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Coker locates in American military uses of technology. Writing on the US military war machine, Coker finds in the computer’s focus on solving immediate and practical questions an absence of aesthetic, moral and ethical considerations that is an expression of the ‘American spirit, one that finds little time for metaphysics’ (Coker, 2004: 123). But there is little point in returning an analysis of supercapitalism back to a discourse of national character or subjectivity. Rather, the ‘American spirit’ should be regarded as being like a unit of code, similar to the so
This book explores the development of Robert Lepage’s distinctive approach to stage direction in the early (1984–94) and middle (1995–2008) stages of his career, arguing that globalisation had a defining effect in shaping his aesthetic and professional trajectory. It combines examination of Lepage’s theatremaking techniques with discussion of his work’s effects on audiences, calling on Lepage’s own statements as well as existing scholarship and critical response. In addition to globalisation theory, the book draws on cinema studies, queer theory, and theories of affect and reception. As such, it offers an unprecedented conceptual framework, drawing together what has previously been a scattered field of research. Each of six chapters treats a particular aspect of globalisation, using this as a means to explore one or more of Lepage’s productions. These aspects include the relationship of the local (in Lepage’s case, his background in Québec) to the global; the place of individual experience within global late modernity; the effects of screen media on human perception; the particular affect of ‘feeling global’; the place of branding in contemporary creative systems; and the relationship of creative industries to neoliberal economies. Making theatre global: Robert Lepage’s original stage productions will be of interest to scholars of contemporary theatre, advanced-level undergraduates with an interest in the application of theoretical approaches to theatrical creation and reception, and arts lovers keen for new perspectives on one of the most talked-about theatre artists of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries.
with the politicians making these ‘moral’ arguments, columnists in the Times and Mail sometimes sounded a note of caution and criticism. In the Mail , for example, Stephen Glover argued that ‘Age-old international law is being challenged’ and objected that the logic of ‘ethical’ intervention was an argument for perpetual war: ‘Britain would become a war machine, a martial state with a single end
by Cage, Ellitt and Varèse fifty years earlier, the composers’ ideas are perhaps more fully realised in sonic terms by those video scratchers who worked without a continuous music track, simply using the sound of the appropriated footage as a form of musique concrete. In the Duvet Brothers’ 1984 tape War Machine, looped sounds of heavy artillery create the basis of a powerful, unrelenting sonic accompaniment to
, expelled or repelled by the machine. But, at the same time, it is in such repellent detritus that the newest, most desirable products might be found. Symptomatic of violent refusals of Western capitalism elsewhere, the authenticity associated with trauma and violence also returns to the war machine precisely at the point where the pleasure principle of American popular cultural hegemony reaches its limit. All is war According to Rolling Stone, rap and metal are far and away the most popular musical forms of US soldiers participating in the occupation of Iraq. In a poll
provides not just the sound track of a war machine, but its very modality in form, speed and intensity. The ‘themes of chaos, death, violence, and destruction’ (102) enhance the death metal machine to the point of it becoming the double of war in a heightened form. So much so that Christopher Coker claims that such music is used to compensate for the absence of intensity in contemporary warfare. For fighter pilots, wired into a cockpit linked to a network of computers, remote from the effect of their actions, war has become cerebral rather than visceral. ‘In the Gulf War
). Superman? Superfly! The gangsta, therefore, has an uncanny proximity to supercapitalism. He assembles with his AK-47 and his production arsenal of beat box, samplers and sequencers, a mini-supercapitalist war machine. Like war itself, he becomes capitalism’s excess-essence, or rather its x-essence where, as with Malcolm X, the ‘X’ marks the unnameable inheritance of African lineage overwritten by slavery. ‘X’ marks the essential point of impossible African-American authenticity that resides imaginarily in the remnants of the civil-rights movement and collectivised
thirty years, and one that that references amongst others Night of the Living Dead, Deliverance, The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, Dawn of the Dead, The Hills Have Eyes, Psycho, The Birds (1963), The Evil Dead (1982), Alien, The Exorcist (1973), Cujo (1983) and Donnie Darko (2002). Its most notable influence though is The Crazies, that allegory of Nixon’s involvement in Vietnam I considered in Chapter 3, a film that itself explored the invidious effects of propaganda on the American psyche and underscored the utter ruthlessness of the American war machine in the pursuit of
began to pile in to the film. Considerations of the cinematic merits of I Aim at the Stars were completely overshadowed by its politics. Whatever his personal beliefs or scientific principles, von Braun’s expertise was thought to have helped to maintain the Nazi regime by enhancing its war machine. 19 Like Peter Burnup, an admirer of Lee Thompson’s cinema, reviewers found the film ‘hard to take’ ( News of the
Nazis for their ‘war machine’, from German-occupied Toulouse across the Pyrenees to Spain. The man trying to stop the escape is Gunther von Berkow (Malcolm McDowell), a psychopathic SS captain. If the film is remembered today, it is for the mad-eyed campness of McDowell’s performance. In his rendition of a sadist with a macabre sense of humour, McDowell goes beyond Clockwork Orange’s Alex and seems to be getting into