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In this article, Daniel Adleman and Chris Vanderwees explore the unique manner in which AMC’s Mad Men remediates traumatic images of the 11 September 2001 terrorist attack on Manhattan’s Twin Towers. The authors take up the production of the show’s title sequence, the media controversy surrounding its representation of 9/11’s falling bodies, and Don Draper’s perilous trajectory over the course of the series. Their analyses lead Adleman and Vanderwees to dwell on Mad Men’s portrayal of the advertising industry as a crucible of, and synecdoche for, unfettered capitalism. The authors contend that Mad Men’s falling man sequence ultimately serves as an uncanny commentary on American political anxieties, contradictions, and uncertainties at the beginning of the twenty-first century.

Background Although the popularity of ruins has accompanied Western modernity in waves since the eighteenth century, the post-9/11 decade marks a notable resurgence of the imagery, aesthetics, and rhetoric of ruins, especially in American culture. This article was completed a few months prior to the global COVID-19 crisis. Analysis While many scholars dismiss contemporary forms of ruin gazing as a mindless fascination with disaster and destruction in its virtual circulation, the author contends that this contemporary imaginary has significant political and social implications. Conclusion and implications Although each geographic site of ruination has its own social, political, and historical specificity, the author draws from Cornelius Castoriadis’ psychosocial extension of Lacanian theory to designate a broader iconographic and discursive trend in American culture whereby the imagery and rhetoric of destruction contributes to what he calls the “social imaginary of ruination." RESUME Contexte Bien que la popularite des ruines ait accompagne la modernite occidentale dans les vagues depuis le XVIIIe siecle, la decennie post-11 septembre marque une resurgence notable de l’imagerie, de l’esthetique et de la rhetorique des ruines, en particulier dans la culture americaine. Cet article a ete acheve quelques mois avant la crise mondiale du covid-19. Analyse Alors que de nombreux chercheurs rejettent les formes contemporaines de ruine en les considerant comme une fascination aveugle pour les catastrophes et la destruction dans sa circulation virtuelle, l’auteur soutient que cet imaginaire contemporain a des implications politiques et sociales importantes. Conclusions et implications Bien que chaque site geographique de ruine ait sa propre specificite sociale, politique et historique, l’auteur s’inspire de l’extension psychosociale de Cornelius Castoriadis de la theorie lacanienne pour designer une tendance iconographique et discursive plus large dans la culture americaine par laquelle l’imagerie et la rhetorique de la destruction contribuent a ce que il appelle «l’imaginaire social de la ruine».

This article explores the implications of paranoid pleasure and pornography in contemporary technocultures from a psychoanalytic perspective. If new media technologies not only interpellate desirin...

This article approaches Joel Meyerowitz’s Ground Zero photography in Aftermath through a theorization of aesthetics and the event. I attempt to move beyond the common scholarly claim that Meyerowitz’s images of ruins and destruction have simply functioned as government propaganda for the War on Terror. I draw from Jill Bennett’s recent work on aesthetics and Gilles Deleuze’s The Logic of Sense in order to conceptualize photography as an affective and aesthetic encounter with the event in its becoming. I contend that Meyerowitz’s more recent publication of his photography in Aftermath enables affective encounters through sublime and uncanny aesthetics. Approaching aesthetics as an affective encounter, a kind of sense event that is distinctive through its abstraction of the historical event, I argue that an examination of the affective dimensions of ruins might map the potential for viewers of Meyerowitz’s photographs to be caught between multiple and contradictory histories and geographies, memorie...

Abstract: The article explores the ethical and political relationship between Jonathan Safran Foer’s Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close and the photographs of those who fell (or leapt) from the World Trade Center on 11 September 2001. Drawing on Judith Butler’s theorization of the ethics of vulnerability, the article briefly outlines ongoing debates around the photography of atrocity in order to suggest that rather than reaffirm tropes of American exceptionalism and victory culture in the wake of the 9/11 attacks, Foer’s novel and its engagement with the falling body may prompt readers to consider ethical recognition and responsibility to others.

In this series of photographs, I document, juxtapose, and recontextualize graffiti, signage, and written messages found in Toronto’s downtown core through 2013 and 2014. I approach each image, each captured inscription, through the political and ethical demands of the trace and as communicative of other traces. Photographs in this series are meant to stand alone, but are also recontextualized through their associative connections to a larger and continuously expanding narrative that conveys marks of socio- economic inequality, difference, and privilege in times of austerity. In this sense, each photograph expresses an imminent ethical demand through the traces of unknown others. This series ultimately aims to identify existing conditions for potential collective struggle through aesthetics of the other’s inscription as a political proposition. These images stage an affective and aesthetic encounter with the language of the other and the traces of that language, encouraging the viewer’s engagement with possibility and difference beyond dominant ideological actualizations that unevenly distribute power and privilege in contemporary life.

Author(s): Vanderwees, Chris | Abstract: Bank Street is the major north-south artery in Ottawa, Ontario, Canada’s capital city. Named for its initial geographic proximity to the Ottawa River bank in the 19th century, the street now runs north from the city limits at Belmeade Road through various villages (Vernon, Spring Hill, Metcalfe, Greely, South Gloucester, Leitrum, and Blossum Park), north through multiple large neighbourhoods (Hunt Club, Alta Vista, Old Ottawa South, The Glebe, Centretown) to Wellington Street, home of Canada’s Parliament Buildings.Almost every afternoon, I photograph a particular stretch of Bank Street from Third Avenue in The Glebe to Wellington Street near Parliament. This series of 25 street photographs is a product of these walks through the lens of a 1972 Canon Canonet rangefinder on inexpensive, often expired, color film. The photographs are presented in order of their location from the Bank Street intersection with Third Avenue, proceeding north toward the intersection with Laurier Avenue.