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Issue 2 (32)

2017 Next

Publication date: 07.12.2017

Licence: CC BY-NC-ND  licence icon

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Pejzaże kultury

Krzysztof Abriszewski

Arts & Cultural Studies Review, Issue 2 (32), 2017, pp. 139-155

https://doi.org/10.4467/20843860PK.17.010.7358

In the text, I analyze audiophiles’ posts from Internet forums using four different theoretical traditions: Peter Berger’s and Thomas Luckmann’s sociology of knowledge, Slavoj Žižek’s theory of ideology, Social Construction of Technology approach – SCOT (Trevor J. Pinch and Wiebe Bijker) and Actor-Network Theory – ANT (Bruno Latour and John Law). I argue to view audiophile Internet forums as dynamic symbolic universes, borrowing the term from Berger and Luckmann. Although they are self-described as spaces for information exchange, in fact they are key forces in fabrication of audiophile fantasies centered around extraordinary esthetic experiences. In the article, I analyze examples of constructing of the desire and of the fantasies. Following Žižek, I claim that the function of the fantasy is the ordering of the social worlds. I read this literally, not as a epistemological sorting things out according to certain categories, but I view fantasy as a blueprint for heterogenic engineering (in ANT’s sense) done by an audiophile in his or her (these  are usually males) direct material environment.
The observations are grouped according to three analytical steps offered by the SCOT approach – interpretive flexibility, closure and stabilization and connection to wider context. However, while SCOT was concentrated on single technological artifacts, I suggest to focus on heterogenic assemblage operated by an audiophile.
In the end it is argued that such a mechanism of permanent and endlessly renewing fabricating of audiophile fantasies directly contributes to the circulation of consumerist capitalism.

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Dariusz Brzostek

Arts & Cultural Studies Review, Issue 2 (32), 2017, pp. 156-175

https://doi.org/10.4467/20843860PK.17.011.7359

This paper focuses on the problem of the non-knowledge and paranoiac hermeneutics in the Internet. This is constructivist and Lacanian approach to interpreting this problem, because the interpretive communities construct knowledge and collaboratively create a small web culture with the words of final vocabulary with shared meanings. According to Umberto Eco’s theory of paranoiac interpretation and Jacques Lacan’s explanation of paranoia the result of the overinterpretation is perfect, coherent world founded on the hermetic knowledge (secret, unoffi cial or antiscience). The Internet interpretive communities prefer “to not know” (as Jacques Lacan said – ne rien vouloir savoir), refuse official, mainstream science and choose the antiscientific approach to the process of accumulating and sharing knowledge (conspiracy theories, witchcraft, alternative medicine) to explain the reality.

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Marek Jeziński, Łukasz Wojtkowski

Arts & Cultural Studies Review, Issue 2 (32), 2017, pp. 176-190

https://doi.org/10.4467/20843860PK.17.012.7360

The field of theoretical analysis presented in the paper is the hipster digital culture and its visual representations. We perceive hipsters’ digital formation as post-subculture and post-community that shapes specific cultural patterns with fragmented identity, inconstant group membership or high cultural mobility. Yet they form stabile connections with other members of post-community with strong emphasis on the common meaning of codes they use and circulate in visual communication. Moreover, we argue that hipsterism operates on two levels: (1) communicative acts of hipsters that are apparent ‘visual reflections’ of their desirable lifestyles. In other words, participants of digital post-community operate with codes created by other members, but relatively more often taken from dominant culture, and incorporated into hipster-like set of meanings; (2) hipsters and their visual representations are strongly mediatized even though there is no media mechanism of legitimization of this digital post-community, therefore the media are not able to seize a dynamic of codes’ circulation within culture.

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Justyna Tuszyńska

Arts & Cultural Studies Review, Issue 2 (32), 2017, pp. 191-206

https://doi.org/10.4467/20843860PK.17.013.7361

The main theme of this paper is the problem of defining the crime fiction (detective story, hardboiled fiction, thriller) by the non-professional literary critics in the Internet interpretive communities. If the literary or film critics are also official experts and possess academic authority, based on study and experience, and their words are not merely ‘individuals’ opinions but they are supported by the institutional authority, the online critics are ‘unoffi cial experts’ (or non-specialists), and their opinions are strictly individual. Anyway they try to imitate the offi cial, institutional criticism online.

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Jakub Nowak

Arts & Cultural Studies Review, Issue 2 (32), 2017, pp. 207-222

https://doi.org/10.4467/20843860PK.17.014.7362

Theoretically departing from Stuart Hall’s theory of articulation, the article analyzes structural conditions of popular culture online. New media are tools and spaces for people’s engagement in various interpretive communities, also consisting of services off ered by neoliberal market agents. The article deconstructs the status of these so-called “internets” being both: pop-cultural and civic resource. Popular culture online is nowadays entangled in a curious dialectics between more active communities of its audiences-participants and increasingly powerful digital culture industry. It is also a sphere of processes of articulation understood after Stuart Hall as expressing particular discursive positions (alternative to the official criteria of interpreting the reality), and as connection – here of spheres of people’s meaningful practices and (naturalized) sphere of the market.

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Piotr Grochowski

Arts & Cultural Studies Review, Issue 2 (32), 2017, pp. 223-242

https://doi.org/10.4467/20843860PK.17.015.7363

In this paper I analyse and compare two kind of materials: ethnographic data from 19th and 20th century which indicate how people in traditional cultures recognised and understood vampires, and contemporary video materials and internet discussions about so called energy/psychic vampires. I claim that on the one hand the ideas of vampires and energy vampires differ and are based on unlike beliefs, but on the other hand they perform the same social function. We can comprehend both former and contemporary narratives about vampires/energy vampires as a form of folklore, which provides people a kind of common knowledge, especially guides and hints, how to interpret social behaviour of other people and how to “properly” react to them.

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Pożegnanie profesor Anny Zeidler-Janiszewskiej

Eugeniusz Wilk

Arts & Cultural Studies Review, Issue 2 (32), 2017, pp. 281-281

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Stefan Bednarek

Arts & Cultural Studies Review, Issue 2 (32), 2017, pp. 282-285

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Wojciech Józef Burszta

Arts & Cultural Studies Review, Issue 2 (32), 2017, pp. 286-287

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Andrzej Szahaj

Arts & Cultural Studies Review, Issue 2 (32), 2017, pp. 288-289

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Andrzej Gwóźdź

Arts & Cultural Studies Review, Issue 2 (32), 2017, pp. 290-291

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Ryszard W. Kluszczyński

Arts & Cultural Studies Review, Issue 2 (32), 2017, pp. 292-293

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Tomasz Majewski

Arts & Cultural Studies Review, Issue 2 (32), 2017, pp. 294-295

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Mirosław Filiciak

Arts & Cultural Studies Review, Issue 2 (32), 2017, pp. 296-297

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Ewa Kosowska

Arts & Cultural Studies Review, Issue 2 (32), 2017, pp. 298-300

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Alicja Kisielewska

Arts & Cultural Studies Review, Issue 2 (32), 2017, pp. 301-302

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Marianna Michałowska

Arts & Cultural Studies Review, Issue 2 (32), 2017, pp. 303-304

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Agata Skórzyńska

Arts & Cultural Studies Review, Issue 2 (32), 2017, pp. 305-310

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