Viva Culture Machine!: Latin American Mediations

We are pleased to announce the latest issue of the open access journal Culture Machine <http://www.culturemachine.net> titled VIVA CULTURE MACHINE!: LATIN AMERICAN MEDIATIONS, edited by Gabriela Méndez Cota. For more details about the issue and the journal please see below.

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CULTURE MACHINE 15 (2014)
http://www.culturemachine.net/index.php/cm/issue/current

VIVA CULTURE MACHINE!: LATIN AMERICAN MEDIATIONS
edited by Gabriela Méndez Cota

In her 2013 book The Posthuman, Rosi Braidotti complains about critical thought ‘after the great explosion of theoretical creativity of the 1970s and 1980s’: it was as if ‘we had entered a zombified landscape of repetition without difference’, she writes. And no doubt poststructuralist theory did in certain hands become another orthodoxy. Yet given the degree of emphasis currently being placed on monistic, realist, object-oriented and materialist ontologies in what is perceived as the ‘cutting-edge’ critical thought of today, it is hard not to wonder: are we in danger of embarking on another journey into theoretical orthodoxy?

Sharing the frustration of Braidotti and others with the decline of so much post-Marxism, deconstruction and psychoanalysis into mere repetition without difference, Culture Machine has over the years published essays and issues on various aspects of monism, realism and materialism. Nevertheless, in an effort to ensure the journal avoids succumbing to a zombified future by doing just more of the same, we have decided to celebrate Culture Machine’s 15th anniversary by transferring much of its editorial oversight to scholars located in Mexico. By placing this bet on Mexico, we are endeavouring to force the Culture Machine journal into inventing a different, unorthodox future for itself that is at once both singular and unpredictable.

As a way of beginning the process of reinvention, for this 15th anniversary issue of the journal we have invited a number of scholars, writers, activists and artists from Latin America to provide us with a series of contaminating mediations of Culture Machine and its history. The issue is therefore designed to constitute something of a critical retrospective, both offering new contributions and inviting the readers to revisit some of the earlier work that was published in Culture Machine. This is only a first step, however. The intention for future issues is to invite increasing numbers of non-Anglo collaborators to participate in Culture Machine, in English and in Spanish (and hopefully in other languages too later on), and in this way join those in the English-speaking world in helping to generate a more distributed, decentred, multi-polar academic gift economy for the production, publication and dissemination of contemporary theory.

Contents

* Culture Machine Editorial Collective / Viva Culture Machine!

* Gabriela Méndez Cota / Fifteen Years: a Textual Celebration

* Benjamín Mayer Foulkes interviewed by Gabriela Méndez Cota / Towards the Post-University: Experimenting with Psychoanalysis and Institutions

* Stefania Haritou / Creativity in Practice

* Emilia Ismael Simental / Re: Recordings

* Nestor García Canclini and Maritza Urteaga interviewed by Emilia Ismael Simental / The Hyper-affective Turn: Thinking the Social in the Digital Age

* Euridice Cabañes and María Rubio / Arsgames: A Political Take on Videogames and Social Networking Platforms

* Benjamín Moreno interviewed by Juan Pablo Anaya / The Electronic Literature of Benjamín Moreno: Affect and Sense Outside the Conventions of the Literary

* Alberto López Cuenca / Writing Errancy: Outcasts, Capitalism and Mobility

* Beatriz Miranda / Traveling through Remembrance as Praxis with Disability Baggage

* Vivian Abenshushan interviewed by Gabriela Méndez Cota / The No-Work Paradox

* Etelvina Bernal Méndez / The Flood Is Elsewhere

* Néstor Braunstein / Economics (and) the Politics of Attention

* Francisco Vergara Silva / Universal Bio-cosmopolitics, Or the Perspectivism of Canine Life

* Gabriela Méndez Cota / Digital Humanities: Whose Changes Do You Want to Save?