Agnieszka Urbańczyk

The author of this paper uses Pierre Bourdieu’s field theory to discusses the anti-shipper movement and its call for exclusion of problematic content from online repositories of fanwork. Anti-shippers, who oppose indiscriminate inclusion of potentially harmful content and its creators in the field of fan production, are a relatively new and vocal faction inside the field. While the research on antis has focused on their methods of harassment and its effects on fan community, this paper discusses the conditions inside the field before the movement’s emergence, focusing on the affordances and terms of service of online fanwork repositories. The author proposes to treat the question of exclusion of sensitive content and its creators as one concerning the field’s autonomy, and presents the anti controversy as a way for newcomers to establish their position in the field and change its problematic.

The subject of this article is the Internet activity and creativity of the elderly, understood as a form of radical sincerity. While the most popular take on the digital divide emphasizes lack of Internet access or technological competences, this paper focuses on the exclusion of the elderly users from the legitimate discourse of the  Internet. The author uses Pierre Bourdieu’s notion of distinction to discuss the role of distance and irony in the establishment of legitimate taste and its similarity to the irony-laden meme culture. The online meme discourse is contrasted with a particular form of creativity of the elderly, who do not only refuse to create an online persona but whose art is the perfect exemplification of Bourdieuian “working-class aesthetics.” The images – considered tawdry by the gatekeepers of legitimate taste – are a result of emulation of analog artifacts (such as postcards and greeting cards) in the new media. Their popularity among the elderly Internet users is caused by a non-selective transposition of offline relationships onto one’s activity in the social media.

One of the main concerns of Bruno Jasieński’s works is the role of the flesh and the violence against it. For Jasieński, the phantasm of revolution is intertwined with physiology, especially with hunger and glut. The dialectical materialism is overshadowed by biological necessity. The violence that necessity brings is presented as abstract arithmetics or as something that concerns the flesh and not the person. Jasieński divides the society into the suffering from unjust violence hungry masses (the proletariat), and the overfed (the aristocracy, the clergy and the bourgeoisie). The latter are shown as a not entirely human group against which the proposed acts of violence are legitimate. The concepts established decades after Jasieński’s death make it possible to analyze his works as a biopolitical project. The key terms in that analysis are bios, dzoe, and homines sacri (people, who can be killed without a murder being committed).