Papers by Katherine Lawless
During his visit to Hiroshima on May 27, 2016, the first ever to be made by a sitting U.S. presid... more During his visit to Hiroshima on May 27, 2016, the first ever to be made by a sitting U.S. president, Barack Obama claimed that " the memory of the morning of August 6, 1945, must never fade. " 1 Not only did he seek to preserve the memory of the dropping of the first atomic bomb beyond the last voices of the hibakusha, he framed this call for preservation in moral terms: " The scientific revolution that led to the splitting of an atom requires a moral revolution as well. " If his explicit claim is that the role of science in human atrocity can be mitigated by a renewed moral framework, the implicit message is that the practice of commemoration provides a symbolic ground for this renewed morality. Accordingly, the president's discourse of moral revolution not only affirms the largely apolitical, ahistorical nature of global memory culture, which tends to translate historical forms of exploitation into universal narratives of suffering, but it also obscures the slow violence of nuclear energy regimes by reducing nuclearity to the moment of explosion. In seeking to preserve the memory of atrocity, the moral revolutionary, however unwittingly, preserves the colonial logic of nuclear energy regimes by transforming the material exploitations of energy production into the universal grammar of commemoration. Against the idealism of the moral revolutionary, I want to recuperate the material dimensions of cultural memory and suggest that it might serve a different purpose in the context of postcolonial capital: to elucidate the materiality of an energy unconscious embedded in memory media. 2 Postcolonial capitalism here signifies the ways in which immaterial forms of accumulation and material forms of labour intersect in the colonial landscapes of global memory culture. My utilization of the term is meant to reflect the complex ways in which enclosures of knowledge and labor reinforce one another while contributing to new forms of accumulation through the aestheticization of colonial capital's material remains. 3 In my elaboration of the atomic unconscious of postcolonial capital, I adapt Michael Niblett's question regarding the mapping of energy regimes in relation to cultural media. Suggesting that patterns
Interview with Catherine Malabou
This article considers the role of retreat in the time of global capital through an exploration o... more This article considers the role of retreat in the time of global capital through an exploration of some of the major themes arising during the Banff residency, The Retreat: A position of dOCUMENTA(13), held in August 2012. These themes include the retreats of mastery, subjectivity, the protagonist, historical time, and the return of totality in response to the so-called crisis of capitalism.
This essay intervenes in a debate that took place between French intellectuals Georges Didi-Huber... more This essay intervenes in a debate that took place between French intellectuals Georges Didi-Huberman and Elisabeth Pagnoux and Gerard Wajcman following the inclusion of four photographs from Auschwitz in a Paris exhibition in 2001. Extending the famous controversy between Claude Lanzmann and Jean-Luc Godard on the unrepresentability of the Shoah, the debate centers on the role of the photographic image in remembering the Shoah. Departing from discourses of the unrepresentable, this paper reframes the iconoclastic impulse of Didi-Huberman’s critics, in which the four photographs appear as “symptoms of psychic resistance,” as a mode of enclosure that reflects the intersecting logics of capitalism and psychoanalysis. Drawing on Tony C. Brown’s discussion of Marx’s two models of presentation, I demonstrate that the photographs operate as metaphors of enclosure that function allegorically to expose contradictions between opposing modes and spaces of representation in the time of globalization. Ultimately, I argue that both the fetishization and the prohibition of the four photographs are structural effects of competing logics in which the enclosure of images is read as a symptom of psychic resistance.
This paper situates Richard Fung's auto-ethnographic video Sea in the Blood within the context of... more This paper situates Richard Fung's auto-ethnographic video Sea in the Blood within the context of the personal illness narrative as a mode of political resistance which emerged alongside the movements of feminist health activism and global HIV/AIDS activism. I argue that as a critical illness narrative, which reads the experiences of transnational travel and migration in and through a narrative of illness, race, and sexuality, Sea in the Blood disrupts the genres of both the personal illness narrative and the imperial travel narrative while resisting the assimilative pull of what Charles L. Briggs calls the “political economy of communicability.“ Specifically, I argue that Fung resists cultural and political absorption using three primary strategies: the symbolics of blood, the juxtaposition of illness and travel narratives, and the tactics of misalignment, or the self-conscious use of contradictory narratives and competing modes of representation. Through these strategies, Sea in the Blood is installed as a form of revolutionary activism which comments on the historical pathologization of foreign bodies, and exposes the ways in which the medicalization of race underwrites the medicalized history of sexuality. Accordingly, Sea in the Blood inaugurates what might be thought of as a politics of incommunicability through the sensuous and metaphorical re/circulation of foreign bodies.
Books by Katherine Lawless
Materialism and the Critique of Energy , 2018
PDF available: http://www.mcmprime.com/books/marxism-and-energy
Materialism and the Critique o... more PDF available: http://www.mcmprime.com/books/marxism-and-energy
Materialism and the Critique of Energy brings together twenty-one theorists working in a range of traditions to conceive of a twenty-first century materialism critical of the economic, political, cultural, and environmental impacts of large-scale energy development on collective life. The book reconceives of the inseparable histories of fossil fuels and capital in order to narrate the historical development of the fossil regime, interpret its cultural formations, and develop politics suited to both resist and revolutionize energy-hungry capitalism.
Examples of the new fields of critical research included in the book range from Marxist-feminism and an energy-critique analysis, test cases for a critique of “electroculture,” an analysis of the figurative use of energies in both political struggle and the work of machines, and the intersection of Indigenous labor and the history of extractivism. Materialism and the Critique of Energy lays the foundation for future study at the intersection of history, culture, new materialism, and energy humanities.
Drafts by Katherine Lawless
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Papers by Katherine Lawless
Books by Katherine Lawless
Materialism and the Critique of Energy brings together twenty-one theorists working in a range of traditions to conceive of a twenty-first century materialism critical of the economic, political, cultural, and environmental impacts of large-scale energy development on collective life. The book reconceives of the inseparable histories of fossil fuels and capital in order to narrate the historical development of the fossil regime, interpret its cultural formations, and develop politics suited to both resist and revolutionize energy-hungry capitalism.
Examples of the new fields of critical research included in the book range from Marxist-feminism and an energy-critique analysis, test cases for a critique of “electroculture,” an analysis of the figurative use of energies in both political struggle and the work of machines, and the intersection of Indigenous labor and the history of extractivism. Materialism and the Critique of Energy lays the foundation for future study at the intersection of history, culture, new materialism, and energy humanities.
Drafts by Katherine Lawless
Materialism and the Critique of Energy brings together twenty-one theorists working in a range of traditions to conceive of a twenty-first century materialism critical of the economic, political, cultural, and environmental impacts of large-scale energy development on collective life. The book reconceives of the inseparable histories of fossil fuels and capital in order to narrate the historical development of the fossil regime, interpret its cultural formations, and develop politics suited to both resist and revolutionize energy-hungry capitalism.
Examples of the new fields of critical research included in the book range from Marxist-feminism and an energy-critique analysis, test cases for a critique of “electroculture,” an analysis of the figurative use of energies in both political struggle and the work of machines, and the intersection of Indigenous labor and the history of extractivism. Materialism and the Critique of Energy lays the foundation for future study at the intersection of history, culture, new materialism, and energy humanities.