Alican Koc is a doctoral candidate in Communication Studies at McGill University. His doctoral research investigates the burgeoning relationships between new media, memetic circulation and subculture in online communities. His broader interests largely pertain to aesthetics, affect theory, popular music, memetic culture, new media, and pop culture. Alican holds a BA and MA in socio-cultural anthropology from the University of Toronto.
Capacious: Journal for Emerging Affect Inquiry, 2017
In Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism, Frederic Jameson (1991) mentions an ... more In Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism, Frederic Jameson (1991) mentions an "aesthetic of cognitive mapping" as a new form of radical aesthetic practice to deal with the set of historical situations and problems symptomatic of late capitalism. For Jameson (1991), cognitive mapping functions as a tool for postmodern subjects to represent the totality of the global late capitalist system, allowing them to situate themselves within the system, and to reenact the critique of capitalism that has been neutralized by postmodernist confusion. While Jameson's notion of cognitive mapping, and specifically its question of how to represent the totality of the late capitalist system, has been taken up by a number of poststructuralist critical race theorists and social geographers (Bartolovich, 2000; Beverly, 2000; Tally Jr., 2000), relatively little attention has been paid to the cognitive mapping of postmodern affect. Drawing upon a close reading of the music and visual art of the nostalgic internet-based "vaporwave" aesthetic alongside Jameson's postmodern theory and the affect theory of Raymond Williams (1977) and Brian Massumi (1995; 1998), this essay argues that vaporwave can be understood as an attempt to aestheticize and thereby map out the affective climate circulating in late capitalist consumer culture. More specifically, this paper argues that through its somewhat obsessive hypersaturation with retro commodities and aesthetics from the 1980s and 1990s, vaporwave simultaneously critiques the salient characteristics of late capitalism such as pastiche, depthlessness, and waning of affect, and enacts a nostalgic longing for a modernism that is fleeing further and further into an inaccessible history. This paper seeks to illustrate the potentiality of Jameson's cognitive mapping project in the realm of affect, and investigate the relationship between late capitalist affect and subcultural aesthetics.
This story begins in the backroom of a Chicago skate shop in the summer of 2014. Hundreds of us a... more This story begins in the backroom of a Chicago skate shop in the summer of 2014. Hundreds of us are assembled in the damp heat of the room for the main gig of a local DIY (do-it-yourself) punk festival, chatting over cans of cheap beer and sweating profusely as we wait for bands to play. A new band whose name I haven't yet learned has begun setting up onstage, and they look a little different from the others. Even with the massive span of North American DIY punk and its abundance of small regional scenes, the proliferation of online blogs, popular zines such as Maximum Rocknroll, small independent music festivals, and the movement of bands and their respective sounds and styles has ensured some sort of aesthetic uniformity to the style and music of the greater scene. This is to say that the increased access that participants in the DIY punk network have to the wider scene contributes to a quickly shifting dialectic of subcultural styles in which dominant aesthetic trends routinely shift. More importantly, this access to regional scenes throughout the continent allows participants to geographically map out dominant trends by region, distinguishing for example, between the street-smart artiness of New York City's late-2000s punk scene and the post-apocalyptic imagery of Pittsburgh raw punk bands like Eel and Ratface. In the geographic imagination of a style-savvy North American punk rocker, each city or region on the continent seems to have its own localized sound and style.
One of the most hotly debated issues during Canada’s 2015 Federal Elections was Liberal leader Ju... more One of the most hotly debated issues during Canada’s 2015 Federal Elections was Liberal leader Justin Trudeau’s proposition to legalize cannabis nationwide, provoking mixed reactions from Canadians ranging from sympathy and excitement to complete moral panic. Now that Trudeau has been elected as Canada’s Prime Minister and has begun looking for ways to implement the legalization of marijuana, the question of what changes this legalization will bring to the lives of Canadians looms heavily on the nation’s consciousness. This essay attempts to answer some of these questions from the perspective of the anthropology of food. Using ideas borrowed from Situationist thinker Guy Debord in dialogue with a number of contemporary food anthropologists, and ethnographic research conducted in a cannabis-friendly café in Toronto, this essay offers a unique look at what constitutes cannabis-related eating habits, and how these are changing in the face of the growing acceptance and commodification of cannabis culture in North America.
Capacious: Journal for Emerging Affect Inquiry, 2017
In Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism, Frederic Jameson (1991) mentions an ... more In Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism, Frederic Jameson (1991) mentions an "aesthetic of cognitive mapping" as a new form of radical aesthetic practice to deal with the set of historical situations and problems symptomatic of late capitalism. For Jameson (1991), cognitive mapping functions as a tool for postmodern subjects to represent the totality of the global late capitalist system, allowing them to situate themselves within the system, and to reenact the critique of capitalism that has been neutralized by postmodernist confusion. While Jameson's notion of cognitive mapping, and specifically its question of how to represent the totality of the late capitalist system, has been taken up by a number of poststructuralist critical race theorists and social geographers (Bartolovich, 2000; Beverly, 2000; Tally Jr., 2000), relatively little attention has been paid to the cognitive mapping of postmodern affect. Drawing upon a close reading of the music and visual art of the nostalgic internet-based "vaporwave" aesthetic alongside Jameson's postmodern theory and the affect theory of Raymond Williams (1977) and Brian Massumi (1995; 1998), this essay argues that vaporwave can be understood as an attempt to aestheticize and thereby map out the affective climate circulating in late capitalist consumer culture. More specifically, this paper argues that through its somewhat obsessive hypersaturation with retro commodities and aesthetics from the 1980s and 1990s, vaporwave simultaneously critiques the salient characteristics of late capitalism such as pastiche, depthlessness, and waning of affect, and enacts a nostalgic longing for a modernism that is fleeing further and further into an inaccessible history. This paper seeks to illustrate the potentiality of Jameson's cognitive mapping project in the realm of affect, and investigate the relationship between late capitalist affect and subcultural aesthetics.
This story begins in the backroom of a Chicago skate shop in the summer of 2014. Hundreds of us a... more This story begins in the backroom of a Chicago skate shop in the summer of 2014. Hundreds of us are assembled in the damp heat of the room for the main gig of a local DIY (do-it-yourself) punk festival, chatting over cans of cheap beer and sweating profusely as we wait for bands to play. A new band whose name I haven't yet learned has begun setting up onstage, and they look a little different from the others. Even with the massive span of North American DIY punk and its abundance of small regional scenes, the proliferation of online blogs, popular zines such as Maximum Rocknroll, small independent music festivals, and the movement of bands and their respective sounds and styles has ensured some sort of aesthetic uniformity to the style and music of the greater scene. This is to say that the increased access that participants in the DIY punk network have to the wider scene contributes to a quickly shifting dialectic of subcultural styles in which dominant aesthetic trends routinely shift. More importantly, this access to regional scenes throughout the continent allows participants to geographically map out dominant trends by region, distinguishing for example, between the street-smart artiness of New York City's late-2000s punk scene and the post-apocalyptic imagery of Pittsburgh raw punk bands like Eel and Ratface. In the geographic imagination of a style-savvy North American punk rocker, each city or region on the continent seems to have its own localized sound and style.
One of the most hotly debated issues during Canada’s 2015 Federal Elections was Liberal leader Ju... more One of the most hotly debated issues during Canada’s 2015 Federal Elections was Liberal leader Justin Trudeau’s proposition to legalize cannabis nationwide, provoking mixed reactions from Canadians ranging from sympathy and excitement to complete moral panic. Now that Trudeau has been elected as Canada’s Prime Minister and has begun looking for ways to implement the legalization of marijuana, the question of what changes this legalization will bring to the lives of Canadians looms heavily on the nation’s consciousness. This essay attempts to answer some of these questions from the perspective of the anthropology of food. Using ideas borrowed from Situationist thinker Guy Debord in dialogue with a number of contemporary food anthropologists, and ethnographic research conducted in a cannabis-friendly café in Toronto, this essay offers a unique look at what constitutes cannabis-related eating habits, and how these are changing in the face of the growing acceptance and commodification of cannabis culture in North America.
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KEYWORDS: cannabis, legalization, commodification, food cultures
KEYWORDS: cannabis, legalization, commodification, food cultures