Paul Virilio’s work on dromology provides a model of a political economy. Called the “dromoeconomic” system, it incorporates aspects of temporality, consumption, and technology, arguably three of the core factors for consideration of the future organization of human societies. Durational factors manifest in issues of health, education, governance, and data. Consumption facilitates the politics of resource and territorial management; technology controls communication and transmission of energy at its base forms into the complexities of every facet of life. Living in a dromoeconomy means negotiating a material field created by the speeds of the global objects of communication. This article focuses on one aspect of the dromoeconomy, the users and producers of this system, the “dromospheric generation.” It explores the generation of the 2000s, users of screen-based digital technologies, in particular focusing on the digital child (“digi-child”) as the model information worker whose operational skills of “transmission” through game play are producing the material grounds of the future by transmitting energy in the dromoeconomy.

This article explores what one might call the dystopia of contemporary screen-based culture through a discussion of the work of Paul Virilio and Bernard Stiegler. Centrally, it explains that the screen might be seen as a negative abyss, where absolute surface creates the effect of infinite depth and a sense of absolute freedom obscures the truth of solipsistic self-reflection and enclosure. It explores this idea through reference to Virilio’s concept of the “squared horizon” and a short history of screen culture that commences with Plato’s myth of the cave, where perceptions of surface and depth clash and contrast in the underworld. It then turns to Friedrich Nietzsche’s use of the idea of the abyss. This work on Plato and Nietzsche brings together the ideas of the screen and the abyss. The article next takes up Edmund Husserl’s notion of the horizon, which structures the human perception of movement through time, and relates this to Virilio’s concept of the negative horizon, which rushes toward humanity rather than endlessly moving into the future. At this point the negative horizon recalls the abyssal screen that is simultaneously infinite distance and absolute surface and the horror of contemporary media culture. Finally, the article reflects on Virilio’s work on technodesertification and disappearance and Stiegler’s theory of the destruction of the delay of desire in the immediacy of drive through attention capture to show how screen culture annihilates the thickness of the thing itself in favor of flat images. In conclusion, the article explains that this is the future of new media culture—the twenty-first-century dystopia of the negative abyss.

The article thematizes the difference between superstition and faith through an allegorical double reading of social theory and Ken Russell’s film The Devils. It discusses the political implications of this difference, contrasting the function of “love of God” in mysticism and in the governmental economy of the church. Crucially, love is originally a universal, immanent impulse, which is captured by religion. But if religion is an apparatus of capture, then the profanation of this universal core is possible. Religion cannot fully appropriate or exhaust the virtual potentiality of faith. By the same token, it becomes possible to distinguish religion and faith. Not all faith is religion and not all religion is faithful. The article draws on Foucault, discussing the possibility of a “political spirituality” outside the religious domain, as a profane, modern political gesture that cannot be reduced to theological notions. Finally, it turns to the relationship between political spirituality and political strategy.

Space colonisation and subterranean dwelling have been staples of speculative fiction since at least the nineteenth century, but the invention of nuclear weapons and the prospect of global environmental collapse have, certainly since the Cold War, made proposals offering vertical escape from the surface of the planet a matter worthy of serious consideration among engineers, planners, military strategists, and countercultural futurologists. The shift in the conception of utopia, from the lateral displacements typical of its classical formations to the vertical modes of descent and ascent considered in this article, suggests a structural relationship between utopia and catastrophe produced out of the new conditions of global threat inaugurated by atomic weapons. While the prospect of impending global catastrophe would appear to lead to a dystopianor even fatalistic acceptance of the limits of human life on Earth, the most devastating assessments of humanity’s future have also produced utopian proposals for the reimagining of human potentiality below and above the surface of the planet. In a real sense, then, catastrophe has become the precondition for the establishment of utopia, both as the compelling threat that demands a plausible response to impending annihilation and as the necessary event that apocalyptically clears the ground for new modes of living.

Book Review| July 01 2013 Being Affected Writings on Contemporary Art and Artists, vols. 1–6, by Lyotard, Jean-François, Leuven: Leuven University Press, 2009–13, $388.00/€297.00 (hardcover), ISBN 978905867881x Keith Crome Keith Crome Keith Crome is a senior lecturer in philosophy at Manchester Metropolitan University. He is the author of Lyotard and Greek Thought: Sophistry (2004) and coeditor of The Lyotard Reader and Guide (2006). Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Cultural Politics (2013) 9 (2): 227–232. https://doi.org/10.1215/17432197-2146185 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Twitter Permissions Search Site Citation Keith Crome; Being Affected. Cultural Politics 1 July 2013; 9 (2): 227–232. doi: https://doi.org/10.1215/17432197-2146185 Download citation file: Zotero Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search nav search search input Search input auto suggest search filter Books & JournalsAll JournalsCultural Politics Search Advanced Search In 2009 Leuven University Press published Jean-François Lyotard's study of the artist Christiaan Karel Appel, Karel Appel: Un geste de couleur/Karel Appel: A Gesture of Colour. It was the first volume of what was initially planned to be a five-volume bilingual collection of Lyotard's Writings on Contemporary Art and Artists. The collection has now grown to six volumes, including a two-part fourth volume bringing together Lyotard's shorter, miscellaneous writings on aesthetics and the theory of art and on contemporary artists (Textes dispersés I: Esthétique et théorie de l'art/Miscellaneous Texts I: Aesthetics and Theory of Art and Textes dispersés II: Artistes contemporains/Miscellaneous Texts II: Contemporary Artists). In addition to the volumes mentioned above, a further three have been published: Sam Francis, Leçon de ténèbres: “Like the Paintings of a Blind Man”/Sam Francis, Lesson of Darkness: “Like the Paintings of a Blind... © 2013 Duke University Press2013 You do not currently have access to this content.

This essay inquires into the institutionalization of the author as a governing practice. I observe the experience of two authors—Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn and “Mr. Perestroika”—in relationship to two institutions—the Soviet Writers' Union and the American Political Science Association—as they contest the imperative to produce cultural/knowledge representations on behalf of the present. Drawing on Michel Foucault's identification of the political practice of parrēsia and its relationship to ontologies of veridiction, I argue that the institutionalization of the author stabilizes a circuitry of value in which the performance imperative dominates transformative thought.