Aris Mousoutzanis

This collection of essays examines the relationship between the media and cosmopolitanism in an increasingly fragmented and globalizing world. This relationship is presented from multiple perspectives and the essays cover, amongst other themes, cosmopolitanization in everyday life, the mediation of suffering, trauma studies, and researching cosmopolitanism from a non-Western perspective.
Some of the essays explore existing research and theory about cosmopolitanism and apply it to specific case studies; others attempt to extend this theoretical framework and engage in a dialogue with the broader disciplines of media and cultural studies. Overall, this variety of approaches generates valuable insights into the central issue of the book: the role played by the media, in its various forms, in either encouraging or discouraging cosmopolitanist identifications among its audiences.

H.G. Wells wanted his epitaph to be 'God damn you all, I told you so'. But how accurate were his predictions of industrial warfare and global conflict, especially as his descriptions of an aerial bombing of New York in War in the Air has been compared to the terrorist attacks of 9/11? Did the late Victorians really 'discover the future' or did the 1990s simply recycle the 1890s? At the aftermath of 2012, this book is 'looking backward' and identifies startling connections between the apocalyptic fantasies of the last two centuries' ends and traces intriguing links between Nietzsche and chaos theory, Dracula and The X-Files, the Borg Queen and H. Rider Haggard's Ayesha, among others.

The monograph provides a comparative approach to the apocalyptic culture of the last two centuries’ ends, thus following and extending a critical trend to compare centuries’ ends that emerged in the Humanities during the 1990s. Most of these critical approaches, however, are predominantly descriptive accounts of similarities between the two periods under consideration. Instead, this book argues for the need of a more analytic approach, one that will situate any similarities within a specific argument that will account for the usefulness of such a theoretical attempt in the first place. From this perspective, a comparative investigation of the last two centuries’ ends is productive insofar as it demonstrates the ways in which contemporary discourses of science, technology, and empire got entangled with each other. Resting on the founding argument that apocalyptic fears tend to emerge in periods of transition, the thesis demonstrates that the apocalyptic culture of the two periods may...

This paper approaches the widening interest in trauma and disaster in academic research, popular fictions, and media culture during the last few decades in relation to two contemporary developments: the arrival of the information revolution and the emergence of the ‘new media’, on the one hand, and the emergence of discourses of globalisation, on the other. It demonstrates the ways in which trauma has always been implicated in technological formations since its earliest theorisations and illustrates the ways in which it has been seen as a concept to encapsulate the experience of ‘postmodern media culture’, in relation to two arguments: first, that the experience of the new media resembles the structure and temporality of trauma; second, that the new media are now the major site in which trauma is represented, witnessed, or even rendered as traumatic in the first place. Specifically, the paper will discuss the equivalences between trauma and the two definitions of ‘mediation’, as inf...

This chapter reads William Gibson’s Pattern Recognition as an exemplary text of an increasing entanglement of discourses of apocalypse and globalization: on the one hand, apocalyptic fictions rely on ideas of global networking and interconnectedness in order to portray some actual or impending catastrophe attributable to connectivity of bodies, machines, or events, whereas, on the other, globalization has been theorized in terms of a series of “ends” (of imperialism, the nation state, etc.). Pattern Recognition is read as an apocalyptic text in three senses: in its status as a narrative of “psychological singularity,” in its preoccupation with individual and cultural trauma, and as a “liminal” text between two centuries and two political realities—that of the Cold War and of globalization.

This article discusses the BBC drama Taboo (2017–present) as a contemporary example of imperial Gothic and places the series in the context of a current trend of ‘imperial nostalgia’ in British culture. It provides a close reading of the series with regard to its use of gothic traits like the exploration of morbid psychology, the function of the ghost as a metaphor for past trauma, the use of locale for gothic effect, and the evocation of body horror. By reading this contemporary narrative against this generic tradition, the paper highlights the ability of the Gothic to reflect on historical transformations and contemporary manifestations of discourses of Empire. The series, the discussion argues, seeks to critique Empire by portraying it as the agent of monstrosity and horror but eventually reproduces stereotypes of colonial otherness that were fundamental to imperialist ideologies. In this sense, Taboo is a text just as ambivalent as earlier imperial Gothic texts.

Harris Breslow and Aris Mousoutzanis: Introduction The Nature of Cyberspace Gary Thompson: Electronic Kairos Scott Sundvall: Post-Human, All too Non-Human: Implications of the Cyber-Rhizome Prosthetic Subjectivity Daniel Riha: Machinima, Creative Software and Education for Creativity Fredrik Gundelsweiler and Christian Filk: Future Media Platforms for Convergence Journalisms Judith Guevarra Enriquez: Bodily Aware in Cyber-Research Cybercultures and the Public Sphere Jernej Prodnik: Post-Fordist Communities and Cyberspace: A Critical Approach Harris Breslow and Ilhem Allagui: The Internet, Fixity, and Flow: Challenges to the Articulation of an Imagined Community Fidele Vlavo: 'Click Here to Protest': Electronic Civil Disobedience and the Imaginaire of Virtual Activism Mediatisation of Memory Heiko Zimmermann: Diverging Strategies of Remembrance in Traditional and Web-2.0 On-Line Projects Martin Pogacar: Music Blogging: Saving Yugoslav Popular Music

This collection of essays examines the relationship between the media and cosmopolitanism in an increasingly fragmented and globalizing world. This relationship is presented from multiple perspectives and the essays cover, amongst other themes, cosmopolitanization in everyday life, the mediation of suffering, trauma studies, and researching cosmopolitanism from a non-Western perspective. Some of the essays explore existing research and theory about cosmopolitanism and apply it to specific case studies; others attempt to extend this theoretical framework and engage in a dialogue with the broader disciplines of media and cultural studies. Overall, this variety of approaches generates valuable insights into the central issue of the book: the role played by the media, in its various forms, in either encouraging or discouraging cosmopolitanist identifications among its audiences.

The world is nearly all parcelled out, and what there is left of it, is being divided up, conquered and colonised. To think of these stars that you see overhead at night, these vast worlds which we can never reach. I would annex the planets if I could; I often think of that. It makes me sad to see them so clear and yet sofar. Cecil Rhodes, Last Will and Testament (1902; cited in Hardt and Negri 2000: 221) We used to think that our fate is in the stars. Now we know that, in large measure, our fate is in our genes. James Watson (1996; cited in Jaroff 1996: 29) Set in a future dystopian society where humans are bio-engineered and genetics has become the major determinant of one’s identity, Andrew Niccol’s Gattaca (1997) follows the story of ‘in-valid’ Vincent Freeman (Ethan Hawke), a naturally born human with genetic deficiencies. The film shows Vincent’s attempts tofit in a society which discriminates against people with a defective genetic make-up, described as ‘genoism’: Vincent can...

The article urges for further attention to representations of childhood in (post-)apocalyptic fictions from the perspective of biopolitical theory, by focusing on two recent television series, Utopia (UK, Channel 4, 2013-15) and The 100 (US, The CW, 2014-present). The apocalypse is discussed as a quintessentially biopolitical narrative about the extinction or survival of humanity. Representations of children as the future of the species are seen as indebted to developmental discourses permeated by biopower. Accordingly, the ‘end’ is staged as the disruption of these discourses that construct childhood as a stage that leads from innocence to experience, from vulnerability to security and from recklessness to maturity.

This paper approaches the widening interest in trauma and disaster in academic research, popular fictions, and media culture during the last few decades in relation to two contemporary developments: the arrival of the information revolution and the emergence of the ‘new media’, on the one hand, and the emergence of discourses of globalisation, on the other. It demonstrates the ways in which trauma has always been implicated in technological formations since its earliest theorisations and illustrates the ways in which it has been seen as a concept to encapsulate the experience of ‘postmodern media culture’, in relation to two arguments: first, that the experience of the new media resembles the structure and temporality of trauma; second, that the new media are now the major site in which trauma is represented, witnessed, or even rendered as traumatic in the first place. Specifically, the paper will discuss the equivalences between trauma and the two definitions of ‘mediation’, as infiltration and communication/transmissibility. Discussion of the first definition will lead to an examination of the ethics of representation of disaster in ‘media events’, whereas the discussion of the second will lead to an analysis of the ways in which globalisation has been increasing associated with disaster and trauma, in two senses: a material sense, whereby globalisation is increasingly seen as responsible for natural and human-made disasters; and a conceptual sense, whereby globalisation is often theorised with metaphors of crisis, apocalypse, and trauma. The paper will conclude with an examination of the ethics behind this general theoretical tendency to turn into a methodological tool a concept that is essentially about human suffering.

“Enslaved by Time and Space”: Determinism, Traumatic Temporality, and Global Interconnectedness Aris Mousoutzanis There is a scene in an episode from season three of Lost,“Not in Portland” (3.7), where, while trying to escape from the Hydra Island, Jack and Kate are led ...

An earlier example of the recent resurgence of apocalyptic speculation on the year 2012 may be found in the late 1980s, when Lewis Shiner made use of the myths surrounding the Mayan calendar in Deserted Cities of the Heart (1988), a novel that follows Thomas and Lindsey in their search for Eddie — Thomas’s brother and Lindsey’s husband — who disappeared years ago in the Mexican jungles. The plot eventually brings all the main characters to the Mayacn ruins of Na Chan, where they get involved in conflicts between Mexican revolutionaries and secret government military groups. Throughout the novel, Shiner creates a sense of impending doom by presenting contemporary political events as fulfilments of ancient prophecies on the end of the five-thousand-year ‘big circle’ of the Mayan calendar. The battles in the jungle include imagery reminiscent of the last days of the Mayan empire, even as they are associated with the Vietnam war and Reaganite politics of the eighties — the private army ...

Even if ‘the year 2000 did not take place’, as Baudrillard would have it, the post-millennial era has witnessed an increasing proliferation of images and narratives of apocalypse, disaster and trauma in literature, film and television. In its ability to be ‘disconfirmed without being discredited’ (Kermode 1967: 8), the End was projected to the next apocalyptic date, the year 2012, that served as material for genre fictions like Dan Brown’s The Lost Symbol (2009), blockbuster movies like Roland Emmerich’s 2012 (2009), or films from European art cinema like Lars von Trier’s Melancholia (2011). This latest recursion of the apocalyptic discourse, however, was coupled with an increasing sense that the apocalypse has already happened and we are ‘living in the end times’, to borrow the title of Slavoj Žižek’s book that begins with his suggestion that ‘the global capitalist system is approaching an apocalyptic zero-point’ whose ‘four riders’ are ‘the ecological crisis, the consequences of t...

The definition thus colonises the cinematic for US culture and seems to obviate the possibility of a non-American cinematic aesthetic. If previous understandings of the cinematic have been problematically vague, this one is surely limiting in its specificity. Despite this, the book is both a riveting analysis of an important television series and a substantial development in the debate on cinematic aesthetics.

In January 1987, French President FranA§ois Mitterand inaugurated the Genitron at the Centre Georges Pompidou in Paris, a digital clock counting the seconds left until the year 2000. This clock was seen by Elaine Showalter as symbolic of the impact of saecula such as that of a ‘century’ and a ‘decade’ on the apocalyptic imagination: The crises of the fin de siecle … are more intensely experienced, more emotionally fraught, more weighted with symbolic and historical meaning, because we invest them with the metaphors of death and rebirth that we project onto the final decades and years of a century.(1991: 1)

A superpower bombing a desolate desert country, and, at the same time, hostage to invisible bacteria — this, not the WTC explosions, is the first image of twenty-first-century warfare. Slavoj Zižek, Welcome to the Desert of the Real (2002: 37) But there are no bacteria in Mars, and directly those invaders arrived, directly they drank and fed, our microscopic allies began to work their overthrow. H.G. Wells, The War of the Worlds (1897: 311) Towards the end of Greg Bear’s Blood Music (1985), Suzy McKenzie is climbing the stairs of the World Trade Centre over a New York covered by a sea of brown blanket material created by ‘noocytes’ — artificially-constructed sentient micro-organisms that have transformed the population of Earth into a post-human state of existence. Apparently the only survivor in North America who has not undergone this transformation, Suzy observes as she climbs up the World Trade Centre: The north tower stood alone. The other tower had been dismantled. All that re...

There has been a trend for introductory texts on science fiction (SF) criticism to start by announcing that SF is now an increasingly respected genre within academia, with its own canonical texts, major scholars, historical traditions, and theoretical perspectives. An increasing influx of publications, conferences, academic courses at both undergraduate and postgraduate level, doctorate dissertations, and annual awards would seem to testify to this claim. Even further indications of the recognition of the genre’s respectability, the argument goes, lies in the fact that “mainstream” authors now adopt motifs and conventions of the genre within their own writing, when not embracing it wholeheartedly, including Margaret Atwood, Salman Rushdie, and Kazuo Ishiguro, to name a few. But it is now time to move beyond this approach to introducing SF that, even unconsciously, reproduces dominant assumptions about cultural value, generic integrity, and canon formation that encourage an almost ap...

Critical discussions on fictions of the 'double' tend to follow theoretical trajectories that rely on theories such as psychoanalysis and Freud's concept of the uncanny, postmodern theory and Baudrillard's concept of the simulacrum, or on cultural theories of identity and representation that view the double as a metaphor for the marginalised Other. This paper seeks to complement these approaches by urging for more critical attention to theories of biopower and biopolitics in the above field. Biopolitical theory mainly originates in the work of French philosopher Michel Foucault, but it has also been developed further by theorists such as Giorgio Agamben, Judith Butler, Nikolas Rose, Roberto Esposito, Antonio Negri and Michael Hardt, among others. Foucault's work initiates a theory of political governance that explores the historical transmutation of power during modernity, from a mode of power exercised through repression, coercion, violence and fear of death to one exerted through monitoring, management and optimisation of health and life itself. At first, it may seem inappropriate to introduce this theory in readings of fictions about mechanical life, about technology rather than biology. But Foucault's work itself illuminates the relevance since, as I outline below, he underscores the extent to which the human body itself is perceived as a machine to be designed, regulated and optimised within biopolitical discourses. Relying on his theory, this paper explores the ways in which these imaginary creatures may be read as metaphors for 1

This article discusses the BBC drama Taboo (2017-present) as a contemporary example of imperial Gothic and places the series in the context of a current trend of ‘imperial nostalgia’ in British culture. It provides a close reading of the series with regard to its use of gothic traits like the exploration of morbid psychology, the function of the ghost as a metaphor for past trauma, the use of locale for gothic effect, and the evocation of body horror. By reading this contemporary narrative against this generic tradition, the paper highlights the ability of the Gothic to reflect on historical transformations and contemporary manifestations of discourses of Empire. The series, the discussion argues, seeks to critique Empire by portraying it as the agent of monstrosity and horror but eventually reproduces stereotypes of colonial otherness that were fundamental to imperialist ideologies. In this sense, Taboo is a text just as ambivalent as earlier imperial Gothic texts.

This paper applies theories of biopolitics and biopower within the discipline of utopian studies. The paper concentrates on the ways in which theorizsations of biopower expose the mechanics of utopian discourses, formations, practices, and texts. During modernity, utopianism demonstrated an increasing preoccupation with issues and concerns pertinent to biopolitical governance through disciplining bodies. The topos of utopia became less a territorial space and more a corporeal space, in a shift of focus within utopianism from outer space to inner space, from geopolitics to biopolitics. Such a shift renders biopolitical theory indispensable to utopian studies. The relations between utopianism and biopower are explored through a reading of Dennis Kelly’s TV series, Utopia (Channel 4, 2013-2015) and the focus is specifically on the ways in which representations of race are determined by biopolitical discourses.

The article urges for further attention to representations of childhood in (post-)apocalyptic fictions from the perspective of biopolitical theory, by focusing on two recent television series, Utopia (UK, Channel 4, 2013-15) and The 100 (US, The CW, 2014-present). The apocalypse is discussed as a quintessentially biopolitical narrative about the extinction or survival of humanity. Representations of children as the future of the species are seen as indebted to developmental discourses permeated by biopower. Accordingly, the ‘end’ is staged as the disruption of these discourses that construct childhood as a stage that leads from innocence to experience, from vulnerability to security and from recklessness to maturity.

The paper suggests that the increasing proliferation of network fictions in literature, film, television and the internet may be interpreted through a theoretical framework that reconceptuallises the originally strictly
psychoanalytic concept of the Unheimlich (Freud’s idea of the ‘unhomely’ or ‘uncanny’) within the context of political, economic and cultural disources fo globalisation. ‘Network fictions’ are those texts consisting of multiple interlocking narratives set in various times and places that explore the interconnections of characters and events across different storylines: novels such as William Gibson’s Pattern Recognition (2003), Hari Kunzro’s Transmission (2005) and Gods Without Men (2011), David Mitchell’s Cloud Atlas (2004), or Rana Dasgupta’s Tokyo Cancelled (2005) are some examples. My argument is that central to these fictions is a sense of a ‘global unhomely’. The sense of displacement, unhomeliness and global mobility that is conveyed in these fictions is fundamental to the experience of the Unheimlich. In addition, the ability of the concept to convey a combined sense of the familiar and the strange is useful in exploring the ways in which these fictions engage with theoretical debates on globalisation that perceive the interaction between global flows and local cultures either in terms of homogenisation and uniformity or of heterogenisation
and hybridity. Moreover, the repetitive temporality of the Unheimlich is another distinctive aspect that allows a reading of the disjunctive, non-linear temporal structure of these fictions from this perspective. The
‘repetition compulsion’, however, that Freud considered to be an example of uncanniness was also theorised by him as a post-traumatic symptom, and this implicit association of uncanniness with post-traumatic experience also allows to interpret the persistent preoccupation of these fictions with suffering and disaster, as well as their explorations of the ways in which collective tragedy and personal trauma reverberate within an increasingly globalised, interconnected world.

This paper approaches the widening interest in trauma and disaster in academic research, popular fictions, and media culture during the last few decades in relation to two contemporary developments: the arrival of the information revolution and the emergence of the ‘new media’, on the one hand, and the emergence of discourses of globalisation, on the other.  It demonstrates the ways in which trauma has always been implicated in technological formations since its earliest theorisations and illustrates the ways in which it has been seen as a concept to encapsulate the experience of ‘postmodern media culture’, in relation to two arguments: first, that the experience of the new media resembles the structure and temporality of trauma; second, that the new media are now the major site in which trauma is represented, witnessed, or even rendered as traumatic in the first place.  Specifically, the paper will discuss the equivalences between trauma and the two definitions of ‘mediation’, as infiltration and communication/transmissibility.  Discussion of the first definition will lead to an examination of the ethics of representation of disaster in ‘media events’, whereas the discussion of the second will lead to an analysis of the ways in which globalisation has been increasing associated with disaster and trauma, in two senses: a material sense, whereby globalisation is increasingly seen as responsible for natural and human-made disasters; and a conceptual sense, whereby globalisation is often theorised with metaphors of crisis, apocalypse, and trauma.  The paper concludes with an examination of the ethics behind this general theoretical tendency to turn into a methodological tool a concept that is essentially about human suffering.

This chapter reads William Gibson’s Pattern Recognition (2003) as an exemplary text of an increasing entanglement of discourses of apocalypse and globalization: on the one hand, apocalyptic fictions rely on ideas of global networking and interconnectedness in order to portray some actual or impending catastrophe due to connectivity of bodies, machines, events, whereas on the other, globalization has been both theorized in terms of a series of “ends” (of imperialism, the nation state, etc.). Pattern Recognition is read as an apocalyptic text in three senses: in its status as a narrative of “psychological singularity,” in its preoccupation with individual and cultural trauma, and as a “liminal” text between two centuries and two political realities – that of the Cold War and of globalization.

Paul Auster’s New York Trilogy was published at a time when the trend to “theory” was at its peak in the Humanities and early critical reception of this work followed prevalent theoretical approaches of the time, most notably poststructuralism and deconstruction. And yet, the text was also part of its cultural moment in another sense. The first volume of Auster’s trilogy, “City of Glass” (1985), was published only five years after the addition of the term “post-traumatic stress disorder” in the third edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual for Mental Disorders (DSM-III) of the American Psychiatric Association. The inclusion of the entry is often considered a turning point in the emergence of a “trauma culture” (Kaplan) or even a “trauma paradigm” (Luckhurst), because it led to a series of debates among psychiatric communities on the authenticity of traumatic memories that are now sometimes referred to as the “memory wars” of the 1990s. Memory, however, is a major topic that Auster began exploring in his work at roughly the same period that saw the gradual emergence of these tensions within these communities – a topic that has received more critical attention in Auster scholarship than that of trauma, probably because Auster demonstrated a more over interest in it since as early as the “Book of Memory” section of his previous work, The Invention of Solitude (1982). And whereas there are already discussions that explore the theme of trauma throughout Auster’s work (such as Debra Shostak’s “In the Country of Missing Persons,” for instance), this article seeks to focus on the ways in which this theme originates in Auster’s first major literary work in ways that affect not only the text’s themes but also its form and structure. More specifically, it revists two earlier major theoretical approaches to Auster’s text from the perspective of trauma theory: first, the psychoanalytic interpretations that have discussed the work from the perspective of Sigmund Freud’s theory of the uncanny; and second, the approach to Auster’s excursions to metafictionality with regard to structuralist narrative theory. These two approaches are be brought together through a focus on the significance of trauma in Auster’s text.

This paper will suggest that more critical attention is needed to the writings of Michel Foucault within utopian studies. Foucault’s work, it will be argued, is exemplary for discussions of utopianism due to its major preoccupation with the relationship between space and power. This preoccupation is more obvious in major ideas of his philosophy, such as panopticism and heterotopia, but this paper will concentrate instead on the ways in which his theorisations of ‘biopower’ are useful for an examination of utopian discourses, practices, and narratives. There is a striking absence of attention to the relations between biopower and utopia in both utopian studies and Foucault studies. And yet, there is a complex set of relations and historical continuities in the trajectories of utopianism and biopower throughout modernity. My discussion will explore these relations and continuities by concentrating on Dennis Kelly’s TV series, Utopia (Channel 4, 2013-5). The significance of biopower in the show is obvious in its main plot, which follows the adventures of a group of fans of the cult graphic novel ‘The Utopia Experiment’, after they realise that its vision of a viral apocalypse caused by the ‘Janus’ virus that sterilises the majority of the human population is indeed the plan of a real-life conspiracy aiming at dealing with overpopulation. The show’s preoccupation with the management of epidemics, the weaponisation of disease and population management is accompanied by an engagement with further biopolitical issues and concerns, such as infertility and artificial insemination, physical torture and corporeal violence, psychological shock and childhood trauma. The physical and psychological violence on children that recurs throughout the series in specific and their portrayal as ‘genetic containers’ of the future will be seen within the context of the biopolitical paradigm that prevails in the show and in relation to what Nick Lee (2001) has called the ‘developmental state’ that sees children as ‘human futures’ (Lee and Motzkau 2011: 10). Furthermore, the show’s questions regarding the survival of the human race-as-species also explores issues regarding the future of races-as-ethnic groups, particularly during its second season. This season includes a narrative thread concentrating on whether the creator of Janus designed the virus so that it would target or protect one specific race. In this plot detail, Utopia directly engages with a ‘new biopolitics of race’ (Rose 2007) that has emerged since the turn of the twenty-first century. This is a renewed scientific racialism that has survived earlier theorisations that have proven that race is a social construct that is not scientifically viable. Under this biopolitical regime, race is again a scientific fact, a biological entity that, in the show’s universe, can be directly targeted and eradicated. In this respect, Utopia may be seen as a popular fiction that demonstrates the ways in which popular fictions of apocalypse, utopia, or dystopia can reflect on, engage with, and respond to contemporary biopolitical discourses, formations and practices.

This paper will suggest that more critical attention is needed to the writings of Michel Foucault within utopian studies. Foucault’s work, it will be argued, is exemplary for discussions of utopianism due to its major preoccupation with the relationship between space and power. This preoccupation is more obvious in major ideas of his philosophy, such as panopticism and heterotopia, but this paper will concentrate instead on the ways in which his theorisations of ‘biopower’ are useful for an examination of utopian discourses, practices, and narratives. There is a striking absence of attention to the relations between biopower and utopia in both utopian studies and Foucault studies. And yet, there is a complex set of relations and historical continuities in the trajectories of utopianism and biopower throughout modernity. My discussion will explore these relations and continuities by concentrating on Dennis Kelly’s TV series, Utopia (Channel 4, 2013-5). The significance of biopower in the show is obvious in its main plot, which follows the adventures of a group of fans of the cult graphic novel ‘The Utopia Experiment’, after they realise that its vision of a viral apocalypse caused by the ‘Janus’ virus that sterilises the majority of the human population is indeed the plan of a real-life conspiracy aiming at dealing with overpopulation. The show’s preoccupation with the management of epidemics, the weaponisation of disease and population management is accompanied by an engagement with further biopolitical issues and concerns, such as infertility and artificial insemination, physical torture and corporeal violence, psychological shock and childhood trauma. The physical and psychological violence on children that recurs throughout the series in specific and their portrayal as ‘genetic containers’ of the future will be seen within the context of the biopolitical paradigm that prevails in the show and in relation to what Nick Lee (2001) has called the ‘developmental state’ that sees children as ‘human futures’ (Lee and Motzkau 2011: 10). Furthermore, the show’s questions regarding the survival of the human race-as-species also explores issues regarding the future of races-as-ethnic groups, particularly during its second season. This season includes a narrative thread concentrating on whether the creator of Janus designed the virus so that it would target or protect one specific race. In this plot detail, Utopia directly engages with a ‘new biopolitics of race’ (Rose 2007) that has emerged since the turn of the twenty-first century. This is a renewed scientific racialism that has survived earlier theorisations that have proven that race is a social construct that is not scientifically viable. Under this biopolitical regime, race is again a scientific fact, a biological entity that, in the show’s universe, can be directly targeted and eradicated. In this respect, Utopia may be seen as a popular fiction that demonstrates the ways in which popular fictions of apocalypse, utopia, or dystopia can reflect on, engage with, and respond to contemporary biopolitical discourses, formations and practices.

One of the most distinctive features of 21st-century fictions of apocalyptic speculation is their preoccupation with a perceived crisis of global capitalism, a trend that has been emerging gradually during the last twenty years that have witnessed the production of a series of 'narratives of interconnectedness' in fiction, film and television. These fictions are discussed in this paper in relation to theorisations that emphasise the importance of networking, interconnectedness and 'connexity' for globalisation. More specifically, the paper will address a dialectic between fictions of apocalypse that have relied on the paradigm of the global network for the articulation of contemporary anxieties and theoretical discussions that have relied on a terminology of disaster, crisis and trauma in order to theorise globalisation

This paper suggests that theoretical approaches to the subgenre of body horror need to focus more on the writings of Michel Foucault, and specifically on his discussions on the emergence of what he terms ‘biopower’ during the period of modernity – a more internalised, sophisticated form of power exercised not under the threat of punishment and death but in the name of life itself, its preservation, monitoring and manipulation through ‘numerous and diverse techniques for achieving the subjugation of bodies and the control of populations’ (Foucault 1978: 140) such as policies of intervention in birth rates, cases of morbidity, madness and disease, measures to co-ordinate medical care and mechanisms of insurance, amongst others. The origins of body horror may be identified in that cultural moment that has been seen by Foucault as formative to the emergence of modern biopower: the late nineteenth century, a period during which the proliferation of biopolitical discourses of evolutionism, degeneration and eugenics was accompanied by the emergence of popular fictions betraying anxieties related to these discourses, identified in the revival of the Gothic, whose distinctive features in relation to earlier stages of the genre included a focus on bodily transmutations and hybridization for the production of the Gothic effect. The emergence and popularity of body horror from the late 1970s onwards, the paper argues, may be attributed to its ability to articulate anxieties about the status of the human body at the proliferation of biopolitical discourses and practices in the postwar West, such as: the emergence of molecular biology at the decoding of the human DNA and the conceptualization of the human body as an information system that can be decoded and re-encoded at will in the 1950s; the concerns of the “new biology” in the sixties, such as in-vitro fertilization, abortion, contraception and reproduction rights; relevant technoscientific developments such as cosmetic and prosthetic surgery, and an increasing preoccupation with viral outbreaks and diseases such as the AIDS epidemic, amongst others.

The paper argues that there is a dialectic relationship between body horror and Foucauldean theory, whereby popular genre and ‘high’ theory share similar interests and concerns that are reformulated in their discursive context. Classic body horror texts from film and television that are mentioned to illustrate the argument include Alien (Scott 1979), The Fly (Cronenberg 1986), The Human Centipede (Six 2009), The X-Files (1993-2002), Fringe (2008-12), American Horror Story: Asylum (2012-13)

This paper will address the increasingly self-reflexive nature of the SF film in terms of the genre’s growing preoccupation with the themes of memory and trauma. The SF film is often seen as one of the most meta-cinematic genres, in three ways: in its strong reliance on elaborate special effects for the creation of new worlds and alien creatures; in the abundance of various means of visualisation in SF films, such as scanning devices, telescopes, microscopes, and video-visions of creatures such as Robocop or the Terminator; and in an increasing proliferation of imagery of eyes, eyeballs, and glasses, which may be found in as early as the first full-length SF film, Fritz Lang’s Metropolis (1927), in classic films such as Kubrick’s 2001 (1968), and even more so in films produced from the 1980s onwards that this paper will mention or discuss: Blade Runner (1984), Total Recall (1990), The Matrix (1999), Vanilla Sky (2001), Minority Report (2002), The Final Cut (2004), and The Butterfly Effect (2006), amongst others.

This generic element, this paper will demonstrate, has become increasingly more prominent at the same time when the SF film has demonstrated a growing interest in the themes of memory and trauma, in accordance with a wider interest in these two themes that has led scholars to argue for the emergence of a ‘trauma culture’ (Kaplan 2005) or a ‘memorial mania’ (Doss 2008). Often the plot of these films revolves around a major incident or accident that disrupts the everyday life of the main character(s) and organises the overarching narrative of the film. More specifically, many of these films have followed a very similar narrative pattern according to which the everyday life of the main character is torn apart when he is confronted with an entirely new set of memories that appear to be their own. The interest in these two concepts, I will be arguing, is part of their attempt to explore the ways in which individuals and communities relate to personal experiences and memories of loss and trauma when these memories are constantly mediated by contemporary information and communication technologies. Self-reflexivity is only the effect of this thematic interest at the level of form, insofar as the processes of mediation and representation are central to core definitions of both memory and trauma. Trauma, on the one hand, has been theorised as an experience too overwhelming to register in the psyche at the moment of its occurrence, ‘a situation in which the outside goes inside without mediation’ (Matus 2001: 423) - it is for this reason that the traumatised subject compulsively tries to represent the incident in recurring nightmares and hallucinations. Memory, on the other hand, has been theorised as a process that is malleable and subject to revision, largely due to its visual nature, to the fact that memories are constantly mediated through representations, ‘regular scenes worked out in plastic form comparable only to representations on the stage’ (Freud 1899: 47). The self-reflexivity of these SF films, from this perspective, will be interpreted as part of their effort to stage the efforts of individuals to perceive, experience, witness and assimilate their experiences in a world where these experiences can only be accessed in a mediatised form.

This paper approaches the widening interest in trauma and disaster in academic research, popular fictions, and media culture during the last few decades in relation to two contemporary developments: the arrival of the information revolution and the emergence of the ‘new media’, on the one hand, and the emergence of discourses of globalisation, on the other. It demonstrates the ways in which trauma has always been implicated in technological formations since its earliest theorisations and illustrates the ways in which it has been seen as a concept to encapsulate the experience of ‘postmodern media culture’, in relation to two arguments: first, that the experience of the new media resembles the structure and temporality of trauma; second, that the new media are now the major site in which trauma is represented, witnessed, or even rendered as traumatic in the first place. Specifically, the paper will discuss the equivalences between trauma and the two definitions of ‘mediation’, as infiltration and communication/transmissibility. Discussion of the first definition will lead to an examination of the ethics of representation of disaster in ‘media events’, whereas the discussion of the second will lead to an analysis of the ways in which globalisation has been increasing associated with disaster and trauma, in two senses: a material sense, whereby globalisation is increasingly seen as responsible for natural and human-made disasters; and a conceptual sense, whereby globalisation is often theorised with metaphors of crisis, apocalypse, and trauma. The paper will conclude with an examination of the ethics behind this general theoretical tendency to turn into a methodological tool a concept that is essentially about human suffering.

The last three decades have witnessed an increasing attention to the concepts of memory and psychological trauma by psychiatric groups, academics in the humanities and social sciences, and popular media texts. The paper will focus on the ways in which the dialectic between memory and trauma has been theorised and represented with reference to concepts and terms from scientific discourses and technological formations associated with the so-called ‘Information Revolution’. Individual memories have been represented as ‘information’ that can be retrieved, accessed, commodified, transferred and implanted in recent popular sci-fi media texts whose main storyline centred on themes of memory and trauma such as The X-Files, Star Trek, Fringe and Flashfoward. The return of traumatic memories through narrative flashbacks, in particular, is staged as an ‘information overload’ that overwhelms the human subject while trying to ‘process’ and integrate it in their psyche. Other times, their plot addresses the questions of the reliability of these memories as ‘evidence’, ‘proof’ or ‘data’ to be subjected to institutional practices of archiving and analysis that will help criminal investigations, thus staging a conflict between (fluid, internalised, subjective) memory and (static, externalised, objective) information. Questions on whether these memories are genuine or fabricated retrospectively, central to psychiatric debates on the nature of traumatic memory, have been addressed by developing plotlines involving actual memory implantation – a process often presented as traumatic. In this way, these texts address questions on the relationship between memory and trauma by employing the theme of what Alison Landberg has termed ‘prosthetic memory’, thus developing themes of earlier texts, such as the cyberpunk fiction of William Gibson, and films such as Blade Runner, Total Recall and Minority Report.

This paper will examine the ways in which the ‘technologised’ representations of memory and trauma are part of a wider tendency during the modern period, and specifically from the mid-nineteenth century onwards, to theorise the human psyche with recourse to technological discourses and formations – what Jean Dupuy has discussed as ‘the mechanisation of the mind’. The discussion will follow two main theoretical trends: on the one hand, a recent tendency in German media theory by scholars such as Friedrich Kittler, Thomas Elsaesser and Andreas Huyssen, who have examined the ways in which the human psyche has been theorised as an ‘information system’ by paying attention to Sigmund Freud’s references to contemporary storage and visual technologies and Jacques Lacan’s use of cybernetics in their discussions of memory and trauma. On the other, this mode of representation will be approached from the perspective of the work of Michel Foucault, who has suggested that during the modern period the human subject has been increasingly theorised in different disciplines as a machine that can be monitored, optimised, regulated, and controlled, a process that intensified much more after the Second World War, with the emergence of information theory and cybernetics. The paper will approach the ‘technologisation’ of memory and trauma in these discourses and media representations within the context of an emerging therapy culture of monitoring and surveillance and the central place of memory, information and trauma in these popular texts as part of their attempt to represent the efforts of individuals to negotiate their sense of identity within wider social and institutional structures of power and resistance.

This paper brings together two very different areas of research that have emerged from the 1980s onwards, the so-called ‘cyborg theory’ and ‘trauma theory’. Epitomised by Donna Haraway’s ‘Manifesto for Cyborgs’, cyborg theory has been concerned with the ways in which the saturation of Western societies with information technologies has affected contemporary ideas of subjectivity, embodiment, ‘reality’ and politics of identity. Trauma theory, often represented by the work of Cathy Caruth, has been investigating the theoretical implications of trauma for ideas of representation and referentiality, memory and history, truth and narrative, particularly with regard to major events like the Holocaust, the Vietnam war, and 9/11, among others. This paper combines these two disciplines in two ways. First, it illustrates the extent to which the ‘interface’ between the biological and the technological has not been represented in popular SF narratives as either ‘subversive’ or ‘liberating’, as Haraway would have it, but mostly as traumatic. Second, it investigates the ways in which theorisations of trauma, from Freud to Lacan to contemporary psychiatry, have relied on terms and metaphors from cybernetics and other technological discourses, suggesting a model of the psyche as an information system. ‘Cybertrauma’ thus stands as a term registering a feedback loop between the discourses of cyberculture and traumaculture. As ‘trauma’ has often been theorised in relation to the concept of ‘shock’, ‘cybertrauma’ will be seen as a response to the ‘technocultural shock’ of the Information Revolution of the late twentieth century. Trauma has always been linked to technology, as its official theorisations emerged due to the proliferation of railway accidents around the mid-nineteenth century; its current interaction with discourses of cyberculture will accordingly be seen as symptomatic of an acceleration – and crisis - of technological modernity.

Early discussions of globalisation were accompanied by a utopian rhetoric promising the rise of living standards in Third World countries, the expansion of liberal democracy and free market, the shared understanding of diverse cultures, and the unlimited access to information through media technologies - a classic example would be Marshall McLuhan’s ‘global village’ of instantaneous communication and exchange among diverse cultures. However, the last three decades have witnessed an increasing association of globalisation with an apocalyptic terminology. The end of the Cold War in particular was a turning point that generated discussions such as Francis Fukuyama’s ‘end of history’ (1990), Kenichi Ohmae’s ‘end of the nation-sate’ (1995), or Antonio Negri and Michael Hardt’s proclamation of the end of imperialism and the emergence of ‘Empire’ (2000), a decentred network of power distributed across media industries, transnational corporations, and organisations of global governance. These associations were consolidated even further after 9/11, which, as the ‘inaugural trauma of the twentieth-century’, even further ‘sutured globalisation and disaster into the defining symptom of our times’ (Kalaidjian 2007: 829). By now, there have been suggestions that disaster and trauma are even the predominant ways through which global capitalism operates in itself by Naomi Klein in The Shock Doctrine (2007). And more recently, Dan Gardner has suggested in Risk (2009) that catastrophist scenarios of apocalypse and terror are the major means through which global media exercise influence and power over people around the world during what he considers the safest period in human history.

The paper will discuss the ways in which popular texts register and respond to these connections, by focusing on popular texts from fiction such as William Gibson’s Pattern Recognition (2003) and television such as J.J. Abrams’s Lost (2004-2010), which will be seen as global narratives set across multiple times and/or places that have investigated the ways in which collective tragedy and personal trauma reverberate in an increasingly interconnected world. Furthermore, it will explore the ways in which these texts – particularly Gibson’s – have responded to this dialectic by references to processes and practices integral to consumer culture. In this way, I will introduce the third important concept of the paper, consumerism, whose complex connections to both trauma and globalisation have received increasing critical attention in the area of cultural studies. Whereas the arrival, prevalence and saturation of consumer culture was previously represented in almost exclusively apocalyptic terms in both postmodern theory, such as that of Jean Baudrillard, and postmodern fiction, such as that of the ‘blank generation’ of the eighties, more recently there has been increasing emphasis on the ways in which consumerism has also been seen as a either a calculated strategy of reassurance from disaster in the American ‘culture of comfort’ (Sturken 2007) or as a dynamic process by which consumers articulate their own personal response to catastrophe. The paper will therefore focus on these texts in order to investigate the cultural politics underlying the complex interactions among consumerism, disaster, and globalisation at the start of the twenty-first century.