CONTENTS 


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                         Articles


Sören Pold, Interface Realisms

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

Christopher Kocela, Unmade Men: The Sopranos After Whiteness 



               Ethics and the Politics of Proximity


Rei Terada, Preface: Approaching Proximity

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

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

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



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                      Reviews
 

Charles Altieri and Rei Terada, Maximal Minimalism. A review 
of _Robert Smithson_. Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles. 
12 Sept.-13 Dec. 2005.

Jason Read, From the Proletariat to the Multitude: Multitude 
and Political Subjectivity. A review of Michael Hardt and 
Antonio Negri, _Multitude: War and Democracy in the Age of 
Empire_. New York:  Penguin, 2004. 

Chris McGahan, Whither the Actually Existing Internet? A 
review of McKenzie Wark, _A Hacker Manifesto_. Cambridge: 
Harvard UP, 2004; and Vincent Mosco, _The Digital Sublime: 
Myth, Power, and Cyberspace_. Cambridge: MIT P, 2004. 

Andrew Strombeck, Whose Conspiracy Theory? A review of Peter 
Knight, _Conspiracy Culture: From Kennedy to the X-Files_. 
New York: Routledge, 2000. 

Heather Love, Some Day My Mom Will Come. A review of Esther
Sánchez-Pardo, _Cultures of the Death Drive: Melanie Klein 
and Modernist Melancholia_. Durham: Duke UP, 2003. 



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                  Notices (HTML Version Only)


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                  Notes on Contributors


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                         Abstracts

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

    o 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 

    o 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 aftereffects 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 

    o 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 

    o 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 

    o 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 


Sören Pold, Interface Realisms: The Interface as Aesthetic 
Form 

    o 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 artwork, "Signwave Auto Illustrator" 
(functional realism).--sp