Book Section
Özgün Eylül İşcen
Black Box Allegories of Gulf Futurism
The Irreducible Other of Computational Capital
Given the prospect of post-oil futures, this chapter historically situates contemporary Gulf Futurism within cybernetic and logistical aspirations underlying the current global trend of the smartness mandate. Working through the complex visuality that the cybernetic black box animates, the chapter revisits Fredric Jameson’s cognitive mapping as an allegorical model for the inherent frictions of computational capital. To this end, it discusses Kuwaiti artist Monira Al Qadiri’s artistic practice that reclaims a right to speculate while condensing material reality and imaginative threads, thereby going beyond a mere gesture of unveiling or mapping.
| Title |
Black Box Allegories of Gulf Futurism
|
| Subtitle |
The Irreducible Other of Computational Capital
|
| Author(s) |
Özgün Eylül İşcen
|
| Identifier | |
| Description |
Given the prospect of post-oil futures, this chapter historically situates contemporary Gulf Futurism within cybernetic and logistical aspirations underlying the current global trend of the smartness mandate. Working through the complex visuality that the cybernetic black box animates, the chapter revisits Fredric Jameson’s cognitive mapping as an allegorical model for the inherent frictions of computational capital. To this end, it discusses Kuwaiti artist Monira Al Qadiri’s artistic practice that reclaims a right to speculate while condensing material reality and imaginative threads, thereby going beyond a mere gesture of unveiling or mapping.
|
| Is Part Of | |
| Place |
Berlin
|
| Publisher |
ICI Berlin Press
|
| Date |
October 11, 2022
|
| Subject |
Gulf Futurism
Smartness Mandate
Ubiquitous computing
Post-oil Futures
Black box
Cybernetics
Logistics
Cognitive Mapping
|
| Rights |
© by the author(s)
Except for images or otherwise noted, this publication is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.
|
| Language |
en-GB
|
| page start |
91
|
| page end |
115
|
| Source |
The Case for Reduction, ed. by Christoph F. E. Holzhey and Jakob Schillinger, Cultural Inquiry, 25 (Berlin: ICI Berlin Press, 2022), pp. 91–115
|
- ‘Expo 2020 Dubai unveils first permanent public artwork by Kuwaiti creative’, Arab News, 4 July 2021 <https://www.arabnews.com/node/1888116/lifestyle> [accessed 17 May 2022]
- ‘Al Qadiri and Al-Maria on Gulf Futurism’, Dazed Digital, 14 November 2012, <https://www.dazeddigital.com/music/article/15037/1/alqadiri-al-maria-on-gulf-futurism> [accessed 15 October 2020]
- Allahyari, Morehshin, and Daniel Rouke, The 3D Additivist Manifesto, 2015 <https://additivism.org/manifesto> [accessed 24 February 2021]
- Althusser, Louis, ‘Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses’, in Althusser, Lenin and Philosophy, trans. by Ben Brewster (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1972), pp. 127–86
- Archer, Megan, ‘Logistics as Rationality: Excavating the Coloniality of Contemporary Logistical Formations’ (Doctoral Dissertation, University of Brighton, 2020) <https://cris.brighton.ac.uk/ws/portalfiles/portal/22372242/Archer_Thesis_2020.pdf> [accessed 16 March 2022]
- Avanessian, Armen, and Mahan Moalemi, eds, Ethnofuturismen (Berlin: Merve Verlag, 2018)
- Beller, Jonathan, The Message is Murder: Substrates of Computational Capital (London: Pluto Press, 2018) <https://doi.org/10.2307/j.ctt1x07z9t>
- Boodrookas, Alex, and Arang Keshavarzian, ‘Giving the Transnational a History: Gulf Cities Across Time and Space’, in The New Arab Urban: Gulf Cities of Wealth, Ambition, and Distress, ed. by Harvey Molotch and Davide Ponzini (New York: New York University Press, 2019), pp. 35–57 <https://doi.org/10.18574/nyu/9781479880010.003.0002>
- Bousquet, Antoine, The Scientific Way of Warfare: Order and Chaos on the Battlefields of Modernity (New York: Columbia University Press, 2009)
- Chua, Charmaine, ‘Logistics’, in The Sage Handbook of Marxism, ed. by Beverley Skeggs, Sara R. Farris, Alberto Toscano, and Svenja Bromberg, 3 vols (Los Angeles: Sage, 2022), III
- Chun, Wendy H. K., Programmed Visions: Software and Memory (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2011) <https://doi.org/10.7551/mitpress/9780262015424.001.0001>
- Debre, Isabel, and Malak Harb, ‘Expo 2020’s Workers Face Hardships despite Dubai’s Promises’, Associated Press News, 5 December 2021 <https://apnews.com/article/coronavirus-pandemic-business-health-middle-east-africa-386c8ee45123e7bea212e14cc106adc2> [accessed 4 June 2022]
- Easterling, Kelly, Extrastatecraft: The Power of Infrastructure Space (London: Verso, 2014)
- Eshun, Kodwo, ‘Further Considerations of Afrofuturism’, CR: The New Centennial Review, 3.2 (Summer 2003), pp. 287–302 <https://doi.org/10.1353/ncr.2003.0021>
- Franklin, Seb, Digitality as Cultural Logic (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2015)
- Galison, Peter, ‘The Ontology of the Enemy: Norbert Wiener and the Cybernetic Vision’, Critical Inquiry, 21.1 (1994), pp. 228–66 <https://doi.org/10.1086/448747>
- Galloway, Alexander R., ‘“Black Box, Black Bloc”: A Lecture Given at the New School in New York City on April 12, 2010’ <http://cultureandcommunication.org/galloway/pdf/Galloway_Black_Box_Black_Bloc.pdf> [accessed 13 March 2022]
- Galloway, Alexander R., The Interface Effect (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2012)
- Gronlund, Melissa, ‘What Monira Al Qadiri’s Otherworldly Expo 2020 Dubai Sculpture Says about the UAE’, The National, 4 July 2021 <https://www.thenationalnews.com/arts-culture/art/2021/07/04/what-monira-al-qadiris-otherworldly-expo-2020-dubai-sculpture-says-about-the-uae/>
- Günel, Gökçe, Spaceship in the Desert: Energy, Climate Change, and Urban Design in Abu Dhabi (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2019) <https://doi.org/10.1215/9781478002406>
- Halligan, Neil, ‘Expo 2020 Dubai Records More than 24 Million Visits after Late Surge’, The National, 2 April 2022 <https://www.thenationalnews.com/uae/expo-2020/2022/04/02/expo-2020-dubai-records-more-than-24-million-visits-after-late-surge-in-numbers/> [accessed 17 May 2022]
- Halpern, Orit, Beautiful Data: A History of Vision and Reason since 1945 (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2015) <https://doi.org/10.1215/9780822376323>
- Halpern, Orit, Robert Mitchell, and Bernard Dionysius Geoghegan, ‘The Smartness Mandate: Notes Toward a Critique’, Grey Room, 68 (2017), pp. 106–29 <https://doi.org/10.1162/GREY_a_00221>
- Hanieh, Adam, Capitalism and Class in the Gulf Arab States (New York: Palgrave MacMillan, 2011) <https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230119604>
- Hanieh, Adam, Money, Markets, and Monarchies: The Gulf Cooperation Council and the Political Economy of the Contemporary Middle East (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018) <https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108614443>
- Haraway, Donna J., ‘A Cyborg Manifesto: Science, Technology, and Socialist-Feminism in the Late Twentieth Century’, in Haraway, Simians, Cyborgs and Natures: The Re-Invention of Nature (New York: Routledge, 1991), pp. 149–83
- Harney, Stefano, and Fred Moten, The Undercommons: Fugitive Planning and Black Study (New York: Autonomedia, 2013)
- Hayles, Katherine, Unthought: The Power of the Cognitive Non-Conscious (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2017) <https://doi.org/10.7208/chicago/9780226447919.001.0001>
- Hilgers, Philipp von, ‘The History of the Black Box: The Clash of a Thing and Its Concept’, Cultural Politics, 7.1 (2011), pp. 41–58 <https://doi.org/10.2752/175174311X12861940861707>
- Hu, Tung-Hui, ‘Black Boxes and Green Lights: Media, Infrastructure, and the Future At Any Cost’, English Language Notes, 55.1–2 (Spring/Fall 2017), pp. 81–88 <https://doi.org/10.1215/00138282-55.1-2.81>
- Jameson, Fredric, ‘Cognitive Mapping’, in Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture, ed. by Cary Nelson and Lawrence Grossberg (Champaign: University of Illinois Press, 1988), pp. 347–60
- Jameson, Fredric, Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1991) <https://doi.org/10.1215/9780822378419>
- Jameson, Fredric, ‘Class and Allegory in Contemporary Mass Culture: Dog Day Afternoon as a Political Film’, in Jameson, Signatures of the Visible (New York: Routledge, 1992), pp. 35–54
- Jameson, Fredric, ‘Reification and Utopia in Mass Culture’, in Jameson, Signatures of the Visible (New York: Routledge, 1992), pp. 9–34
- Jameson, Fredric, Marxism and Form: Twentieth-Century Dialectical Theories of Literature (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2017)
- Jameson, Fredric, ‘Political: National Allegory’, in Jameson, Allegory and Ideology (London: Verso, 2019), pp. 159–216
- Justo, Gemma, and Ghiwa Sayegh, ‘Whose Home Is It? The Workplace of Migrant Domestic Workers Under Kafala’, Funambulist, 19 February 2021 <https://thefunambulist.net/magazine/spaces-of-labor/whose-home-is-it-the-workplace-of-migrant-domestic-workers-under-kafala> [accessed 1 March 2022]
- Khalili, Laleh, Sinews of War and Trade: Shipping and Capitalism in the Arabian Peninsula (London: Verso, 2021)
- Latour, Bruno, Pandora’s Hope: Essays on the Reality of Science Studies (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999)
- Lynch, Kevin, The Image of the City (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1960)
- Marx, Karl, Capital: A Critique of Political Economy, trans. by Ben Fowkes, 3 vols (London: Penguin, 1976), I
- Mezzadra, Sandro, and Brett Neilson, The Politics of Operations: Excavating Contemporary Capitalism (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2019) <https://doi.org/10.1215/9781478003267>
- Mirzoeff, Nicholas, The Right to Look: A Counterhistory of Visuality (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2011) <https://doi.org/10.1215/9780822393726>
- Mirzoeff, Nicholas, ‘Visualizing the Anthropocene’, Public Culture, 26.2 (2014), pp. 213–32 <https://doi.org/10.1215/08992363-2392039>
- Mitchell, Timothy, Carbon Democracy: Political Power in the Age of Oil (London: Verso, 2013)
- Noorizadeh, Bahar, ‘Weird-Futuring’, Counter-N, ed. by Özgün Eylül İşcen and Shintaro Miyazaki, 12 April 2022 <https://doi.org/10.18452/24452>
- Parikka, Jussi, ‘Counter-Futuring’, Counter-N, ed. by Özgün Eylül İşcen and Shintaro Miyazaki, 12 April 2022 <https://doi.org/10.18452/24451>
- Parikka, Jussi, ‘Middle East and Other Futurisms: Imaginary Temporalities in Contemporary Art and Visual Culture’, Culture, Theory and Critique, 59.1 (2018), pp. 40–58 <https://doi.org/10.1080/14735784.2017.1410439>
- Szeman, Imre, ‘Who’s Afraid of National Allegory? Jameson, Literary Criticism, Globalization’, South Atlantic Quarterly, 100.3 (2001), pp. 803–27 <https://doi.org/10.1215/00382876-100-3-803>
- Toscano, Alberto, ‘Lineaments of the Logistical State’, Viewpoint Magazine, 4, 28 September 2014 <https://viewpointmag.com/2014/09/28/lineaments-of-the-logistical-state/> [accessed 28 May 2022]
- Toscano, Alberto, ‘Elsewhere and Otherwise: Introduction to a Symposium on Fredric Jameson’s “Allegory and Ideology”’, Historical Materialism, 29.1 (2021), pp. 113–22 <https://doi.org/10.1163/1569206X-29010101>
- Tsing, Anna, Friction: An Ethnography of Global Connection (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2004) <https://doi.org/10.1515/9781400830596>
- Tsing, Anna, ‘Supply Chains and the Human Condition’, Rethinking Marxism, 21.2 (2009), pp. 148–76 <https://doi.org/10.1080/08935690902743088>
- Ziadah, Rafeef, ‘Transport Infrastructure & Logistics in the Making of Dubai Inc.’, International Journal of Urban and Regional Research, 42.2 (2018), pp. 182–97 (p. 183) <https://doi.org/10.1111/1468-2427.12570>
- Ziadah, Rafeef, ‘Circulating Power: Humanitarian Logistics, Militarism, and the United Arab Emirates’, Antipode, 51.5 (2019), pp. 1684–1702 <https://doi.org/10.1111/anti.12547>
- İşcen, Özgün Eylül, ‘The Racial Politics of Smartness Urbanism: Dubai and Beirut as Two Sides of the Same Coin’, Ethnic and Racial Studies, 44.12 (2021), pp. 2282–2303 <https://doi.org/10.1080/01419870.2021.1921233>