Abstracts, PMC 12.1

Abstracts

Volume 12, Number 1
September, 2001

David Grandy, The Otherness of Light

Abstract: Otherness is an integral part of the human experience, and yet the very coin of otherness is strangeness and apartness. How then does otherness bridge into experience? Here light is presented as a bridging agency, albeit one that fosters and fashions the ambiguities associated with otherness at the experiential level. In Einsteinian physics, light breaks into material reality in a "relationless" way: the speed or motion of light cannot be scaled into the motion of material bodies, into the spacetime metric of everyday experience. Similarly, Emmanuel Levinas's otherness has an integrity or metric of its own that cannot be assimilated into Heideggerian Being. Inasmuch as light enables apprehension of the other, one may propose a single process: the irreducibility of light becomes the irreducible otherness of the outside world.--dg

Suzanne Bost, "Be deceived if ya wanna be foolish": (Re)constructing Body, Genre, and Gender in Feminist Rap

Abstract: Current media that love to demonize Black urban culture focus much attention on "gangsta rap" because it reinforces racist criteria of gender intelligibility that date from slavery. In this framework, women are objectified as "hos"--sexual commodities and exotic spectacle--or vilified as gender-crossing "gangstas"--a criminal threat to social order and "pure" womanhood. This gender binary eclipses much of the work done by women within hip hop culture. Chicago rap star Da Brat has achieved tremendous success both inside and outside of "the ghetto," but this prominence can be attributed, in part, to her apparent concession to rap's famed misogyny, "booty call," and other dominant media images. Using the familiar criteria gains Da Brat a much wider audience than her more clearly "feminist" contemporaries, and the size of this audience makes her a serious political force to be reckoned with. Employing double-voiced strategies that are traditional to African American culture--from slave songs and quilts with hidden meanings to signifyin(g) linguistic games and multi-tracked, parodic "sampling"--hip hop texts are often about more than they seem to be. Yet critics miss this complexity when they ignore the dissonance between verbal, musical, and corporeal levels of performance. This paper uses the overtly feminist raps of hip hop-style spoken word artists--Ursula Rucker, Dana Bryant, and Sarah Jones--to uncover potentially empowering gender politics in the more ambivalent, but also more publicly visible, raps of Da Brat. All four artists begin by emphasizing the artificiality of objectified images of Black women, undermine these images with excessive imitation, and ultimately clear spaces for reimagining hip hop gender. Together they present powerful and accessible feminist theories of the body.--sb

Frank Palmeri, Other Than Postmodern?--Foucault, Pynchon, Hybridity, Ethics

Abstract: This essay argues that the high postmodernism of the 1960s through the 1980s has been succeeded by two other modes of cultural expression. In the late postmodernism which has been dominant in the last decade, the tense equilibrium between paranoia and skepticism typical of the earlier period has hardened into a darkly paranoid vision of conspiracies that usually involve threatening human hybrids. In such works as The X-Files and The Matrix, an autonomous human subject emerges as a hero whose efforts can save humans from becoming hybrids with machines or aliens. What is other than postmodern, by contrast, moves away from the representation of extreme paranoia toward a vision of local ethical-political action and a less anxious view of human hybrids. Levinas's philosophy of ethical responsibility serves as a precursor and component of this mode, as does Haraway's manifesto for cyborgs, and Laclau and Mouffe's emphasis on subject positions rather than essential identities. Foucault and Pynchon, in their roughly parallel careers, turn away from a high postmodern deterministic vision of the efficacy of normalizing forces (Foucault) or the prominence of inanimacy and death (Pynchon). Their later works resist paranoid totalizing, and view humans less as automata subject to forces of control, and more as creatures with some capacity for effective ethical-political action, based on their ability to form themselves. Other-than-postmodern thinkers do not seek to establish an essential, purely human subject, and are thus more open to the possibilities for hybrids of humans and others, and to an understanding of animals as moral subjects, as exemplified in Pynchon's Mason & Dixon.--fp

Ashley Dawson, Surveillance Sites: Digital Media and the Dual Society in Keith Piper's "Relocating the Remains"

Abstract: This essay argues that postcolonial theory needs to be brought to bear on digital media. In addition, the essay dramatizes such an application through analysis of Keith Piper's digital installation Relocating the Remains. The declining value of technology stocks has certainly deflated some of the hyperbolic utopian rhetoric that attached to the internet in its early days. Yet even in the heyday of the "New Economy," discussions of digital technology were imbued with problematic assumptions and studded with metaphors lifted blindly from colonial discourse. As Keith Piper's work demonstrates through its deft dissection of the role of the social sciences during the colonial era, science and technology are not only historically embedded, but have often been complicit with the European project of colonial domination. However, descriptions of contemporary technology are not simply the product of historical amnesia. Digital media are themselves central to the project of surveying and containing populations that are perceived as a threat to social stability in the increasingly polarized cities of today. Such technologies therefore need to be carefully scrutinized for their potential to curtail civil liberties. In addition, the essay argues that we must to be attentive to possible changes in the code through which technologies like the internet are structured, for it is this code which enables or disables oppressive uses of technology. As Piper's dystopian vision underlines, there are no ironclad guarantees that digital media will be used for egalitarian purposes.--ad

Rita Raley, Reveal Codes: Hypertext and Performance

Abstract: A central problem for hypertext fiction, criticism, and theory has been the delineation of a strict ontological difference between the analog and the digital, but this problem is irresolvable in these terms. It is not possible to locate a fundamental difference in the metaphysical sense, and yet it cannot be denied that something different happens when one works with, or performs, hypertext: the operative difference this makes is the concern of this article. The author argues that hypertext must be conceived in terms of performance and that approaching the problem of a difference between the analog and the digital must be done in a mode through which digital textuality can emerge on its own terms. To that end, the author proposes a new typology for hypertext by emphasizing its function as performance, an interface of user and system that becomes a mode that separates the digital from the analog. The performance of hypertext collapses processing and product, input and output, within a system of "making" that is both complex and emergent. Because it is its emergence in performance that differentiates hypertext from text, its difference as such is not ontologically discernible and it is locatable only in effect. The article is constructed in four nodes--Charting, Combinatorial Writing, An-anamorphosis, and Linking--which display and situate this new aspect of performance in the digital terms of hypertext. The central visual model for what the author identifies as the trace performance of hypertext is Jasper Johns's anamorphic painting Flags.--rr

Da-w Gal'ueai, Hii-[per~~lexlico~~aorpara=][strophismagien: Geo-grphammmatico-empiro]postr-spgraphicascoepisge

Abstracht: He stirkens out alsto yon distante marke. Holo, stripes yhis pare. Vaspusio, hehtoughtoutof this, as sugg. yin _Loaws_ &yan _Crisias_.--= A canonization intheDoneaanmode, , &ya'reocgitintonoiof htehete- remoneorphousnature of languagagel...a renunicatioantofyTErrror,yhweihach aassseumsethattheyareisomorhpic &attemptsthomakeThem so' (PMC 666), thenew-fdlandSited, yand into yong long natureyearly history. Takeethis queyandgo forth.--dù

Evans Chan, Against Postmodernism, etcetera--A Conversation with Susan Sontag

Abstract: The interview explores Susan Sontag's ambivalent, contradictory relationship with, and overt hostility to, postmodernism, which she dismisses as "[non]-critical ideas." As both a cultural critic/essayist and novelist, she refuses to lend credence to postmodernism by distancing her celebrated '60s writings on "camp" and "the new sensibility," as well as her most recent novels, from what has come to be known as the postmodern. While acknowledging the interviewer's interpretation of "On Photography" as a pioneering work about postmodernity, she continues to characterize "postmodern" as a term both imprecise and cheap, a way of facilitating consumerism. Sontag makes provocative statements about Barthes and Jameson and expresses a wholesale political dismissal of Baudrillard. She talks about post-Cold War politics and her disillusionment as a public intellectual. Also intended as an introduction to a Chinese anthology of Sontag's writings, the interview invites Sontag to reminisce about her trip to China in the 60's, which she has never written about directly.--ec

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