CONTENTS 


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                         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


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                      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).


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                  Notices (HTML Version Only)


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                  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