Abstracts
Volume 13, Number 3May, 2003
- Abstract: This article uses a reading of Chuck Palahiuk's novel, Fight Club, as an opportunity to construct a Lacanian framework for understanding historical self-consciousness. I argue that Fight Club's historical imagination dramatizes the way the impossibility of defining the postmodern "present" is conflated with the interminability of identifying with one's symptom, revealing how both are governed by the same tautological performativity. Fight Club's narrator couches his wounded masculinity in conspicuously historical terms, seeking recognition from the Other qua History as a means of interpellating an identity for both period and self. I argue that this dynamic, a dynamic of historical interpellation, is one way texts "think historically," to borrow Jameson's phrase, in postmodernity. In other words, maybe texts do not reflect or reveal their time so much as they assert--performatively, imaginatively--what their time ought to be. --kpf
- Abstract: Between June 1999 and April 2000, philosopher Jean-Luc Nancy and painter Simon Hantaï exchanged a series of letters relating to a group of artworks that Hantaï was producing to accompany the forthcoming book on Nancy by their mutual friend, Jacques Derrida ( Le Toucher, Jean-Luc Nancy [2000]). Hantaï's works consist of "unreadable manuscripts": passages by Nancy and Derrida meticulously copied and recopied on stiffened crumpled batiste. Ultimately, the letters were published as La Connaissance des textes: Lecture d'un manuscrit illisible (Correspondances), including the text of the correspondence, color plates of Hantaï's "travaux de lecture," photographic reproductions of all the letters, and a final letter by Derrida addressed to both correspondents. This reading of the correspondence takes into account its epistolary dynamics--its logic of sending and receiving, its "message strategy"--which are analyzed in terms of a Deleuzian "desiring machine." Other important aspects of the published correspondence include its complex negotiation of visual and discursive modes and its relationship to a set of significant pre-texts: the passages from Nancy's Etre singulier pluriel and Derrida's Donner le temps that Hantaï renders "unreadable" as he copies and recopies them; and, of course, Le Toucher. It is important to look at Connaissance not only as a "text," but also as a "book": a physical object, manifesting production constraints and editorial choices that subtly interact with the dialogue of the correspondents. This analysis is shaped by the reflections of Derrida, Nancy, and other scholars and theoreticians on the vicissitudes of "the letter" and its emblematic relation to questions of textual materiality, production, and reproduction. --jch
- Abstract: This essay situates Barrett Watten's book-length poem Bad History against the debate between Jean Baudrillard and Christopher Norris regarding the proper position of the intellectual during the Persian Gulf War. Bad History provides a provisional third way, mobilizing both the paranoiac postmodernity of Baudrillard and the hyperrationality of Norris, in a poetry that refuses to extract itself from its own subjective position, a resistance that speaks beyond the limits of its own political group. Watten's poem is the most sophisticated attempt to grapple with the Gulf War in part because it situates itself in the cultural milieu that enabled the war itself to take place: what Paul Virilio calls "Pure War"--that state of society whereby the real war is the constant preparation for war. By invoking and countering the epic mode through a poetics of interference, a subjectivity vacillating between complicity and resistance, and formal innovations (including use of footers, newspaper-like columns, and a hefty appendix), Bad History stands out as perhaps the most important poetry to emerge out of the Persian Gulf War. --pm
- Abstract: The article discusses a dominant trend in postmodernism toward the dissolution of subjectivity into something vague, unstable, fragmented, amorphic, and always impersonal. In line with the ethical appeal of Lyotard's idea of the inhuman as a resistance to the tyranny of subjectivity, Baudrillard defines the fatal or the inhuman as an expression of the enigma of the world, its resistance to metaphysics. What makes Baudrillard's theory of the hyperreal problematic is the possibility for confusing the hyperreal with the pure or the impersonal (i.e., with the fatal) since both are defined as the collapse of the subject/object distinction. On one hand, the impersonal is the elimination of human perception as an external, privileged point of view. However, the hyperreal is also defined as the elimination of the subjective point of view, the suppression of the look, the fact that the object of perception is always already there, already seen, thus preventing the act of seeing. Obscenity then has two mutually exclusive meanings: it signifies either the absolute triumph of subjectivity (the world has been preempted by consciousness, objects are merely extensions or reflections of the subject) or the complete objectivization of the world (everything becomes objective because what is already seen is, for that very reason, no longer accessible: it cannot be manipulated by the subject). The de-realization of reality is the destruction of subjectivity but, as Baudrillard notes, the crime is never perfect. If the real is still preserved--as the trace of what has been murdered--the subject also survives its annihilation or dispersal; its destiny passes into the object. By subjectivizing or de-realizing the world, the subject has revealed its ability to appear and disappear--to lose itself in multiplicity--which is, in fact, the strongest proof that there is still a subject since Baudrillard himself defines the constitutive illusion of the world as the possibility of things to appear and disappear. Subjectivity includes its own annihilation, its pseudo-sacrificial self-reduction to objective (fatal) reality. --tt
- Abstract: Open Source Software refers to a software development model in which the source code is open for modification and redistribution, unlike proprietary software such as Microsoft Windows, which denies access to the source. The OSS model, in particular the Linux operating system, has garnered much attention from disciplines as diverse as computer science, sociology, economics, law, and political science; however, cultural theory and media studies, especially theories influenced by poststructuralist thought, have yet to address the social impact of Open Source and its potential as a political philosophy in the network society. This paper examines the convergence of poststructuralist anarchism (using works by Michel Foucault, Gilles Deleuze, Lebbeus Woods, and Hakim Bey) and Open Source Software via a discursive analysis of Eric Raymond's Open Source manifesto and ethnographic survey, "The Cathedral and the Bazaar." --mt
Krister Paul Friday, "A Generation of Men Without History": Fight Club, Masculinity, and the Historical Symptom
Julie Candler Hayes, "The Body of the Letter": Epistolary Acts of Jean-Luc Nancy, Simon Hantaï, and Jacques Derrida
Philip Metres, Barrett Watten's Bad History: A Counter-Epic of the Gulf War
Temenuga Trifonova, Is There a Subject in Hyperreality?
Michael Truscello, The Architecture of Information: Open Source Software and Tactical Poststructuralist Anarchism
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