Epic Sea Battle at Night: a Revolutionary Play with the Economic Thinking of Milton Friedman

The play Epic Sea Battle at Night was originally staged in 1967, to commemorate two of China’s People’s Liberation Army’s military triumphs over the Taiwanese navy two years previously. Produced at the height of the Chinese Cultural Revolution, the play is an example of the exploitation of the arts as an ideological instrument, celebrating military heroism and political conviction. Stills from the play were included in, China Pictorial 11, an English language propaganda pamphlet that was distributed to Western Imperialists in order to educate them in Maoist policy. Today, these images are clear representations of ideology. More than forty years after the Cultural Revolution, the ideology under which we live, neo-liberal late-capitalism, deliberately shirks from such blatant displays of propaganda. We have supposedly the freedom to believe whatever we like in a post-ideological age, and yet core beliefs about meritocracy, individualism and competitiveness frequently go unchallenged. By juxtaposing the visual language of ideology with the text of the capitalist manifesto, the re-enactment of a scene from Epic Sea Battle at Night harnesses the aesthetics of the past so as to allow us to reconsider the alleged neutrality of the present. The design of the stage, the positioning of the actors, costumes and props of the current production closely resembled those documented in China Pictorial 11, yet the actors’ monologues belong to a completely different context. No less heroic and utopian in tone than the speech given by the political instructor of gunboat 874 in the original play, the capitalist manifesto was an attempt to give a concrete language to the shapeless ideology of the present, and to force the invisible currents that govern life today, in China as in the West, to the surface. Neither a lecture on neo-liberal economics, nor a theatrical performance of a narrative, the piece appropriated the format of the propaganda play to re-evaluate the relationship between art and politics now.

Children of the revolution: fathers and sons in antifascist DEFA films

The article looks at three antifascist films from the 1980s by the East German film company DEFA: Jürgen Brauer's Pugowitza (1981), Egon Schlegel's Die Schüsse der Arche Noah (1983), and Helmut Dziuba's Jan auf der Zille (1986), which during this final decade of the East German state re-examine an ideologically seminal constellation of the GDR's official antifascism – the relationship between antifascist father and son. Linking generational and political succession, the father-son relationship helped to legitimise the GDR as a state in which the young continued the antifascist fight of the old communists against the Nazi dictatorship. From the 1950s on, DEFA films contributed to the visualisation of this relationship, codifying it not only as heroic but also as ‘natural’: the assumed innocence of the communist son was meant to naturalise the father's antifascist/communist cause. The 1980s saw this naturalised political succession questioned. By re-telling the canonised father-son story, the three films visualise the generational antifascist contract as flawed. Re-deploying the son's assumed innocence in a critique of the father, they explore new endings to the antifascist story and revive the discussion of categories like ‘victim’ and ‘perpetrator’.// Der Aufsatz untersucht drei antifaschistische Filme der ostdeutschen Filmgesellschaft DEFA aus den 1980er Jahren: Jürgen Brauers Pugowitza (1981), Egon Schlegels Die Schüsse der Arche Noah (1983) und Helmut Dziubas Jan auf der Zille (1986). Alle drei Filme wurden im letzten Jahrzehnt der DDR gedreht und greifen eine ideologisch tragende Konstellation des offiziellen DDR-Antifaschismus auf – die Beziehung zwischen antifaschistischem Vater und Sohn. In der Vater-Sohn-Beziehung verband sich Generationenabfolge mit politischer Nachkommenschaft, eine Verbindung, die half, die DDR als einen Staat zu legitimieren, in dem die Jungen den antifaschistischen Kampf der alten Kommunisten gegen die Nazi-Diktatur weiterführten. Seit den 1950er Jahren beteiligte sich die DEFA an der Visuali-sierung dieser Beziehung und kodifizierte sie nicht nur als heldenhaft, sondern auch als ‘natürlich’: die behauptete Unschuld der kommunistschen Söhne diente dazu, den antifaschistisch-kommunistischen Kampf der Väter zu naturalisieren. Die solcher Art politisch interpretierte Generationenabfolge verlor ihre Natürlichkeit, als sie in den 1980er Jahren kritisch befragt wurde. Im nochmaligen Erzählen der kanonisierten Vater-Sohn-Geschichte wird die Brüchigkeit des antifaschistischen Gesellschaftsvertrags in allen drei Filmen sichtbar. Die vermeintliche Unschuld der Söhne wird nun zu einer Kritik der Väter genutzt, wobei die Filme ein neues Ende für die antifaschistische Geschichte erkunden und die Debatte über Kategorien wie ‘Opfer’ und ‘Täter’ wieder aufnehmen.

Conspicuous redemption? Reflections on the promises and perils of the 'celebritization' of climate change

With rising public awareness of climate change, celebrities have become an increasingly important community of non nation-state ‘actors’ influencing discourse and action, thereby comprising an emergent climate science–policy–celebrity complex. Some feel that these amplified and prominent voices contribute to greater public understanding of climate change science, as well as potentially catalyze climate policy cooperation. However, critics posit that increased involvement from the entertainment industry has not served to influence substantive long-term advancements in these arenas; rather, it has instead reduced the politics of climate change to the domain of fashion and fad, devoid of political and public saliency. Through tracking media coverage in Australia, Canada, the United States, and United Kingdom, we map out the terrain of a ‘Politicized Celebrity System’ in attempts to cut through dualistic characterizations of celebrity involvement in politics. We develop a classification system of the various types of climate change celebrity activities, and situate movements in contemporary consumer- and spectacle-driven carbon-based society. Through these analyses, we place dynamic and contested interactions in a spatially and temporally-sensitive ‘Cultural Circuits of Climate Change Celebrities’ model. In so doing, first we explore how these newly ‘authorized’ speakers and ‘experts’ might open up spaces in the public sphere and the science/policy nexus through ‘celebritization’ effects. Second, we examine how the celebrity as the ‘heroic individual’ seeking ‘conspicuous redemption’ may focus climate change actions through individualist frames. Overall, this paper explores potential promises, pitfalls and contradictions of this increasingly entrenched set of ‘agents’ in the cultural politics of climate change. Thus, as a form of climate change action, we consider whether it is more effective to ‘plant’ celebrities instead of trees.

Staging the Sherleys' Travails

The remarkable Sherley brothers and their maverick diplomacy evidently appealed to early seventeenth-century readers, and dramatists recognised the theatrical potential their adventures offered. Scholars have been drawn to The Travailes of the Three English Brothers for its depiction of encounters with 'others', as a portrait of early modern England's ambitions beyond its shores. This article examines how, rather than serving as propaganda, as Thomas Sherley must have hoped, the theatrical treatment exposed the brothers to a sustained critique, deploying irony to undercut the heroic motives to which they laid claim and revealing the ideological fault lines at the heart of their enterprise.

Transreal arithmetic as a consistent basis for paraconsistent logics

Paraconsistent logics are non-classical logics which allow non-trivial and consistent reasoning about inconsistent axioms. They have been pro- posed as a formal basis for handling inconsistent data, as commonly arise in human enterprises, and as methods for fuzzy reasoning, with applica- tions in Artificial Intelligence and the control of complex systems. Formalisations of paraconsistent logics usually require heroic mathe- matical efforts to provide a consistent axiomatisation of an inconsistent system. Here we use transreal arithmetic, which is known to be consis- tent, to arithmetise a paraconsistent logic. This is theoretically simple and should lead to efficient computer implementations. We introduce the metalogical principle of monotonicity which is a very simple way of making logics paraconsistent. Our logic has dialetheaic truth values which are both False and True. It allows contradictory propositions, allows variable contradictions, but blocks literal contradictions. Thus literal reasoning, in this logic, forms an on-the- y, syntactic partition of the propositions into internally consistent sets. We show how the set of all paraconsistent, possible worlds can be represented in a transreal space. During the development of our logic we discuss how other paraconsistent logics could be arithmetised in transreal arithmetic.

From warfare to welfare: veterans, military charities and the blurred spatiality of post-service welfare in the United Kingdom

The military offers a form of welfare-for-work but when personnel leave they lose this safety net, a loss exacerbated by the rollback neoliberalism of the contemporary welfare state. Increasingly the third sector has stepped in to address veterans’ welfare needs through operating within and across military/civilian and state/market/community spaces and cultures. In this paper we use both veterans’ and military charities’ experiences to analyse the complex politics that govern the liminal boundary zone of post-military welfare. Through exploring ‘crossing’ and ‘bridging’ we conceptualise military charities as ‘boundary subjects’, active yet dependent on the continuation of the civilian-military binary, and argue that the latter is better understood as a multidirectional, multiscalar and contextual continuum. Post-military welfare emerges as a competitive, confused and confusing assemblage that needs to be made more navigable in order to better support the ‘heroic poor’.