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What role do individuals play in sustaining the so-called global film festival network? This article considers this question through case studies of four specialist Chinese-language film festivals in London. It argues that while the global circuit shapes the institutional appearance of these smaller events, the kinds of strategic collaborations that the organisers of the latter effect at the former – striking up connections with directors and sales agents at film markets, for example – are key ways in which global relationships and A-list events are built from the ground up. These mutually related but unstable interactions allow us to rethink the network as an assemblage of events and individuals, addressing the analytical problem of scale in film festivals studies in the process.
8 Technical memes and assemblages Drawing together the key ideas set forth in previous chapters, it is now possible to spell out the agents of cognitive extension that create and sustain relations between the human self and the complex environment in which it evolves. To that end, the present chapter proffers the linked concepts of ‘technical memes and assemblages’ as embodied clusters of material, social, cultural and psychological phenomena, as manifest in the reproduction of building types and other artifacts. The chapter commences by examining the ambiguous
that resemble hierarchical gendered conventions of heterosexual relationships, but they are mixed and matched between partners in various ways. In this chapter I utilise the Deleuzian concept of ‘assemblage’, which enables me to develop the line of inquiry of gendered conventions, as I seek to account for variety and change in how gender matters in female relationships (Coleman
roam the networks in search of opportunities, have to be understood not as private individuals, but as components of multifaceted assemblages whose exploits are enabled and regulated by social apparatuses underpinning artistic circulation. Thus, the critique of political economy of the projectariat involves a rigorous analysis of the apparatuses that bring it into being. In a famous passage from A Thousand Plateaus , Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari analyse a nomadic war machine, an assemblage composed from the human body of a nomadic warrior
This paper examines the role fungi play in Arthur Machen‘s Decadent classic The Hill of Dreams (1907), a supernatural novel written in the 1890s. Ostensibly an idiosyncratic topic, the novels concern with these organisms devolves on an inquiry into the nature of life itself, of whether it is the result of a spiritual life-force or a haphazard assemblage of matter. In this way, Machen‘s novel participates in the fin de siècle debates between vitalism and materialism. Rather than attempting to resolve this debate, the novel seizes on tensions inherent in fungal life in order to dissolve the concept of life altogether, to suggest its horrifying unreality.
Self-driving cars have long been depicted in cinematic narratives, across genres from science fiction films to fantasy films. In some cases, a self-driving car is personified as one of the main characters. This article examines cinematic representations and imaginaries in order to understand the development of the self-driving technology and its integration in contemporary societies, drawing on examples such as The Love Bug, Knight Rider, Minority Report and I, Robot. Conceptually and methodologically, the article combines close readings of films with technological concerns and theoretical considerations, in an attempt to grasp the entanglement of cinematographic imaginaries, audiovisual technologies, artificial intelligence and human interactions that characterise the introduction of self-driving cars in contemporary societies. The human–AI machine interaction is considered both on technological and theoretical levels. Issues of automation, agency and disengagement are traced in cinematic representations and tackled, calling into question the concepts of socio-technical assemblage.
South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission the question arises: what kinds of truth surfaced in the actual gacaca assemblage in small face-to-face communities? And what kind of truth dominated? And how did these truths interact? I will answer these questions based on fieldwork conducted in Rwanda between 2005 and 2012 – when the gacaca courts were operational nationwide – when I, together with Rwandan collaborators, observed a total of 1,917 trials dealing with allegations against 2,573 individuals. In doing so, I conceptualise the gacaca process as
territory, and described the difficulty of presenting himself as a representative of MSF. He had multiple family and friend links to local armed networks, and faced mounting pressure: ‘Armed groups ask you for things, find out about you, your origin, family. They exploit any personal links between you and them. You are exposed.’ Theoretically, the MSF emblem is supposed to become employees’ new ‘identity marker’ ( Hilhorst and Schmiemann, 2002 ): the organisation is performed through an ‘assemblage’ of the white cars, flags, and people in MSF T-shirts ( Latour, 2005
facts in the name of values, in the pursuit of both technical and ethical ends’ ( Redfield, 2006 : 3). He goes on to say that, [i]n this way, they combine assertions of universalized human sentiment and opinion with those of specific expertise, suggesting a modified relationship with traditions of objectivity and neutrality whereby truth might be proclaimed in open association with a point of view. I call this positioned assemblage of
including embodied practices of nationalism in the repertoire of performance and consumption (Goode et al. 2020 ). This book conceptualizes everyday policy performance through discursive, consumerist, and carnal practices that together constitute an everyday foreign policy assemblage. While the concept of assemblage might seem like an unnecessary complication of the theoretical framework, it offers several