Title: The Circulation of Forms and Forms of Circulation
Abstract: Every journal strives for a signature, a combination of topic, tone, and texture. This is a difficult asset to nurture, in the growing cacophony of journals, blogs, social media influencers, and micro-audiences. For a journal like Public Culture, there is an additional challenge, which is to be open to the ever-changing present without losing an identifiable take on it, which necessarily implies a less volatile orientation. In the triangle of critical energy constituted by the diaspora of modernity, the mediated constitution of all public spheres, and the circulation of cultural forms, Public Culture was a pioneer in identifying the volatile edges of transnational cultural politics. Just as Public Culture has witnessed some of the key transitions within academia, which can be traced to globalization and to transnational cultural politics from an early moment, we are also able to trace the ways in which Public Culture's signature has circulated across numerous other scholarly journal and fora, expanding the reach of these forms of thinking.Circulation is both our most enduring theme and the signature of our social life as a journal. It is worth recalling why circulation has been a vital concern for us since we began in 1988, more than three decades ago. In the very early years of cultural globalization, when markets appeared to be dissolving borders, our authors and readers sensed that the idea of commodities as mobile and culture as stable was not useful. Instead, the tropes of flow, diaspora, mobility, and multiplicity began to appear in descriptions and theorizations. Cultural forms began to be read as agentive and not as primarily representational. The transnational morphed into the global. The movement of bodies was seen as part of the same energy that moved images. The formative ideas of liberal political theory (civility, publicity, representation, participation) began to be seen as parts of a global ecumene of words and ideas, as in the case of the idea of the “people,” which was transformed by its journey to places like China, Haiti, and India, and could be reimagined in its original homes in Europe and the United States as a consequence of its circulation.In the second and third decades of the journal, marked by the destruction of the Twin Towers in September 2001, the new millennium appeared to encourage many dark forms of circulation: the violence of asymmetrical warfare, the black holes of torture and rendition, the rise of arms and finance mafias, new forms of human trafficking and slavery, the rise of multiple ethnonationalisms. Public Culture went with the flows of these phenomena, staying as close as possible to the shifting dramas of the ordinary that registered the stubbornness of locality amidst the ceaseless circulation of forms. We tried hard to remind our critics that we understood that movement was not freedom, that aspiration was no substitute for justice, and that even as wealth increased, so did inequality.By the time our present editorial team took responsibility for the journal, a little over three years ago, our world looked permanently changed—again. The planetary had eclipsed the global, repatriation seemed more urgent than revolution, data had become the central raw material of global capital, the growing pronomination of gender roles had generated an unrestricted set of possibilities, and COVID-19 had made many prior axioms of sociality unstable.So, we offer you this issue of our journal in the spirit of critical uncertainty, of situations not yet crystallized into contexts, of forms of circulation not yet fully available to theory, of predicates of a subject still in the making. In this issue we present three forum essays that embody an exploratory spirit, suggesting but not yet drawing definitive conclusions. The essays, one of which is collectively authored, draw explicitly on transnational circulations—of cryptocurrencies, community land trusts and activism, and mediatized forms of irony.The difficult relationship between law, circulation, and value-production in global capitalism is the topic of Ritu Birla's alarming essay on cryptocurrency, both within and beyond the domain of visual art. Beginning with a discussion of what are called NFTs (non-fungible tokens), which are a new hybrid of artwork and value storage, Birla takes us into a troubling reading of the dangers of cryptocurrency. She shows that the biggest risk of this new form of money is to blur the distinction between the social contract—as a form of liberal political agreement—and the aleatory contract, which is oriented to risk, uncertainty, and profit. In other words, we are facing the possibility that financial and political contracts become two sides of the same coin.In “Trust Land,” our second forum essay, Keller Easterling draws together the threads of a remarkable set of stories from the past into a potential narrative connecting two moments of activism around land and civil rights across time and geography. Easterling presents us with a loose sheaf of stories, set around the town of Albany in Georgia, spanning several decades since the 1960s. Deftly drawing suggestive connections across these stories, she writes, “In the Albany stories, a forgotten chapter of the civil rights movement in the US South meets an underexamined watershed moment in the global South.” Focusing on multiple and diverse strands of activism, she suggests that such diversity may be the answer to overwhelming dominant capitalism with “multiple modes of exchange and incalculable productivity.” These exchanges, embedded in networks of care and mutualism, have once again come to the fore during the COVID-19 pandemic. Her work suggests that there is also a kinship across time between the abolitionist and decolonizing modes of activism and relational infrastructures prevalent in the early to mid-twentieth centuries and what is needed today to combat the multiple crises produced by “globalizing infrastructure projects that have reinforced Western dominance and exacerbated inequality” in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries.The third Forum essay titled “Animating Irony” by Farhan Samanani and his coauthors, draws on a very diverse set of contexts (primarily Greece and Ghana) with sharp asides on Donald Trump's America, to explore the political contradictions of irony in political discourse, both on- and offline. The authors show a keen eye for what was observed long ago by Søren Kierkegaard, namely, that both irony and hypocrisy exploit the distance between the external utterance and the inner motivation. To this understanding, they add the original insight that irony opens a space for uncertainty, speculation, and ambiguity for a variety of political actors, thus offering a sensibility that is especially suited to the growing uncertainty of our times, revealed in economic crises, new experiments in voice and group formation, and blurred boundaries between hope and pessimism in politics.The Essays section opens with Valerie Werder's essay on the legal struggles around a set of daguerreotypes of American slaves in the possession of Harvard University. Werder's essay speaks to the embattled terrain of lawfare and visual exploitation, in this case involving issues of race, science, property, and visuality. In this scandalous case, Harvard shows its remarkable willingness to commoditize its own shameful collections of enslaved humans, first collected as evidence for the theories of white supremacy endorsed by one of its founding zoologists, Louis Agassiz. Today Harvard asserts its rights to use these images in various visual campaigns to promote its claims to being a bastion of inclusion and diversity.Continuing the focus on visuality and visibility, Danny Hoffman's essay, “Rally Day: The Urban Landscape of Postcolonial Political Violence in Sierra Leone,” explores “the configuration of violence, politics, and the city” in contemporary Sierra Leone, focusing on a moment of extra-judicial violence during a political rally. Reading this moment of violence as a moment of political violence, Hoffman overturns a dominant understanding of violence as signaling the absence of the state and the breakdown of governance. Coupling his own observation and witnessing in the field with readings from cinema and fiction, Hoffman offers an alternative interpretation of a moment of violence in which a young man is caught and punished as a thief during the rally. Contrasting the suggestions in works of Cameroonian filmmaker Jean-Marie Teno and the Nigerian-American writer Teju Cole that popular justice is meted out due to the frustration that results from the absence of the state, Hoffman offers a different and perhaps more surprising reading of popular violence, which draws both on the improvisatory setting provided by cities to enact self-government as well as on the suggestion that the state operates through “clandestine, rhizomatic, and extralegal circuits,” making it possible to participate in and to understand violence as a preemptive, political act to root out the criminal presence of the state in everyday life. The urban setting “affords a certain security of unknowability to those taking justice into their own hands” while “the anonymity of the thief, for example, makes him an especially effective, unmoored signifier for the machinations of the state.”Finally, Elana Resnick offers us an essay on the scabrous humor of Roma women street sweepers in Sofia (Bulgaria) where they simultaneously constitute, perform, and clean the marginal spaces of urban life. Their humor plays with the stereotypes of dirt, immorality, and sexuality that define Roma bodies, and they produce a powerful politics of recognition among themselves under the shadow of the very civil society that despises them. Indeed, this is a “refusal of refusal,” in this instance by women forced to deal with refuse, and it is a reminder that no social margin is an island, and that even the most marginalized identities can snatch dignity from the jaws of humiliation.Each of these essays can also be read in the light of our stubborn interest in the logics of the circulation of forms and the forms of circulation. Both logics are ever changing, but, as with the many tropes of the blade and handle of a knife that can change many times without changing the identity of the knife, we urge our readers to wonder what has truly changed in the nature of circulation.