Abstracts, PMC 15.2

Abstracts

Volume 15, Number 2
January, 2005

Dana Cuff, Enduring Proximity: The Figure of the Neighbor in Suburban America

Abstract: The figure of the neighbor as metaphor, practice, and form is a lens through which we can read the postwar suburban landscape. In the residential sphere, the un-private, quasi-public space of the neighbor establishes our proximity with otherness in enduring, significant ways. As the ground for proto-political engagement, neighborhoods figure interiority and publicity, sameness and difference, intimacy and enmity. This essay places Levittown, and its mass-produced conformity, as the progenitor of more recent historicist, themed, community developments often taken as its opposites. The literal projection of neighborliness in the physical form of porches, park benches, and brick veneers simultaneously masks and controls discomfort with difference. By contrast, an early modernist housing tract projects an abstract field in which privacy and tolerance can be situated. The contemporary figure of the neighbor embodied in suburban spatial patterns articulates an anxiety over close-up encounters with strangers, and points toward ways to garner the political fruits of civility.--dc

Steven Helmling, During Auschwitz: Adorno, Hegel, and the "Unhappy Consciousness" of Critique

Abstract: This paper considers the hair-shirt ethos of T. W. Adorno's writing practice in relation to the counterexample of Hegel, Adorno's single most important "influence." Adorno's critique of modernity foregrounds the repression of affect, a theme allegorized in Dialectic of Enlightenment (1944) in the Homeric episode of Odysseus and the Sirens. Salient among the loci of Adorno's critique is philosophy (sc. critique) itself, a project, and a "kind of writing," heavily invested since Plato in an ethos of dispassion. Adorno sees in this an instance of the sundering of thought from feeling that he protested throughout his career. "The need to lend a voice to suffering is the condition of all truth," he writes, thus committing his own critical labor to a textual effect, or affect, of a kind of critical "unhappy consciousness." This last phrase comes, of course, from Hegel, but Hegel posits "unhappy consciousness" as part of humankind's historical burden--that is, as part of the problem Hegel's providential philosophical historicizing is meant to "solve." To that end, Hegel not only diagnoses and prescribes against "unhappy consciousness," but his own prose style achieves a serenity or "optimism" that many take as evidence of a false or ideological consciousness in Hegel, a Panglossian "imaginary solution to a real contradiction." Adorno shares this reservation about Hegel (and about the after-effects of his optimism in Soviet triumphalism). In Adorno's own writing, what I call an "after Auschwitz," or indeed a "during Auschwitz" imperative, prescribes a tone, an affect, quite the reverse of Hegel's, despite Adorno's patent indebtedness to Hegel. The essay links these stylistic contrasts to Adorno's and Hegel's differing speculations as, in effect, psychologists of "unhappy consciousness," and with Adorno's troubled relation to the theme of Utopia.--sh

Christopher Kocela, Unmade Men: The Sopranos After Whiteness

Abstract: An implicit assumption of much work in whiteness studies is that to heighten white racial awareness--particularly about the sometimes "invisible" privileges that whiteness affords--is to engage in a form of anti-racist practice. This essay reads the HBO television series The Sopranos in light of recent efforts (like those of Mike Hill and Ruth Frankenburg) to rethink the functioning of white racial identification in an age in which the "end of whiteness" is frequently proclaimed both inside and outside academia. By focusing on the way in which the series' protagonist, Tony Soprano, strategically affirms and denies his status as white, the essay argues that The Sopranos foregrounds the historically disavowed relationship between Italian-American identity and whiteness, while also revealing how the celebration of ethnic difference can be used to preserve white privilege. The essay then argues, given Tony's frequent appeal to various lost symbolic fathers, the need for a psychoanalytic understanding of white racial (mis)identification. Using the Lacanian model of race developed by Kalpana Seshadri-Crooks, the essay explains Tony's recurring panic attacks as evidence of racial anxiety brought about by the foreclosure of his desire for a cultural master-signifier of whiteness. The essay concludes by arguing for the need to combine psychoanalytic and historicizing theories when addressing the complexities and contradictions of white racial awareness in what some have called a "post-white" era.--ck

Robert Meister, "Never Again": The Ethics of the Neighbor and the Logic of Genocide

Abstract: This essay delineates and criticizes the specific view of ethics (the ethics of the neighbor) and politics (the politics of rescue) implied by the paradigm of radical evil that is often coded simply as "Auschwitz." The imperative that "Auschwitz" must "never again" occur is at once an account of evil that foregrounds atrocities occurring at the local level and a global rationale for third-party intervention in response. To explore the structure and limitations of this particular version of human rights discourse, the article develops the contrast between Lévinas and Badiou on the importance of relationships of mere proximity in contrast to those based on history, affinity, universality, solidarity, etc. Reading both thinkers against Schmitt's view that the ethical duty to rescue one who is in danger presupposes that there is another who can be legitimately attacked for endangerment (and that in this sense politics precedes ethics), the article is critical of the new humanitarian ethics for removing questions of justice not involving face-to-face cruelty (especially injustice committed at a distance) from the ethical field. The article does not, however, find Badiou's ethics of militant commitment to be a sufficient response to Lévinas's restatement of ethics after Auschwitz (and after Schmitt). To move beyond Lévinas, one must question what he takes to be the central lesson of Auschwitz: that bodily suffering is always ethically meaningless trauma that becomes even worse when it is experienced to be happening again. The article concludes that humanitarian ethics after Auschwitz reflects a cultural tendency to reduce the moral significance that physical agony sometimes has to "trauma" that merely becomes worse through the experience of repetition. This tendency severely truncates our moral vocabulary in dealing with political struggles on the ground. Once we stop using ethics as an evasion of politics, the ways in which the ethics of the neighbor are also a politics come into clear view, as does the question of who is to be rescued from whom when third-party interventions occur.--rm

Laura O'Connor, Neighborly Hostility and Literary Creoles: The Example of Hugh MacDiarmid

Abstract: The proliferation of hybrid Englishes that has accompanied the monocultural thrust of "global" English has had significant impact on literary production in English. Hybrid Englishes are formed under conditions of colonial diglossia, in which the "High" English tongue coexists with other ("Low") vernaculars that have been marginalized or almost supplanted by it, and whose speech-communities are subjected to linguicism (discrimination against others on the basis of language and speaking-style). The literary Creoles that emerge from such diglossic contexts--where conscious and unconscious memories of linguicism survive in writers' minds, in the stuff of their art (language itself, and speech and literary genres), and in the social fabric and cultural unconscious of their speech-communities--illuminate the dynamics of intimate and hostile relations across a contested border. This essay examines how Hugh MacDiarmid's literary Creole, Synthetic Scots, and his modernist classic, A Drunk Man Looks at the Thistle (1926), work against and through the tendentious genres of popular blazon and "Scotticism" to interrogate what keeps Scotland's imageme (the ambivalent and unfalsifiable conceptual space within which a given national character is held to move) in place. --lo

Søren Pold, Interface Realisms: The Interface as Aesthetic Form

Abstract: This article argues for seeing the interface as an important representational and aesthetic form with implications for postmodern culture and digital aesthetics. The interface emphasizes realism due in part to the desire for transparency in Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) and partly to the development of illusionistic realism within computer graphics and games. The article compares the pragmatic realism of HCI with aesthetic notions of realism in the computer game Max Payne (illusionistic realism), the artist Jodi's game modifications (media realism), and Adrian Ward's software art work, "Signwave Auto Illustrator" (functional realism).--sp

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