Blockchain Papers

Leah Nieboer

This dissertation is a novel, STATES OF ZERO, accompanied by a critical preface on rupture in the works of German artist Rebecca Horn and Korean American artist Theresa Hak Kyung Cha. The critical preface “ON RUPTURE, ESTRANGEMENT, & EXTENSIBILITY: THE NEUTRAL IN REBECCA HORN AND THERESA HAK KYUNG CHA,” investigates negating interruptions in Rebecca Horn and Theresa Hak Kyung Cha’s lives—a life-threatening illness and its ensuing chronic conditions in the former, and displacement, exile, and linguistic rupture in the latter—that shape their innovative, multimedia works and their understandings of subjectivity, embodiment, articulation, and relationship. Their compositions, pitched at hyperbolic limits of self and language, touch Maurice Blanchot’s neutral—that substance which both underlies and threatens to obliterate speech altogether. In this preface, I explore some ways Horn’s works, given these ruptures, are expressive of this touching of the neutral and discuss the possible senses, embodiments, and modes of relationship her works—staged at the intersection of the human, nonhuman, mechanical, and environmental—offer as a result. Her works, intended to touch and to hyperbolize the limits of sense, ask us to encounter previously unimaginable configurations of self and other, insisting we reckon with the essential plurality of self, as we approach what Blanchot considers “the impossible” utterance this mode of articulation allows. I then take up Korean American artist Theresa Hak Kyung Cha’s multimedia work to extend the conversation into the invitational nature of rupture and its socio-ethical-political implications. The novel, STATES OF ZERO, is a composition that lives in this tradition of rupture. Set in a fictional, totalitarian state, the novel follows Zero, a woman who finds herself paradoxically embedded in the heart of the state’s increasingly totalitarian structure through her work at its national laboratory, even as her increasing disability—caused by early chemical exposure in her environments and exacerbated by ongoing clinical invasion—makes her its powerful, if unintentional, dissident. This early rupture in her form ensures she cannot become—or conceive of—a singular subject imagined by the state. Instead, she becomes a person of increasing alterity, an “impossible” body articulated across human, environmental, mechanical, clinical, and nonhuman worlds, in an aporia of unresolvable crossings. At the bottom of these crossings is the mother—Zero’s own sick mother, as well as the state’s toxins, clinical invasions, heteronormative structures, releasing dreams, and queer relationships that have mothered her form into its present state. This results in a narrative form that is as experimental and polyvocal as Zero herself. The novel itself becomes an impossible body, suspended across varying times and spaces, mechanisms of recording and surveillance, an unnamed narrator(s), and Zero’s own consciousness. As Zero, the state, and their intertwined narratives reach a point of no return, the novel and its world is flooded—with a local storm, and a teeming, lyric passage expressive of Blanchot’s neutral, where Zero may, finally, conceive of an impossible form for becoming into a possible future.

Marko Pajević

Reviewed by: Opak: Schatten der Erkenntnis in Paul Celans 'Meridian' und im Gedicht 'Schwanengefahr' by Chiara Caradonna Marko Pajević Opak: Schatten der Erkenntnis in Paul Celans 'Meridian' und im Gedicht 'Schwanengefahr'. By Chiara Caradonna. Göttingen: Wallstein. 2020. 455 pp. €48. ISBN 978–3–8353–3508–0. This voluminous and profoundly philosophical study focuses on a single short poem by Paul Celan, 'Schwanengefahr'. Chiara Caradonna's point of departure is the poem itself and an equally short comment on it by Celan in a letter to his friend, Franz Wurm. After a few pages of initial reflections on Celan's approach to writing poetry, particularly his method of combining various aspects 'all in one' ('in Eins'), Caradonna delves at great length into Celan's poetological speech, 'The Meridian', and the preparatory notes he made for it. Drawing also on related archival materials, she embarks on a thorough exploration of a key element of Celan's poetics: the issue of light and darkness and the related notions of shadow and opacity. Caradonna digs deep into all the references the enormous Celan scholarship has discovered, managing to bring them all together and to add a good number of enriching elements and ideas: Pascal, Shestov, Lenz, Kafka, Berdyaev, Valéry, Benn, Scheler, Bühler, Heidegger, Husserl, Becker, and many more are all discussed in considerable detail and their influence on Celan's work illuminated. Caradonna masters not only German, French, English and Italian sources, but works also with Hebrew (she lectures in Jerusalem) as well as Russian. This alone is a very considerable achievement, proof of highly impressive scholarship and an intellectual grasp of the issues at stake for Celan and his readership. In her in-depth treatment of the question of obscurity in Celan's poetics, which developed from the traditional light–darkness dichotomy towards an advocation of poetry's particular opacity in the face of a totalizing form of light, Caradonna alights on a wealth of relevant issues for Celan Studies and provides a general reflection on what his poems do, or can do. The study demonstrates convincingly what a philosophically minded and informed poet Celan was, with a particular [End Page 171] focus on the phenomenological imprints in his poetics. It offers tremendous foundational work demonstrating that his opacity is far from being 'hermetic', as used to be stated so often. References are also made to other poets, such as Whitman, and of course to other poems in Celan's notably close-knit œuvre. The final ninety pages of the book return to 'Schwanengefahr', examining its genesis in detail. This 1967 poem belongs to the late phase of Celan's writing, when his poems became very condensed and indeed enigmatic, which is why few scholars have ventured to analyse them in depth, making the contribution of the present book all the more valuable: until now, only one study had proposed a closer reading of this poem. Caradonna for her part deserves praise, not least for establishing that a text by the anthropologist Éveline Lot-Falck provided important cues for Celan without which it would be almost impossible to understand some of the poem's key references. Thus, the constructing principle of many of Celan's poems, particularly the later ones, is once again revealed in a manner which is both very enlightening and impressively erudite. The book contains an index of names and a bibliography of fourteen pages, of which, however, only two are devoted to Celan-specific secondary literature. While it is evidently difficult in the case of intensely studied authors such as Celan to take into consideration all that has been written, greater reference might have been made to the secondary literature that deals with some of the points which Caradonna develops. Moreover, in a study that speaks about the limits of a classical hermeneutic approach and relies very much on background knowledge and context to interpret the poem, there is hardly any mention of the particular poetic form of 'Schwanengefahr'. I would have preferred to see a conclusion that managed to wrap up and formulate the key insights of Caradonna's great intellectual endeavour. In its stead we are offered a long quotation from Benjamin...

Heidi James-Dunbar

This thesis recalls and surveys the work of major theorists in the field of Trauma theory, including Freud, Charcot, Prince, Caruth and Leys. It will consider if literature can provide a positive response to the attestation and representation of trauma. For Derrida, testimony must always remain irreducible to evidence or proof. This secret at the heart of every telling is what is at stake for survivors of trauma. Further, pain (either physical or mental) is that which precisely can't be shared between subjects it cannot be denied neither can it be confirmed. On the one hand it induces certainty
\n(I feel pain) and on the other, doubt (I can't see or feel your pain). One's pain is entirely aversive, a secret that evades language. How does this affect the textual production of trauma narratives? And how are those narratives received?
\nThe definition of testimony, that it alone can't constitute a 'proof whilst possibly recuperating one's right to 'tell' insomuch as one can construct an apparatus to evade censorship by government or other authorities, reduces that telling to a fiction, a story; which could be described as akin to the violence of blocking one's ears, refusing to partake in witnessing, a dismissal of subjectivity/sovereignty. Can
\nliterature and the art of testimony confront the impossibility of a proper response to trauma, a trauma that evades language and majority discursive practices?

B. Balamurugan, T. Poongodi, M. R. Manu, S. Karthikeyan · 5 authors

The moving image archive of the US Agency for International Development (USAID) includes a copy of the film The Double Day (1975), cataloged in the series Moving Images Relating to International Development Programs and Activities, 1979–1991, a collection of more than eight hundred titles “created to provide information on assistance programs supported by the Agency for International Development (AID).”1 Yet, The Double Day does not, in fact, directly depict or engage with any specific development or aid initiative. Instead, the film—directed by US-based Brazilian filmmaker Helena Solberg as part of the International Women’s Film Project collective and described as “the first Latin American feminist documentary”—examines the gendered dynamics of paid and unpaid labor through the testimonies of women from Argentina, Bolivia, Venezuela, and Mexico.2 Its presence in the USAID archive is likely a consequence of its funding history, having received support from the Inter-American Foundation, a USAID-affiliated entity; the development agencies of Denmark, Norway, and Sweden; the United Nations Development Program; and US philanthropist Calvin Cafritz.3These transnational funding structures not only enabled the film’s production but also determined its archival destination, which renders legible its place within the history of international development.4 The Double Day’s institutional trajectory reflects the shifting configurations of aid, gender, and media during a historic moment when women were being repositioned at the center of what Arturo Escobar has described as development’s “regimes of visuality.”5 Especially relevant to The Double Day’s production and exhibition was the international institutional framework of Women in Development (WID). Emerging in the early 1970s and culminating in United Nations’ proclamation of 1975 as International Women’s Year, WID emphasized women’s participation in the global economy as both an index and mechanism of development. Indeed, The Double Day premiered at the World Conference of the International Women’s Year, held in Mexico City.6 Within this context, the film forms part of a broader trajectory of media use by international organizations that intensified during the 1970s—as best exemplified by Media Habitat, a collection of 236 documentary films commissioned by the United Nations to represent urban and rural development initiatives for the 1976 Habitat Conference on Human Settlements in Vancouver. As a policy-shaping initiative, Media Habitat primarily featured films from the Global South intended not only to illustrate but also to help codify standardized audiovisual markers of “underdevelopment” that determined access to the emerging global economic order and to international aid.7Framed in relation to these international institutions and their operations, The Double Day could similarly be considered “development media”—exemplifying the type of nonfiction media produced and distributed outside of the commercial film circuits whose aspects and subcategories have been variously described in scholarship as nontheatrical, useful, sponsored, institutional, industrial, educational, or nonprofessional/amateur.8 Scholars working in this area have emphasized the institutional contexts of such media’s production and exhibition infrastructures as shaping its instrumentalized effects. From a feminist perspective, such an approach is crucial to grappling with the broader question of how “gender impacts [these works’] shape, content, and trajectories.”9 Yet we also argue that, taken in isolation, the institutional and infrastructural contexts are insufficient to account for the complex relationship between media and development, potentially not only limiting our understanding of the reach and impact of development but also distorting our interpretive conclusions. For example, to categorize The Double Day as “development media” is to overlook the film’s place within Solberg’s directorial oeuvre, as well as within the histories of both transnational women’s filmmaking and radical Latin American documentary cinema to which it simultaneously belongs. Such exclusive framing is especially limiting given that women globally were disproportionately engaged in nonfiction production throughout the twentieth century—sometimes by political choice but more often due to structural exclusions from fiction filmmaking. Even in nonfiction historiography, however, institutional media has remained particularly marginal, reinforcing hierarchies that separate such works from the aesthetic and authorial frameworks through which film history has been constructed.10 This marginalization not only tends to erase women’s contributions but also presumes a “weak” or derivative authorship, rendering these films unworthy of the interpretive attention needed to apprehend their aesthetic and political complexity.11 The same dynamic is likely to structure assumptions about “development media” as well.Categorizing The Double Day exclusively within this category would further prompt us to assume top-down institutional analyses that have been characteristic of both institutional media methodologies and the scholarship on development at large. This, in turn, would risk obscuring this film’s radical Marxist approach to women’s labor as well as its concrete contribution to activism and its attendant grassroot structures. In Mexico City, The Double Day became a catalyst for feminist solidarity in practice when one of the film’s protagonists, Bolivian activist and trade unionist Domitila Barrios de Chungara, was invited to participate in the Tribune of Non-Governmental Organizations held alongside the official UN conference.12 There, Barrios de Chungara challenged Western feminist priorities by reframing the debate around labor, class, and imperialism, helping to articulate a shared Third World feminist agenda that significantly departed from the developmentalist vision of the United Nations and USAID.13 Seen through the lens of activist media, The Double Day helped forge transnational solidarity networks by enabling information exchange across the diverse voices that shaped its making—from the women featured in the film to the activists who circulated it—revealing a considerably more dynamic interplay between institutional and grassroots or contingent media practices.Moreover, the film’s Latin American context—reflected in Solberg’s formation in Brazil as the only woman in Cinema Novo, its focus on women from across the region, and its premiere and key reception in Mexico City—requires grappling with the regional specificities of the very notion of development in its multiple iterations.14 Far from being an epistemological and political framework imposed solely by the Global North, both the practices of development and the theoretical foundations of developmentalism (understood as a broad and polysemic set of discourses) were shaped through the active participation of Latin American economists.15 Within this iteration, underdevelopment, as a constitutive notion of developmentalism, became central to a distinctly critical strand, which by the late 1960s became known as the dependency theory.16 This same approach is reflected in some of the best-known Latin American radical film manifestos of the time, arising precisely from the same milieus to which Solberg belonged.17These various considerations of the film’s history illustrate the methodological challenges confronting feminist scholars seeking to assess the impact of development on media projects, theories, and practices. To disregard the developmentalist context of such works by emphasizing their political aesthetics and affects risks reproducing a romanticized narrative of heroic resistance (albeit from a feminist perspective). Yet to engage exclusively with their institutional and material infrastructures risks naturalizing developmentalism’s political and epistemological foundations at the expense of the goals and beliefs of the many women who participated in these projects. The contradictions and ambivalences that animate such histories call for feminist frameworks capable of holding both institutional complicity and radical possibility in view.This challenge resonates with ongoing debates about the politics of the archive and what Allyson Field has termed “the practice of informed speculation.”18 As she reminds us, feminist, queer, and decolonial methodologies have long taught us to “press at the limits” of the archive to “inoculate our scholarship against our evidence’s afflictions.”19 The concern that the evidence we draw on in our analysis reproduces the very structures and blind spots of the dominant ideology and therefore shapes and delimits our interpretation becomes particularly urgent when engaging the developmentalist media corpus. Informed speculation offers an alternative by inviting the experimental, creative, and speculative rewriting of history, mobilizing the archive “in a project that runs counter to the original purpose, or the imperative to preserve, or the conditions that led to erasure.”20 Yet, as Field cautions, such speculative gestures must remain grounded in a deep and “intimate familiarity with the archive” that we are working with and against. Building on this imperative, we suggest that the developmentalist archive, in particular, demands expansion and critical reconsideration in ways that unsettle the very disciplinary frameworks through which it has been studied as well as the larger institutional contexts for such knowledge production.Our focus on The Double Day in the opening of this introduction thus foregrounds the entanglements of institutional and grassroots forces, local and international contexts, structural and interpersonal relations, and creative and economic factors that have shaped not only this film but the broader ecosystem of development media projects—and their preservation—over time. Addressing such a constellation involves transgressing methodologically entrenched divisions between political economy and aesthetics, between material infrastructures and affective regimes; reckoning with divergent periodizations across film history and world economics; and situating these within the local specificities of women’s movements and international institutional programs. It also demands attentiveness to the coexistence of multiple, and sometimes competing, understandings of development—each historically, geographically, and ideologically situated.We imagine this special issue as an opening toward a critical dialogue, not only about how such an approach might be enacted in practice but also about the far-reaching ways development paradigms have shaped both our objects of study and the contours of the field itself. The decision to center institutionally sponsored films across all the essays in this issue is deliberate and enables us to highlight institutional critique as a vital methodological imperative within our analytical framework. Created within the frameworks of international organizations, state agencies, or NGOs, these films’ histories make legible the institutional logics that underwrite their production. Yet our critique does not stop at these specific entities. Rather, we argue for a broader interrogation of the political conditions and institutional infrastructures that shape media and knowledge production more generally. This includes contemporary corporations embedded in the digital platform economy, from streaming services to the rapid expansion of AI. Equally critical is a reflexive examination of academia itself, where departments of economics, political science, and centers for development have played a formative role in producing and legitimizing developmentalist theories and policy frameworks. While the humanities and arts have at times offered critical alternatives, they have also frequently mirrored and reinforced many of the same developmentalist assumptions. A feminist analysis of the nexus between development and media must therefore unsettle not only dominant archives but also the institutional and disciplinary foundations of our own scholarly practices.As scholars, we share the complex position of navigating the same tensions between institutional complicity and emancipatory aspiration as many of the media-makers whose work we study. Mirroring our subjects is also the transnational, collective mode of this special issue’s own production as it emerges from an ongoing informal working group we have sustained over several years. While relying on institutional and disciplinary affordances—such as university funding for conferences or access to academic publishing platforms—we have been working toward creating a community that exceeds, and often resists, the prevailing logics of our academic institutions. Our aim has been to create a space for shared inquiry and mutual support that pushes back against disciplinary siloing and technocratic neoliberal assessment modes of both labor and knowledge production—and this certainly extends to our experience collaborating with the journal editors throughout the publication process. Our goal has been to examine both the persistence and variability of developmentalism, understood as what Gustavo Esteva calls a “powerful but fragile semantic constellation,” as a conceptual formation that has historically inspired, legitimized, and mobilized media projects across Asia, Africa, and Latin America.21 And gendered biopolitics, from population control to gender mainstreaming, have remained integral to development policies and media practices, recurring across formats from institutional newsreels to film festivals.We share the conviction that, far beyond the history of nonfiction institutional media, development (as both a broad ideological project and a network of material and institutional practices) and developmentalism (as a set of discourses and theoretical models associated with development) have exerted a far-reaching influence on film and media cultures at large. As such, they must be treated as a major force in shaping global film and media systems and also the many ongoing assumptions behind their critical discourses. The discipline of communication studies was founded on modernization theory governed by Cold War goals of dissemination of Western liberal democracy around the world, while “an area studies framework allowed compartmentalizing Western and non-Western outcomes of technologies that were always claimed to be universal.”22 Despite critique from postcolonial and critical race studies, many of these frameworks have remained foundational for media theory.23 In historical scholarship, as we increasingly move beyond “modernity” as a dominant conceptual anchor, engaging with practices and discourses of development opens more precise analytical pathways. These film and media’s entanglements with the logics of and economic and the associated with as well as their conceptual underdevelopment, and impact in as diverse as and of media aesthetic and paradigms in film and film and funding are developmentalist assumptions to the they to underwrite the narrative and logics of and global media from the structure of the film to the cultures of argue that a examination of the historical entanglements between film and developmentalist aesthetics, modes of as well as infrastructures and critical the and that our contemporary media is a of the historical contours of development as a field of inquiry embedded within a of some of the methodologies by the featured in this special a of this complex history, to the larger at in media, development, and gender all its development a it as an of be with practices as divergent as and in In as we work on this the of the of the USAID the ideological that have the history of international the and of this on the global its a from development as a global practice and as an institutional and which over the has as a with its own media Yet or does not erase the historical impact of these the contradictions they have reflected and over the as the of development several crucial to the economic theories of development initiatives to and through the of the development an international policy framework at from the Global to the of the Global the by the political role of and the of the International the on was challenged by dependency theory and at development as global structural the neoliberal of the the Programs by the and World imposed and as conditions for and forms of assistance became known as the major markers for international development development has moving beyond economic to such as the Human Development and the Development and from international organizations such as the United Nations to a broader network of These frameworks increasingly of and liberal of and with what in many ways to various while the of the to development’s epistemological more scholarship has toward a of its and material the field has to a of and critical by and scholars, which development as a dynamic of conceptual and political to these the studies in this special issue call for sustained analysis in place of In we draw from a of and that in of of gender and to this special issue engage that and from Mexico to contemporary specific local historical of global distinctly feminist methodologies as well as attention to studies that this issue a in the global history of development on and documentary work in Mexico how early women infrastructures as of while US films an early of state and transnational on a outside the Global as the of developmentalist both the and markers of development media, its to the and Latin central grounded in archival also women’s in transnational and the methodological of archives on study of the series to a a digital media not by but by women not as but as subjects and within circuits of neoliberal and the aesthetics and of how development’s has models of to contemporary neoliberal paradigms of and analysis how digital and gender and practices, discourses on and their of these essays the of some of the historical of developmentalist as the question of the role of the state within such on a notion of economic as a and the dominant of development that the state as the for and through infrastructural projects. This understanding of development was shared across both of the as well as in the Third The United and the increasingly mobilized international in the of the modes of international at the postcolonial of policy and ideological These programs were at the expansion of their and of while with the and decolonial of The conceptual between modernization and development that the Cold in of and hierarchies of that long and As an of postcolonial their role as of international aid concern about the of Western development projects. In alternative across the Global South that to structural between and through policies of and In many they were further the global structures. In Latin for example, this approach was through organizations such as the United Nations for Latin and the both developmentalist projects and their have taken many forms historically, and they have and they have been to a of projects, and postcolonial and development has been and in ways and with frequently political While many of these alternative frameworks the embedded in dominant Western they often technocratic and assumptions. gender and gender as for the of to be shaped by This becomes particularly in the media that of development where women frequently a crucial associated with and women were as both the subjects and of their participation in the and labor often as the index of In this study of from the 1970s how women were as of this as these about women’s urban and recurring and of a within the own of and critique that official examination of archives and enables a feminist interrogation of their mobilizing a of the in the of contribution to this issue similarly the of a dynamic within as well as across ideological the of women’s and the media of the and as active in labor and as integral to the technocratic women became of as their labor remained a of and analysis and archival with attention to the specific of and It also transnational that as a and affective a nexus of and practices through which gender, media, and developmentalism one film not as a but as part of the of alongside and work a broader concern of this special media as a of developmentalist projects. The debates the World and which international such as the United Nations and a critical historical for such primarily by postcolonial and of the for the of media and communication infrastructures in as to counter Western The a between and economic how systems of media and reinforced global hierarchies of and in an agenda that supported and alternative media infrastructures across postcolonial contexts, the framework gender as an analytical This “gender in the 1970s by of the Women in Development in relation to The Double its political critique of with its broader to center women in development policy through and This was also in of media, which was shaped by its international reach and audiovisual production and and and Yet, as WID institutional it also to the and of the women’s development programs often by in These were by a of studies, and on and the to of women’s presence and through the of their economic and In this on the filmmaker this history directly by the and of for women by the WID framework during the with and agencies the of and against Women in at the of the neoliberal turn, when institutional media often the only to access and support to projects. The an by this dynamic as of the from the Global South are to engage with the developmentalist assumptions funding models that their similarly the as a in developmentalist media history by the of and centers on the Film a between of and the attention toward the and labor by and work was foundational the of and the of audiovisual aid, as both a of development projects and a critical for their the in this issue argue for a with media, gender, and developmentalism as an field of that is and shaped by feminist and methodologies and that challenge the entanglements between academic knowledge production and and technocratic development And while methodological these dynamics at the structural the of feminist in media and cinema by this the very a