X-VM-v5-Data: ([nil nil nil nil nil nil nil nil nil] [nil nil nil nil nil nil nil nil nil nil nil "Postmodern Culture 5.2" "^From:" nil nil nil nil "Postmodern Culture 5.2" nil nil] nil) Received: from sparc02.cc.ncsu.edu by world.std.com (5.65c/Spike-2.0) id AA11592; Wed, 15 Feb 1995 00:14:35 -0500 Received: from (localhost) by sparc02.cc.ncsu.edu (5.67b/SYSTEMS 12-28-92 15:15:00) id AA28639; Wed, 15 Feb 1995 00:14:31 -0500 Posted-Date: Wed, 15 Feb 1995 00:14:31 -0500 Message-Id: <199502150403.AA32822@jefferson.village.Virginia.EDU> Errors-To: pmc@jefferson.village.virginia.edu Reply-To: pmc-list@listserv.ncsu.edu Originator: pmc-list@listserv.ncsu.edu Precedence: bulk X-Listserver-Version: 6.0 -- UNIX ListServer by Anastasios Kotsikonas X-Comment: NCSU Post Modern Culture From: Postmodern Culture Sender: pmc-list@listserv.ncsu.edu To: obi@world.std.com Subject: Postmodern Culture 5.2 Date: Wed, 15 Feb 1995 00:14:31 -0500 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 Pfiel 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 notices.195 ----------------------------------------------------------------- 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 economy 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 ---------------------------------------------------------------- PMC-MOO: The editors of _Postmodern Culture_ gratefully acknowledge the contributions of Lisa Brawley, Bill Garrett, Craig Horman, Ted Whalen, and Shawn Wilbur, who run PMC-MOO, the journal's text-based virtual reality facility. To connect to PMC-MOO telnet to hero.village.virginia.edu and log in as "pmcdemo"; hit the "enter" key when prompted for a password. 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