Cultural Criticism Terms Flashcards
Contact Zone
Mary Louise Pratt uses the term ‘contact zone’ to refer to social spaces where cultures meet, clash, and grapple with each other, often in contexts of highly asymmetrical relations of power, such as colonialism, slaver, or their aftermath. The term is also used to reconsider the models of community. Pratt takes as an example Guaman Poma’s New Chronicle and Good Government, in which Spanish culture and Incan culture meet and clash. (Mary Louise Pratt)
Autoethnographic Texts
Autoethnographic texts are the ones that produced by the so-called others in response to, and in relation to the texts produced in metropolitan centers with using the representational strategies used to describe them. If ethnographic texts are those produced by Europeans to represent their conquered others, then autoethnographic texts are those produced by so-defined others who appropriate the representation of Europeans. Guaman Poma’s New Chronicle and Good Government is an example of autoethnographic text, and, as seen in this text, they are often collaborative including different groups of people, and therefore often involve more than one language. (Mary Louise Pratt)
Simulacrum and simulation
A simulation is a play of various simulacrum, which are like characters and props on a stage. It’s a part-whole relationship.
“The simulacrum is never that which conceals the truth–it is the truth which conceals that there is none. The simulacrum is true.-Ecclesiastes”
“If we were able to take as the finest allegory of simulation the Borges tale where the cartographers of the Empire draw up a map so detailed that it ends up exactly covering the territory (but where, with the decline of the Empire this map becomes frayed and finally ruined, a few shreds still discernible in the deserts - the metaphysical beauty of this ruined abstraction, bearing witness to an imperial pride and rotting like a carcass, returning to the substance of the soil, rather as an aging double ends up being confused with the real thing), this fable would then have come full circle for us, and now has nothing but the discrete charm of second-order simulacra” -Baudrilliard
The Hyperreal
“Abstraction today is no longer that of the map, the double, the mirror or the concept. Simulation is no longer that of a territory, a referential being or a substance. It is the generation by models of a real without origin or reality: a hyperreal. The territory no longer precedes the map, nor survives it. Henceforth, it is the map that precedes the territory - precession of simulacra - it is the map that engenders the territory and if we were to revive the fable today, it would be the territory whose shreds are slowly rotting across the map. It is the real, and not the map, whose vestiges subsist here and there, in the deserts which are no longer those of the Empire, but our own. The desert of the real itself.” -Baudrilliard
Deterrence
“It would take too long to run through the whole range of operational negativity, of all those scenarios of deterrence which, like Watergate, try to revive a moribund principle by simulated scandal, phantasm, murder - a sort of hormonal treatment by negativity and crisis. It is always a question of proving the real by the imaginary; proving truth by scandal; proving the law by transgression; proving work by the strike; proving the system by crisis and capital by revolution; and for that matter proving ethnology by the dispossession of its object (the Tasaday). Without counting: proving theater by anti-theater; proving art by anti-art; proving pedagogy by anti-pedagogy; proving psychiatry by anti-psychiatry, etc., etc.” -Baudrilliard
Accumulation
“The social world is accumulated history, and if is not reduced to a discontinuous series of instantaneous mechanical equilibria between agents who are treated as interchangeable particles, one must reintroduce into it the notion of capital with it, accumulating and all its effects. Capital is accumulated labor (in its materialized form or its ‘incorporated,’ embodied form) which, when appropriated on a private, i.e., exclusive, basis by agents or groups of agents, enables them to appropriate social energy in the form of reified or living labor.” -Bordieu
Cultural Capital
“Cultural capital can exist in three forms: in the embodied state, i.e., in the form of long-lasting dispositions of the mind and body; in the objectified state, in the form of cultural goods,… which are the trace or realization of theories or critiques of these theories, problematics, etc.; and in the institutionalized state, a form of objectification which must be set apart because, as will be seen in the case of educational qualifications, it confers entirely original properties on the cultural capital which it is presumed to guarantee.” -Bordieu
Social Capital
“Social capital is the aggregate of the actual or potential resources which are linked to possession of a durable network of more or less institutionalized relationships of mutual acquaintance and recognition—or in other words, to membership in a group—which provides each of its members with the backing of the collectivity-owned capital, a ‘credential’ which entitles them to credit, in the various senses of the word.” -Bordieu
