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This article connects the evolution and formation of contemporary Internet language with its graphical underpinnings, arguing that Internet language is a form of visual knowledge production that combines and layers image and text through a contested political economy. The authors focus on the linguistic contours of graphical representation and display by providing a brief media archaeology of contemporary Internet language, upsetting its separation into generational stages, and therefore a linear progression of its history. At the same time, the authors argue that contemporary Internet language elicits a subversive operation as it layers, allowing its graphical components to exceed acts of political censorship. The authors forward this argument in an economic context as well, examining how the graphical dimensions of contemporary Internet language are both delimited by and opposed to the restrictions of communicative capitalism. Taking the cultural battle between Universal Pictures' Minions and Pepe the Frog as their primary example, the authors argue that some forms of graphical representation and display produce an anticapitalist concept of rarity when they function linguistically, attempting to protect the cultures that produce this kind of linguistic act from commodification.

In an essay on French literature in the period of Nazi occupation, Herbert Marcuse argues that a literature of intimacy—love poems and romantic novels—is the last resort of freedom in totalitarian conditions. Written in 1945 and revised in the 1970s, Marcuse's essay argues that in the face of totalitarianism, a literature of intimacy opens a realm of human experience that is outside the control of the regime. Because it carries a memory of joy, it is radically other to the ethos of the regime. Later, in The Aesthetic Dimension (1978), Marcuse returns to the role of aesthetics when political change is unlikely to occur. The article revisits Marcuse's 1945 essay and his reading of the poetry of Charles Baudelaire and Paul Eluard. It begins by relating Marcuse's interest in love poetry to the work of other critical theorists who see a radical role for aesthetics and the pursuit of happiness in periods when political change is blocked. It examines the 1945 essay, puts it in context of Marcuse's work for the US intelligence services in the 1940s, and looks at the similarities between the 1945 essay and Marcuse's later writing. Finally, it asks whether Marcuse's arguments matter today (as the dreams for which the New Left of the 1960s went in search appear as remote as ever).

This essay traces the advances in time axis manipulation brought about by the media switches from symbolic mediation (alphabet) to analogue recording (phonography and cinematography) and digital processing (computers). Special emphasis is on the mathematical dimension of the final stage. The Fourier transform enables the conversion of sound events into periodicities with numerical values that can then be manipulated and converted back into sound events, even if there was no original source involved. The media access frequencies and operate at speeds beyond all human thresholds. Kittler argues that the resulting ability to subvert and simulate human perception is the very definition of technical media.

Glitches, formally artifacts of errors in electronic transmission like CD stutters or dead pixels, interrupt communication and distract audiences without wrecking the systems they occur in. Permanent irritants, they operate as irruptions of difference into the indifferent flux of commodity exchange. They reveal the exclusions, notably of noise, that enable rational communication, and the underpinning dependence of ostensibly unique items in semantic chains on their mutual indifference. Glitches are symbols whose nonhuman labor reveals the limits of humanism.

This article studies the Picasso in Palestine exhibit in light of what it means to be a modern and resistant Palestinian colonial subject, living in a sovereign state-to-be in our contemporary global world. By drawing on theories of the imagination, resistance studies, art, and internal relations, as well as discourse analysis of the content of the project, field interview material, and published critiques of the project, the article queries the conceptual boundaries of studying the Picasso in Palestine project. The article contextualizes a moment in Palestine's history of visual cultural production within wider debates and scholarship on the construction of resistant praxis in cultural production; the distribution of power; culture and representation; and image circulation, translation, and reception in a colonial setting, global context, and transnational frame. Tracing the readings of the project across transnational space by locating them within the discourses they engaged with in both the "global" arts circuit as well as the "local" cultural scene, the article rethinks transnational processes of arts production emergent from and focused on Palestine, the different forms that resistance in cultural practices take and how they acquire different meanings in the process of travel.

Photographer Terry Richardson works in a digital aesthetic vernacular that looks more to underground hard-core pornography of yesteryear than traditions associated with the institutionalization of erotica, as associated with Playboy. And yet his images, in Kibosh and Terryworld, anticipate the contemporary public recalibration of ideas of intimacy as associated with social media, tally with contested ideas of the sexualization of female empowerment as associated with contested elements of third wave feminism, and can be read as a contemporary phase of Antonio Negri's theory of art and immaterial labor in their evidencing of the affective labor on the part of the photographer himself. This critical commentary, the first such academic writing on Richardson, explores his work in these contexts and considers Richardson's return to the figure (over abstraction) as evidencing and exploring of the nature of work, and the nascent eroticization of working relations, under Western neoliberal regimes.