Marco Briziarelli

ABSTRACT This article applies ‘social drama’ – adapted from the anthropology of Victor Turner – to portray a performance of media ritual in control of critical academic discourse. Insights from newspaper coverage of a controversy surrounding Ward Churchill allow us to trace theoretical connections between strategic ritual at the occupational level and media ritual in cultural practice. We observe a fractal-like structure, such that ritualistic punishment of deviant ideas as a cultural response is encoded in textual production. We discuss implications of social drama as media ritual for the prowess of US journalism in patrolling boundaries of acceptable ideas in the academic-media nexus.

In this paper, I examine video game testing as a lens through which exploring broader aspects of digital economy such as the intersection of different kind productive practices—working, labouring , playing and gaming—as well as the tendency to conceal the labour associated with them. Drawing on Lund's (2014) distinction between the creative aspects of " work-playing " and the con-straining/instrumental aspects of " game-labouring " , I claim that video game testing is buried under several layers of invisibility. Ideologically, the " playful " , " carnivalesque " , quasi-subversive facets of this job are rejected because of their resistance to be easily subsumed by the logic of capitalism. Practically , a fetishist process of hiding human relations behind relations among things (elements in the video game environment) reaches its paradoxical apex in the quality assurance task of this profession: the more the game tester succeeds in debugging games higher is the fetishization of his/her activity.

While communication scholars who have invoked the Gramscian concept of hegemony have approached it primarily as a designation for cultural stability and domination, there have been fewer calls for its closer consideration in relation to human agency in the process of social change. Receptive of these calls, in this article, I develop an alternative to the dominant reading of the concept to show its productiveness in the analysis of a political group’s rhetorical situation. I claim that such a conceptualization advances the discussion toward a dimension of rhetorical intervention that passes from an oppressive to an emancipatory understanding of hegemony. I take as my case study the national-popular rhetoric of Podemos, a recently formed political party in Spain, which, in the context of the recent economic crisis, is building hegemony by successfully synthesizing public sentiments and intellectual involvement against austerity policies.

This essay sheds light on the neoliberal aspects of the Italian political-economic system exemplified in the relationship between capital, state and media. The main argument is that the specific marriage between neoliberalism and neocorporatism that characterizes Italy reveals a distinctive characteristic of neoliberalism: a class project relying heavily on the state. As Polanyi has suggested through the concept of ‘embeddedness’,

Drawing  on  Debord’s  Society  of  Spectacle,  t
his  paper
explore
s
the  relationship  between  the  broad
neoliberal  capitalism
spectacle
and  the  specific  representations  of  the  economic  crisis  mediated  by  an  Italian
newspaper,  Il  Sole  24  Ore.  In  the  cont
est  of  informational  capitalism  and
based  on  a  theme  analysis
of  the
newspaper front
-
page articles in the period of 2010
-
11,
the paper maintains that
the crisis should be
understood as
a contradictory enactment
: being in betw
een a necessary and functional aspect
of neoliberal capitalism
as well as a
genuine
, potentia
lly subversive,
exception from it.

This book explores the communicative practices of the Italian radical group Red Brigades (Brigate Rosse, or BR), the relationship the group established with the Italian press, and the specific social historical context in which the BR developed both its own self-understanding and its complex dialectical connection with the society at large. The BR’s worldview and the dominant ideology(ies) mediated by the press are treated as competing responses to structural issues of Italian history: the structural weakness of the nation state, the contradictions of an uneven economic development, and the consequent struggle of the bourgeois class to achieve hegemonic rule.

ižek and Tolokonnikova’s exchange letters provides the reader with the suggestive image and evocative words of two intellectuals speaking from very different contexts. This article discusses the relevance of this volume in the context of localized global capitalism and an equally localized global struggle against it.

Working with the notion of translation, this paper illustrates a central contribution of Gramsci to communication theory: his philosophy of praxis. Such a framework works through an indissolubly twofold historical materialist program: (1) as an investigation of social phenomena through the exercise of a translation of polity aimed at the raising of a critical consciousness, and (2) as a political instrument that aims to consolidate and dialectically sublate " common sense " into " good sense, " through a politics of translation. I will offer the example of presidential candidate Bernie Sanders's " Political Revolution " to point out the meaningful but also ambiguous space of reciprocal translation between his discourse, Occupy Wall Street's trope of " 1% vs. 99%, " and Donald Trump's " Make America Great Again " rhetoric