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Abstracts

Volume 16, Number 2
January, 2006

    Eu Jin Chua, Laurie Anderson's Telepresence

    • Abstract: A survey of the work of American artist Laurie Anderson makes clear her career-long interest in what may be described as the modern subject's self-alienation in the face of excessive technologization and authoritarianism. This article argues that her 1998 installation Dal Vivo forms an extreme endpoint in this ongoing project of artistic critique. It claims that the conceit of this installation, which can be understood as an unusual and highly mediatized variation on performance art, places Anderson in an irresolvable ethical bind. For the installation crystallises, in aesthetic form, the paranoia which Eric Santner argues is endemic to subjects forced to function within the damaging solicitations of disciplinary authority, and it makes Anderson complicit within this process. The ethical predicament created by the installation's deployment of tele-technologies, moreover, suggests the potential of telepresence technologies to function repressively, thus providing a cautionary note to too uncritical techno-utopian accounts of tele-technologies. --ejc

    Oliver Harris, Not Burroughs' Final Fix: Materializing The Yage Letters

    • Abstract: The essay reconsiders recent developments in the field of material scholarship and editing to advance the case for a social text approach that recognises the independent life of the text in its multiple material histories. Focusing on the especially complicated textual history of two works by William Burroughs--The Naked Lunch and The Yage Letters--it demonstrates the opportunities of such an approach for both critical interpretation and the production of new editions. Demonstrating how Burroughs criticism has rested upon an inadequate material base, the essay then argues the importance of a more rigorous descriptive approach to his texts, including recognition of their physical codes, and for recovering the original circumstances of their production. In the case of The Yage Letters, making visible the rich complexity of the text's publishing history enables a more accurate and complete factual record both to underpin new critical interpretation and to generate entirely new objects of critical analysis. It also generates new understandings not only of Burroughs' writing and of the publishing environment in which he worked, but of the relationship between authorial intention and contingent agency. The bulk of the essay details the materialist underpinnings to the author's new edition of The Yage Letters. Documenting the text's provenance in numerous little magazines, it recovers the original social, cultural, and bibliographical histories of these part-publications, and then reveals their unsuspected role in the production of the final text itself. Finally, it considers the implications of textual history for editing practice, framed by recognition of the determining social agency of the publisher. --oh

    Martin Hipsky, Post-Cold War Paranoia in The Corrections and The Sopranos

    • Abstract: This essay proposes that Jonathan Franzen's novel The Corrections (2001) and David Chase's television series The Sopranos (1999-2007) offer cultural indices of the contemporary habitus of much of middle-class U.S. society and potential signs of an emergent strain of "late postmodernist" representation. These narratives supersede the demanding experimentalism of Pynchonesque or David Lynch-style "high postmodernism," and offer instead the accessible and pleasurable incorporation of modernist flourish and postmodern play into traditional realist narrative. Their hybrid mimesis, perhaps unique to our turn-of-the-century moment, has achieved considerable popular appeal among audiences who, long since immersed in the schizophrenic intensities of near-universal commodification, can powerfully "relate to" such narrative farragoes of psychic fragmentation, the "decline" of the family, and the newfound paranoias of globalization. More specifically, these two paradigmatic texts symbolically code the political unconscious of the post-Cold War, professional-managerial class of North America. Such popular entertainments appeal to the (primarily, though not exclusively) white-collar middle class--the "blue" or "metro" demographics--by staging a metonymic realism without the consolations of myth or symbol, without the telos or metaphysics of master metaphor. Firmly established within the "low-mimetic" modes of comedy and realism, even as they are intermittently destabilized by the ironies and self-reflexivity of postmodernism, these narratives might be said to express the contemporary disquietudes and pathologies of "business as usual."--mh

    Chloé Taylor, Hard, Dry Eyes and Eyes That Weep: Vision and Ethics in Levinas and Derrida

    • Abstract: This paper discusses the relationship between vision and ethics in the writings of Emmanuel Levinas and Jacques Derrida. While it begins with an account of the dominant antiocularism of Levinas's and Derrida's philosophies, according to which vision subsumes the other into the same, this essay also attends to less frequent moments in their works in which vision is understood as a passive response to the other, as suffering and surprise, and expands upon this more positive view of the ethical potential of vision. In contrast to an ethics of blindness, which this paper argues is present in Derrida's use of Levinas's ethical phenomenology to discuss vision and the closed eye, this paper explores the capacity of the eyes not only to see but to cry, and to see through tears, in order to develop an account of a visionary ethics, an ethics of tears. --ct

    Justin Vicari, Fragments of Utopia: A Meditation on Fassbinder's Treatment of Anti-Semitism and the Third Reich

    • Abstract: This essay grew out of a book-length study of Rainer Werner Fassbinder's masterpiece, In a Year with Thirteen Moons. The essay argues against commonly held misconceptions of Fassbinder as the "Bad Boy" of 1970s New German Cinema--to comprehend him as a serious and profound artist deeply concerned with the Holocaust, and a poetic champion of society's outsiders. Though his films are staged around issues of helplessness and victimization, with an ironic awareness of how outsiders become complicit in the process of their own persecution, Fassbinder primarily explored the ways in which negative projection is forced upon minority groups. Fassbinder's depictions of Jewish characters are deliberate reversals or complex re-readings of the inflammatory propaganda of the Nazi era: where once Jewish men were depicted as "feminized" Untermenschen, in Fassbinder's films it's the German men who become feminized (and hystericized) vis-á-vis their Jewish counterparts. The essay positions In a Year with Thirteen Moons as an expression of postwar misanthropy, in relation to Jean-Paul Sartre's play, The Condemned of Altona, Luchino Visconti's The Damned, and August Sander's portrait-photographs from the 1920s. --jv

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