Culture in-colour

ABSTRACT

Culture in-colour is a concept that recognizes that culture is always imbricated in relations of colour as form, structure, or system and in relations of colours. These two regimes – colour and colours – fold back onto and interpenetrate one another to constitute culture in complex, multiple, contradictory, constitutive relations that are potentially open to change. Theorizing culture in-colour draws on and beyond the image of the cyborg to insist on in-colour as neither a thing, a property of an object, nor a neurological process, but an active verb, a lived event: of interminglings and articulations, of repetitions, struggles, rearticulations, and becomings. The Dress, a 2015 controversy over the colour of a dress in an image circulated over the Internet, reveals how colour is typically thought of – as surface, artifice, and ornament; as a scientific fact; and as a neurological phenomenon – and how it is lived affectively. The anxieties produced by The Dress suggest a tension between the typical explanations of how colour matters and the less-accessible, but far more consequential, ways that both colour and colours matter. Colour and colours are often used to designate community belonging, but a closer look at the perceived threat in seeing colour differently reveals an underlying trust both in what colour is and in the reliability of colour to negotiate/constitute community in relations of inclusion, exclusion, and hierarchy. Neuroscientific and technological explanations affectively discipline colour by asserting thingness and sameness, and by erasing the traces of the powerful articulatory work of colour. Yet it is the system of colour itself that makes the dismissal of the significance of colour possible. Acknowledging that we live in-colour demands recognition that not only do we live deeply in-colour, but that different cultures in-colour are possible, that different forms or systems of colour are lived affectively, and that the disciplining of colour can be resisted with effects more open to indeterminateness.

KEYWORDS:

• Colour
• colours
• in-colour
• community
• The Dress
• Internet meme
• affect

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes on contributors

Jennifer Daryl Slack is a Professor of Communication and Cultural Studies in the Department of Humanities at Michigan Technological University. She is also a pastel painter. Her research examines cultural studies, technology, environment, and new media theory. Her most recent book, with J. Macgregor Wise, is Culture and Technology: A Primer, 2nd edition (2015). Email: [email protected]

Stefka Hristova is an Assistant Professor of Digital Media in the Department of Humanities at Michigan Technological University. She holds a Ph.D. in Visual Studies from the University of California Irvine. Her research examines digital visual cultures and technologies and has been published in journals such as Visual Anthropology and Radical History Review. Email: [email protected]