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Bradley Butterfield, The Baudrillardian Symbolic, 9/11, and the War of Good and Evil

• Abstract: This essay compares Jean Baudrillard's notion of theoretical terrorism, based on his theory of symbolic exchange, to his remarks about real terrorism before and after 9/11. Symbolic exchange plays on the principle of "ineluctable demand," which Baudrillard derives mainly from Marcel Mauss's theory of the gift in "primitive" societies. The symbolic value of the gift is not its reducibility to another value, but the singular challenge it poses, which Baudrillard says still haunts the order of capital. In his recent "L'Esprit du Terrorisme," Baudrillard claims that we were all complicit in the spectacle of 9/11 and in the terrorists' resentment towards the U.S. as the world's only superpower. Counting also on our fascination with spectacles, they were able to enlist "the system" against itself by placing upon the media the demand that it report and thereby spread their gift of death. But death is not valued symbolically in the U.S., not in Baudrillard's terms, and so the violence of the spectacle in the end only quickens the numbness and indifference of the masses. The terrorists' hope, nevertheless, was that the U.S. would lose face in its retaliation in a way that the rest of the world would recognize. I argue that Nietzsche's conception of "mercy" is the only ethical response to the challenge of 9/11, if we recognize our symbolic standing in the world. The U.S. can only win its present war of Good vs. Evil by going beyond it, by forgiving debt, thus giving a gift of life in excess of what the terrorists gave in their gift of death. --bb

Christopher Douglas, "You Have Unleashed a Horde of Barbarians!": Fighting Indians, Playing Games, Forming Disciplines

• Abstract: We are about four or five years into the formation of a new discipline, that of digital game studies. At this early stage, digital game studies is necessarily and self-consciously concerned with its own formation, and recent commentators have differed over whether digital games should become part of an already existing discipline like cinema, literary, new media, or cultural studies or whether it needs to resist such "colonizing" attempts and develop into a discipline of its own, with a coherent object of study and institutional support. This essay agrees with the warnings against the kind of methodological blindnesses likely to result from such colonizations--that games will be understood as just a more interactive kind of film or narrative--but argues nonetheless that each of these disciplines (and others) is likely to have valuable conceptual tools that we need to carefully adapt for game studies. Moreover, it's sometimes precisely the historical baggage of the old disciplines that provides insight into the structure of game use. This essay argues that the ideological content of one series of influential games, Sid Meier's Civilization series, comes to light when the historical, disciplinary blindness to forms of American imperialism in American literary studies are considered. The Civilization games transform and display the symbolic Native presence in the land whose accidental, terrestrial effects in the games must be destroyed in order for the player to win the game; however, and moving beyond the kind of ideological representations found in film or narrative, in these games the users must perform their logic, a logic which is coded into the very rules of the game. Games like Civilization thus rehearse a series of lessons about national destiny, race and colonization, and the moral fitness of civilizations and individuals. --cd

Janet Holtman, Documentary Prison Films and the Production of Disciplinary Institutional "Truth"

• Abstract: Drawing primarily upon Michel Foucault's theories regarding knowledge and power, this essay examines the discursive mode of the documentary prison film. Beginning with Foucault's brief discussion of the role of newspapers and crime novels in nineteenth-century France, the essay contemplates the similar ways in which humanist discourses might be imbricated within today's popular and documentary films and the particular ways in which social force is disseminated by documentary prison films. Steven Shaviro's conceptualization of the "double articulation" of the bodily and the textual within filmic discourse is a pivotal concept. The essay concludes with an examination of Frederick Wiseman's provocative prison documentary Titicut Follies, the only American film ever to be banned for reasons other than national security or obscenity (though the judge's original decision contained an argument relating to the latter, which the essay attempts to take into account). Foucault's discussion of the asignificatory "monument" in The Archaeology of Knowledge plays an important role in the essay's conclusions about Wiseman's film and other documentaries. --jh

David Rando, Reading Gravity's Rainbow After September Eleventh: An Anecdotal Approach

• Abstract: This essay asks two primary questions: what and how can Gravity's Rainbow tell us about the world we live in after 9/11? Do anecdotes gain currency in times of war? Specifically, this essay seeks to read a sampling of the profuse post-9/11 anecdotes about children who break their piggy-banks and donate money to relief funds alongside Thomas Pynchon's graphic sexual depictions of children in the setting of World War II. How do each of these kinds of representation affect a state's ability to establish itself as innocent and to prosecute war? Centering on the figure of Zwölfkinder, a miniature of the state run by children in the novel, the essay explores how the state launders its institutions and its finances through its children. This state-in-miniature is akin to the diminutive form of the anecdote, which functions similarly as a site of innocence creation. Gravity's Rainbow's refusal to constitute children as either innocent or experienced blocks the kind of innocence production that post-9/11 "piggy-bank" anecdotes help to establish in the context of the state-written innocence/experience narrative. Children in such multiply mediated anecdotes become points of contact for the diverse desires of the public, the media, and other institutions, where the state takes its ultimate pleasure. In fact, rather than a recent phenomenon related directly to the 9/11 disaster, this specific form of piggy-bank anecdote has a history and is tied to specific ideological responses to war, as demonstrated in an early nineteenth-century anecdote that is structured almost identically to these newer ones. At the same time, however, the essay discusses the delicate historicity of this form and asks how history expresses itself in these and other anecdotes, questioning generally how these anecdotes are poised at an important nexus between event, narrative, and history.--dr

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