POSTMODERNCULTUREPOSTMODERNCULTURE
P RNCU REPO ODER E P O S T M O D E R N
P TMOD RNCU U EP S ODER ULTU E C U L T U R E
P RNCU UR OS ODER ULTURE
P TMODERNCU UREPOS ODER ULTU E an electronic journal
P TMODERNCU UREPOS ODER E of interdisciplinary
POSTMODERNCULTUREPOSTMODERNCULTURE criticism
-----------------------------------------------------------------
Volume 5, Number 2 (January, 1995) ISSN: 1053-1920
-----------------------------------------------------------------
Editors: Eyal Amiran, issue editor
John Unsworth
Review Editor: Jim English
Managing Editor: Amy Sexton
List Manager: Chris Barrett
Editorial Board:
Sharon Bassett Phil Novak
Michael Berube Patrick O'Donnell
Marc Chenetier Elaine Orr
Greg Dawes Marjorie Perloff
bell hooks Fred Pfeil
Graham Hammill Mark Poster
Phillip Brian Harper David Porush
David Herman Carl Raschke
E. Ann Kaplan Avital Ronell
Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett Susan Schultz
Arthur Kroker William Spanos
Neil Larsen Gary Lee Stonum
Tan Lin Tony Stewart
Jerome McGann Chris Straayer
Jim Morrison Rei Terada
Stuart Moulthrop Paul Trembath
Larysa Mykyta Greg Ulmer
-----------------------------------------------------------------
CONTENTS
TITLE FILENAME
Kevin McNeilly, "Ugly Beauty: John Zorn mcneilly.195
and the Politics of Postmodern Music"
Arkady Plotnitsky, "RE-: Re-flecting, plotnits.195
Re-membering, Re-collecting, Re-selecting,
Re-warding, Re-wording, Re-iterating,
Re-et-cetra-ing,...(in) Hegel"
Ewa Ziarek, "The Uncanny Style of ziarek.195
Kristeva's Critique of Nationalism"
Hank De Leo, Two Paintings: "Get Change,"
and "The Brain Has a Mind of its Own"
(World-Wide Web/gopher/ftp versions only)
Charles Shepherdson, "History and the shepherd.195
Real: Foucault with Lacan"
Hassan Melehy, "Images Without: Deleuzian melehy.195
Becoming, Science Fiction Cinema in the
Eighties"
Jeffrey Yule, "Waxing Kriger" yule.195
Dion Dennis, "Evocations of Empire in dennis.195
A Transnational Corporate Age: Tracking
the Sign of Saturn"
LETTERS:
Timothy Burke, "Response to Deepika letters.195
Bahri's Essay, 'Disembodying the Corpus:
Postcolonial Pathology in Tsitsi
Dangarembga's Nervous Conditions'" and
Deepika Bahri, "Response to Timothy
Burke's Letter."
POPULAR CULTURE COLUMN:
Karen L. Carr, "Optical Allusions: pop-cult.195
Hysterical Memories and the
Screening of Pregnant Sites"
REVIEWS:
Brent Wood, "Bring on the Noise! review-1.195
William S. Burroughs and Music in
the Expanded Field." Review of
William S. Burroughs, Dead City Radio.
Island Records, 1990; ---, Spare Ass
Annie and Other Tales. Island Records,
1993; Ministry with William S. Burroughs,
Just One Fix. Sire Records, 1992;
Revolting Cocks, Beers, Steers and Queers.
Waxtrax, 1991; and ---, Linger Fickin
Good. Sire Records, 1993.
Alan G. Gross, "A Disorder of Being: review-2.195
Heroes, Martyrs, and the Holocaust."
Review of Lawrence L. Langer, Holocaust
Testimonies: The Ruins of Memory. New
Haven: Yale UP, 1991; James E. Young, The
Texture of Memory: Holocaust Memorials
and Meaning. New Haven: Yale UP, 1993;
and Yitzhak Zuckerman, A Surplus of Memory:
Chronicle of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising.
Barbara Harshav, ed. and trans. Berkeley:
University of California Press, 1993.
Karen Morin, "The Gender of Geography." review-3.195
Review of Gillian Rose, Feminism and
Geography: The Limits of Geographical
Knowledge. Minneapolis: University of
Minnesota Press, 1993.
Steven Helmling, "The Desire Called review-4.195
Jameson." Review of Fredric Jameson,
The Seeds of Time. New York: Columbia
University Press, 1994.
Matthew Causey, "Mapping the review-5.195
Dematerialized: Writing Postmodern
Performance Theory." Review of Nick Kaye,
Postmodernism and Performance. London:
Macmillan, 1994.
Jon Thompson, "A Turn Toward The Past." review-6.195
Review of Carolyn Forche, The Angel of
History. New York: Harper Collins, 1994.
-- Review Editor: Jim English
NOTICES
Announcements and Advertizements [WWW Version only]
-----------------------------------------------------------------
ABSTRACTS
Kevin McNeilly, "Ugly Beauty: John Zorn and the Politics of
Postmodern Music"
ABSTRACT: John Zorn's music, both composition and
performance, pursues a crucial relationship between the
political and the postmodern. Zorn's music is affective,
in the sense that it attempts to engender a decidedly
proactive response in its listeners to the anaesthetic,
technocratic conditions of mass media and mass culture.
That affectivity is generated, however, from within mass
culture itself, as Zorn exploits both established genre and
renegade noise. Against the often elitist assumptions of
Theodor Adorno and Jacques Attali, epitomized in the
practices of such late modernist composers as John Cage,
Zorn's music offers an ironic counterthrust, while
attempting simultaneously to provoke a somewhat uneasy
musical revolution; his work dismantles and reassembles
musical form using its own technocratic trappings, but also
aims toward an inherently self-critical sense of creative
community. --KM
Arkady Plotnitsky, "RE-: Re-flecting, Re-membering,
Re-collecting, Re-selecting, Re-warding, Re-wording,
Re-iterating, Re-et-cetra-ing,...(in) Hegel"
ABSTRACT: This paper explores the conjunction of
consciousness, history, and economy in Hegel, centering
around the concept of economy and linking it to the modern
(post-Hegelian) and postmodern institution of collecting.
The Hegelian economy both offers a paradigmatic classical
econonmy of collecting and carries within itself the forces
of dislocation of classical understanding of collecting--or
economy--and entails a reinterpretation of both. This
reinterpretation, and the economics of collecting it
implies, conform to George Bataille's "general economy,"
which he opposes to "restricted economies," such as Hegel's
philosophy or Marx's political economy (in their classical
interpretation), which aim to contain irreducible loss, or
excessive accumulation, within the systems they describe.
General economy would see the relationships between both
types of economic aspects--the productive or conserving and
the destructive or wasteful--as multiply interactive,
sometimes metaphorically mirroring each other, sometimes
metonymically connected, sometimes disconnected. The
"economics" of Hegel's own text, of its production and
reception, and Andy Warhol's practices of collecting, are
considered as key examples in this argument. --AP
Ewa Ziarek, "The Uncanny Style of Kristeva's Critique
of Nationalism"
ABSTRACT: On the basis of the aesthetics of the uncanny,
Kristeva rethinks the model of collective identification at
work in modern nation-states from the marginal position of
the foreigner. Exposing the violence of xenophobia
underlying national affiliations, Kristeva attempts to
articulate a different concept of sociality, based on the
"respect for the irreconcilable." Such a respect for the
radical form of otherness not only contests the reification
of language (where the arbitrary signs become emblems of
the imaginary communion with others) but also demystifies
the identity of the symbolic order itself. Since for
Kristeva the individual or collective identity is
inextricably bound with a "fascinated rejection of the
other," she argues that only a departure from that logic of
identity--from the affective %Einfuhlung% as well as from
the equivalences set up by the symbolic totality--can
create non-violent conditions of being with others. In
_Strangers to Ourselves_, Kristeva's political critique of
nationalism leads to an inquiry into ethics. In this
context, I explore the notion of alterity implied by this
intersection, or perhaps, disjunction, between the politics
and ethics of psychoanalysis. --EZ
Charles Shepherdson, "History and the Real: Foucault with Lacan"
ABSTRACT: This paper contests the canonical reception of
Foucault, which has stressed two aspects of his work: on
the one hand, its contribution to "theory" or "method" (the
theory of power, or sexuality, or genealogy), and on the
other hand its status as "historical knowledge." The paper
argues that the crucial epistemological break forged by
Foucault lies in its refusal to lay claim to a metalanguage
(a "theory of power" for example), and its refusal to
present its historical material as "knowledge about the
past," as the discipline of history traditionally presents
itself. The argument focuses on three features of
Foucault's work: its status as a "history of the present"
(as opposed to knowledge about the past); its interest in
the "limits of formalization" (as opposed to the systematic
aims of structuralist thought); and its explicitly
"fictional" character. All three issues are clarified
through a parallel with Lacanian psychoanalysis. The first
issue can be formulated in terms of the "position of
enunciation." Here, Foucault is seen to aim more at
disrupting the place of the speaking subject--namely, our
current arrangement of knowledge--that at producing an
account of the past. The second issue can be formulated in
terms of what Lacan calls "the real," namely, a traumatic
element which has no imaginary or symbolic form, which is
lacking any representation, but which haunts the systemic
organization of conscious thought, marking its
incompleteness, the impossibility of its closure. Here,
Foucault is regarded as aiming, neither at a "structural
linguistics" (as "archaeology" is usually seen to be), nor
at a "return to history" ("genealogy"), but as aiming to
encounter the "real" in a Lacanian sense--to provoke the
destabilization of our contemporary arrangement of
knowledge by touching upon the elements of trauma within it
(such as "madness," in his early work, or "sex" in his
later work). Finally, the third issue, "fiction," obliges
us to stress the degree to which Foucault's work presented
itself as a kind of action, a kind of praxis or
intervention, rather than a "documentary" form of
knowledge. Here, the status of Foucault's "historical"
research comes very close to the "fictions" produced in the
course of analysis. This point also makes it possible to
give more weight to the references Foucault constantly made
to works of art, references which have always been slighted
by those who wish to present his work as either "positive
historical research" or a new methodology or metalanguage.
In more general terms, the paper seeks to bring together
two thinkers who, in the canonical reception, have been
simply opposed to one another--as if Foucault simply
repudiated psychoanalysis, while Lacan's purported
"structuralism" had no relation to contemporary efforts to
rethink historical knowledge. By bringing the two thinkers
together, the paper hopes to intervene in this canonical
interpretation. --CS
Hassan Melehy, "Images Without: Deleuzian Becoming, Science
Fiction Cinema in the Eighties"
ABSTRACT: Gilles Deleuze's _Cinema 1_ and _Cinema 2_ are
integral to the philosopher's career-long projects, as they
involve a rereading of philosophy in search of its less
dominant aspects in order to elicit resistance to
totalizing forces. Deleuze interprets Henri Bergson's
notion of the image. This notion is akin to Deleuze's own
characterization of the simulacrum in an early essay on
Plato: the simulacrum turns out to be not so much a false
representation as what debunks the representation that
claims to be true. Deleuze enters the cinema to undo the
predominance of imposed true images of the world, which
philosophy has largely accepted since Plato. Of interest
in connection with Deleuze is a set of science fiction
movies released in the 1980s: these films take up questions
of the cyborg and simulation, raising the anxiety of what
is real and what human in the age of image-producing
technology. The directors addressed are James Cameron,
John Carpenter, David Cronenberg, Ridley Scott, and Paul
Verhoeven. These movies treat philosophical concepts in
ways that point to the possibility of reconceiving human
limits in relation to images and machinery. --HM
Dion Dennis, "Evocations of Empire in a Transnational
Corporate Age: Tracking the Sign of Saturn"
ABSTRACT: This essay examines how a series of "New World
Order" effects, such as deindustrialization, downward
mobility and the economic climate for Generation Xers are
represented within current U.S. corporate, educational and
political practices. In shaping the politics of everyday
anxiety, endemic concerns about personal and social
security are often thoroughly intermixed with a pervasive
nostalgia for the "Golden Age" of the American Empire
(roughly 1955-1973). The current task for public relations
workers at transnational corporations and their
governmental allies has been how to recover the iconography
of the American Dream as a positivity in a time of
dislocation and disaccumulation. Specifically, they
cultivate and circulate a claim that transborder
informational and production practices do not represent the
death of the American Dream. In the amended account, the
American Dream is resurrected, phoenix-like, in the
promised embodiment of a postindustrial,
information-driven, "next generation" form. In doing this,
they refurbish the powerful and recurrent American ideology
of techno-utopianism. And "Saturn" has become a key
signifier repetitively attached to well-promoted projects
and promises of Imperial reinvigoration via technology.
This essay is a politico-semiotic analysis of the intended
and unintended meaning-effects attached to these
techno-Saturnian projects. From NASA rockets and General
Motors' Saturn division to the Saturn School of Tomorrow,
the essay probes the sign of Saturn's multiple and
contradictory connotations--including the political promise
of nation-state hegemony in a transcorporate era. --DD
_________________________________________________________________
COPYRIGHT: Unless otherwise noted, copyrights for the texts which
comprise this issue of Postmodern Culture are held by their
authors. The compilation as a whole is Copyright (c) 1995 by
Postmodern Culture and Oxford University Press, all rights
reserved. Items published by Postmodern Culture may be freely
shared among individuals, but they may not be republished in any
medium without express written consent from the author(s) and
advance notification of the editors. Issues of Postmodern
Culture may be archived for public use in electronic or other
media, as long as each issue is archived in its entirety and no
fee is charged to the user; any exception to this restriction
requires the written consent of the editors and of the publisher.
_________________________________________________________________
IATH WWW Server
Last Modified: