick Ut’s Pulitzer Prize winning photograph of a naked girl, Kim Phuc, running burned from a napalm attack in Vietnam in June 1972; a quintessential ‘ethnic cleansing’ image of massacred Kosovar Albanian villagers at Racak on January 15, 1999, which finally propelled a hesitant Western alliance into the first of the ‘new humanitarian wars’; Luis Simco’s photograph of marine James Blake Miller, ‘the Marlboro Man’, at Fallujah, Iraq, 2004; the iconic toppling of the World Trade Centre towers in New York by planes on September 11, 2001; and the ‘Falling Man’ icon – one of the most controversial images of 9/11; the image of one of the authors of this book, as close-up victim of the 7/7 terrorist attack on London, which the media quickly labelled iconic. This book will be of great interest to students of media and war, sociology, communications studies, cultural studies, terrorism studies and security studies in general.
Download or read book The Future of the Image written by Jacques Rancière and published by Verso Books. This book was released on 2019-09-03 with total page 149 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In The Future of the Image, Jacques Rancire develops a fascinating new concept of the image in contemporary art, showing how art and politics have always been intrinsically intertwined. He argues that there is a stark political choice in art: it can either reinforce a radical democracy or create a new reactionary mysticism. For Rancire there is never a pure art: the aesthetic revolution must always embrace egalitarian ideals.
Download or read book Beta written by Rachel Cohn and published by Little, Brown Books for Young Readers. This book was released on 2012-10-16 with total page 336 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Elysia was born without a soul, her only purpose to serve the wealthy inhabitants of Io, an island paradise. But sensations are clouding her mind...anger...loneliness???love. Before long, Elysia learns that she is a Defect. And If any human on the island discovers the truth, it will cost her her life.
Download or read book Image Warfare in the War on Terror written by N. Roger and published by Springer. This book was released on 2013-01-11 with total page 190 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Roger examines how developments in new media technologies, such as the internet, blogs, camera/video phones, have fundamentally altered the way in which governments, militaries, terrorists, NGOs, and citizens engage with images. He argues that there has been a paradigm shift from techno-war to image warfare, which emerged on 9/11.
Download or read book The Scene of the Mass Crime written by Christian Delage and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2013 with total page 250 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Scene of the Mass Crime takes up the unwritten history of the peculiar yet highly visible form of war crimes trials. These trials are the first and continuing site of the interface of law, history and film. From Nuremberg to the contemporary trials in Cambodia, film, in particular, has been crucial both as evidence of atrocity and as the means of publicizing the proceedings. But what does film bring to justice? Can law successfully address war crimes, atrocities, genocide? What do the trials actually show? What form of justice is done, and how does it relate to ordinary courts and proceedings? What lessons can be drawn from this history for the very topical political issue of filming civil and criminal trials? This book takes up the diversity and complexity of these idiosyncratic and, in strict terms, generally extra-legal medial situations. Drawing on a fascinating diversity of public trials and filmic responses, from the Trial of the Gang of Four to the Gacaca local courts of Rwanda to the filmic symbolism of 9-11, from Soviet era show trials to Nazi People's Courts leading international scholars address the theatrical, political, filmic and symbolic importance of show trials in making history, legitimating regimes and, most surprising of all, in attempting to heal trauma through law and through film. These essays will be of considerable interest to those working on international criminal law, transitional justice, genocide studies, and the relationship between law and film.
Download or read book Dynamics and Performativity of Imagination written by Bernd Huppauf and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2013-05-13 with total page 375 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this interdisciplinary anthology, essays study the relationship between the imagination and images both material and mental. Through case studies on a diverse array of topics including photography, film, sports, theater, and anthropology, contributors focus on the role of the creative imagination in seeing and producing images and the imaginary.
Download or read book Against Nature written by Lorraine Daston and published by MIT Press. This book was released on 2019-05-28 with total page 88 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A pithy work of philosophical anthropology that explores why humans find moral orders in natural orders. Why have human beings, in many different cultures and epochs, looked to nature as a source of norms for human behavior? From ancient India and ancient Greece, medieval France and Enlightenment America, up to the latest controversies over gay marriage and cloning, natural orders have been enlisted to illustrate and buttress moral orders. Revolutionaries and reactionaries alike have appealed to nature to shore up their causes. No amount of philosophical argument or political critique deters the persistent and pervasive temptation to conflate the “is” of natural orders with the “ought” of moral orders. In this short, pithy work of philosophical anthropology, Lorraine Daston asks why we continually seek moral orders in natural orders, despite so much good counsel to the contrary. She outlines three specific forms of natural order in the Western philosophical tradition—specific natures, local natures, and universal natural laws—and describes how each of these three natural orders has been used to define and oppose a distinctive form of the unnatural. She argues that each of these forms of the unnatural triggers equally distinctive emotions: horror, terror, and wonder. Daston proposes that human reason practiced in human bodies should command the attention of philosophers, who have traditionally yearned for a transcendent reason, valid for all species, all epochs, even all planets.
Download or read book Mental Traveler written by W. J. T. Mitchell and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2020-09-01 with total page 189 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: How does a parent make sense of a child’s severe mental illness? How does a father meet the daily challenges of caring for his gifted but delusional son, while seeking to overcome the stigma of madness and the limits of psychiatry? W. J. T. Mitchell’s memoir tells the story—at once representative and unique—of one family’s encounter with mental illness and bears witness to the life of the talented young man who was his son. Gabriel Mitchell was diagnosed with schizophrenia at age twenty-one and died by suicide eighteen years later. He left behind a remarkable archive of creative work and a father determined to honor his son’s attempts to conquer his own illness. Before his death, Gabe had been working on a film that would show madness from inside and out, as media stereotype and spectacle, symptom and stigma, malady and minority status, disability and gateway to insight. He was convinced that madness is an extreme form of subjective experience that we all endure at some point in our lives, whether in moments of ecstasy or melancholy, or in the enduring trauma of a broken heart. Gabe’s declared ambition was to transform schizophrenia from a death sentence to a learning experience, and madness from a curse to a critical perspective. Shot through with love and pain, Mental Traveler shows how Gabe drew his father into his quest for enlightenment within madness. It is a book that will touch anyone struggling to cope with mental illness, and especially for parents and caregivers of those caught in its grasp.
Download or read book Simulacra and Simulation written by Jean Baudrillard and published by University of Michigan Press. This book was released on 1994 with total page 174 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Develops a theory of contemporary culture that relies on displacing economic notions of cultural production with notions of cultural expenditure. This book represents an effort to rethink cultural theory from the perspective of a concept of cultural materialism, one that radically redefines postmodern formulations of the body.
Download or read book In visible War written by Jon Simons and published by Rutgers University Press. This book was released on 2017-06-14 with total page 286 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In/Visible War addresses a paradox of twenty-first century American warfare. The contemporary visual American experience of war is ubiquitous, and yet war is simultaneously invisible or absent; we lack a lived sense that “America” is at war. This paradox of in/visibility concerns the gap between the experiences of war zones and the visual, mediated experience of war in public, popular culture, which absents and renders invisible the former. Large portions of the domestic public experience war only at a distance. For these citizens, war seems abstract, or may even seem to have disappeared altogether due to a relative absence of visual images of casualties. Perhaps even more significantly, wars can be fought without sacrifice by the vast majority of Americans. Yet, the normalization of twenty-first century war also renders it highly visible. War is made visible through popular, commercial, mediated culture. The spectacle of war occupies the contemporary public sphere in the forms of celebrations at athletic events and in films, video games, and other media, coming together as MIME, the Military-Industrial-Media-Entertainment Network.
Download or read book Alternative and Activist New Media written by Leah A. Lievrouw and published by John Wiley & Sons. This book was released on 2013-05-06 with total page 258 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Alternative and Activist New Media provides a rich and accessible overview of the ways in which activists, artists, and citizen groups around the world use new media and information technologies to gain visibility and voice, present alternative or marginal views, share their own DIY information systems and content, and otherwise resist, talk back to, or confront dominant media culture. Today, a lively and contentious cycle of capture, cooptation, and subversion of information, content, and system design marks the relationship between the mainstream ‘center’ and the interactive, participatory ‘edges’ of media culture. Five principal forms of alternative and activist new media projects are introduced, including the characteristics that make them different from more conventional media forms and content. The book traces the historical roots of these projects in alternative media, social movements, and activist art, including analyses of key case studies and links to relevant electronic resources. Alternative and Activist New Media will be a useful addition to any course on new media and society, and essential for readers interested in new media activism.
