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POSTMODERNCULTUREPOSTMODERNCULTURE
P       RNCU   REPO   ODER       E            P O S T M O D E R N
P  TMOD RNCU  U EP S  ODER  ULTU E               C U L T U R E
P       RNCU  UR  OS  ODER  ULTURE
P  TMODERNCU  UREPOS  ODER  ULTU E          an electronic journal
P  TMODERNCU  UREPOS  ODER       E           of interdisciplinary
POSTMODERNCULTUREPOSTMODERNCULTURE                      criticism
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Volume 16, Number 1 (January, 2006)              ISSN: 1053-1920
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Editor:                             Eyal Amiran


Review Editor:                      Kent Puckett

Editorial Collective:		    Lisa Brawley
                                    James F. English
                                    Paula Geyh                                    
                                    Stuart Moulthrop
                                    John Unsworth

Managing Editor:                    Claire Chantell

Editorial Assistant:                Benjamin Bishop
				    Sean Borton
				    Margaret Cho
			   	    Kristen Gilger

Editorial Board:                                           

     James Berger                   Patrick O'Donnell
     Heesok Chang                   Bob Perelman
     Wendy Hui Kyong Chun           Marjorie Perloff
     Ashley Dawson                  Fred Pfeil
     Johanna Drucker                Peggy Phelan
     Graham Hammill                 Arkady Plotnitsky
     Terry Harpold                  Tilottama Rajan
     Steven Helmling                Judith Roof
     David Herman                   Susan Schultz
     Matthew Kirschenbaum           Katie Stewart
     Neil Larsen                    Rei Terada
     Akira Lippit                   Darren Tofts
     Adrian Miles                   Paul Trembath
     Jim Morrison                   Jeffrey Williams
     Sianne Ngai
                                               
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                             CONTENTS 
    
    
                        ------------------
    
                             Articles
    
          
    Eu Jin Chua, Laurie Anderson's Telepresence
    
    Oliver Harris, Not Burroughs' Final Fix: Materializing 
    The Yage Letters
    
    Martin Hipsky, Post-Cold War Paranoia in The Corrections 
    and The Sopranos
    
    Justin Vicari, Fragments of Utopia: A Meditation on 
    Fassbinder's Treatment of Anti-Semitism and the Third Reich
    
    Chloe Taylor, Hard, Dry Eyes and Eyes That Weep: Vision 
    and Ethics in Levinas and Derrida
    
    
                        ------------------
                          Reviews
    
    Allan G. Borst, The New Imperialism, or the Economic 
    Logic of Late Postmodernism. A review of David Harvey, 
    _The New Imperialism_ (Oxford: Oxford UP, 2003).
    
    Patrick Query, Building Pictures: Hiroshi Sugimoto on 
    Visual Culture. A review of Hiroshi Sugimoto, _Architecture_. 
    Chicago Museum of Contemporary Art. 22 Feb.-2 June 2003.
    
    David Banash, Globalizing William S. Burroughs. A 
    review of Davis Schneiderman and Philip Walsh, Retaking the 
    Universe: William S. Burroughs in the Age of Globalization 
    (London: Pluto, 2004).
    
    
                        -----------------     
                      Notices (HTML Version Only)
    
    
                        -----------------   
                      Notes on Contributors
    
    
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                             Abstracts
    
    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 
    
    Chloe 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-a-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
    
Copyright (c) 2006 Postmodern Culture & Johns Hopkins 
University Press

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