Critical Studies

"'Electric Feel': Transduction, Errantry and the Refrain" assesses what certain logics gleaned from selected popular music songs might offer to ongoing efforts to renegotiate bonds, institutions and political possibilities shaped by the violences characteristic of capitalism, cisgender and white supremacy, neoliberal multiculturalism and contemporary geopolitics. Making Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari's concepts of ‘the Refrain’, and ‘music’ available as heuristics and technologies to contribute to ongoing explorations of the role that sound plays and yet might play in contemporary Euro-American feminist cultural studies, this essay is animated by what might be called, following Édouard Glissant, a mode of ‘scholarly errantry’. If feminism was music and feminists musicians, it could be said that feminism's histories, its preoccupations, its shifting and fluid subjects and debates, its styles, its canonical texts and concepts, are its refrains, the things to which it returns, its territory, the aspects of feminism that exert a force in the world. These have political indices as well as scholarly, creative ones. Insofar as academic feminism traverses disciplines and constitutes itself as such through reference to those narratives and intellectual lineages that it claims as its own, it has carved out a terrain, a ‘field’, and a set of constituents, but nonetheless contested, organizations and their stated priorities, interests and common senses. The present essay asks, what music might contemporary feminisms make when their existing refrains are placed under pressure? How might sound and music offer insightful support for generating and relating concepts to the rapidly changing present circumstances that queer anti-racist feminisms actively participate in shaping? What tales of errantry might such feminisms tell today?

Functions traditionally attributed to the intellectual or to the artist currently are perceptible across broad segments of society. Their appearance is facilitated by digital technologies in ways that trouble any remaining distinctions between ‘theory’ and ‘practice’ for film and media scholars, theorists and makers. ‘Critical Theory and Popular Education’ explores the relevance of the conceptualization of ‘theory’ offered in Barbara Christian's essay, ‘The Race for Theory’, to a consideration of a range of responses to a dispersal of the intellectual function throughout society and argues that approaching new media technologies and industries themselves as ‘theory’ and modes of theorizing might contribute to our understandings of current configurations of knowledge and power.

Daniel Peddle's film The Aggressives makes perceptible an intolerable yet quotidian violence, as the index of our time. Putting queer theories of temporality into proximity with anticolonial ones, this essay seeks to remain aware of what in The Aggressives escapes attempts to contain it yet nonetheless can be felt and perceived even though—or especially if—it remains unrecognizable or unintelligible to our current common senses. We can think of what escapes these operations as the content that exceeds its expression, that through which poetry from the future might be perceived yet not recognized. Poetry from the future interrupts the habitual formation of bodies, and it is an index of a time to come in which what exists potently, even if not (yet) effectively, today but escapes us will find its time.