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 7, Number 2 (January, 1997) ISSN: 1053-1920
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Editors: Lisa Brawley
Stuart Moulthrop
Editors Emeritus: Eyal Amiran
John Unsworth
Review Editor: Paula Geyh
Managing Editor: Sarah Wells
List Manager: Jessamy Town
Research Assistants: Anne Sussman
Steve Wagner
Editorial Board: Sharon Bassett
Michael Berube
Nahum Chandler
Marc Chenetier
Greg Dawes
J. Yellowlees Douglas
Jim English
Graham Hammill
Phillip Brian Harper
David Herman
bell hooks
E. Ann Kaplan
Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett
Arthur Kroker
Neil Larsen
Tan Lin
Saree Makdisi
Jerome McGann
Uppinder Mehan
Jim Morrison
Larysa Mykyta
Phil Novak
Chimalum Nwankwo
Patrick O'Donnell
Elaine Orr
Marjorie Perloff
Fred Pfeil
Peggy Phelan
David Porush
Mark Poster
Carl Raschke
Avital Ronell
Susan Schultz
William Spanos
Tony Stewart
Allucquere Roseanne Stone
Gary Lee Stonum
Chris Straayer
Rei Terada
Paul Trembath
Greg Ulmer
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CONTENTS
TITLE FILENAME
ARTICLES
Arkady Plotnitsky, "But It Is Above plotnitsky.197
All Not True": Derrida, Relativity, and
the "Science Wars"
Maria Damon, Lenny Bruce's 1962 Obscenity damon.197
Trial: Public Culture and the Jewish
Entertainer as Cultural Lightning Rod
Tony Thwaites, Currency Exchanges: thwaites.197
The Postmodern, Vattimo, Et Cetera, Among
Other Things (Et Cetera)
Heikki Raudaskoski, "The Feathery Rilke raudaskoski.197
Mustaches and Porky Pig Tattoo on Stomach":
High and Low Pressures in Gravity's Rainbow
Penelope Engelbrecht, Bodily Mut(il)ation: engelbrecht.197
Enscribing Lesbian Desire
Steven Jones, The Book of Myst in the jones.197
Late Age of Print
FICTION
Paul Andrew Smith, Radio Free Alice smith.197
Gregory Wolos, Son of Kong, How Do You Do? wolos.197
REVIEWS
David DeRose, "A Lifetime of Anger and review-1.197
Pain": Kali Tal and the Literature of Trauma.
Review of Kali Tal, Worlds of Hurt: Reading
the Literature of Trauma. Cambridge, MA:
Cambridge UP, 1996.
Thomas Vogler, Dressing the Text: On the review-2.197
Road with the Artist's Book. Review of Dressing
the Text exhibition.
Lynda Hall, Holly Hughes Performing: review-3.197
Self-Invention and Body Talk. Review of Holly
Hughes, Clit Notes: A Sapphic Sampler. New
York: Grove, 1996.
Tammy Clewell, Failing to Succeed: Toward a review-4.197
Postmodern Ethic of Otherness. Review of Ewa
Plonawska Ziarek, The Rhetoric of Failure:
Deconstruction of Skepticism, Reinvention of
Modernism. Albany: SUNY Press, 1996.
Sujata Iyengar, The Resuscitation of Dead review-5.197
Metaphors. Review of "Incorporating the Antibody:
Women, History and Medical Discourse," a conference
held at the University of Western Ontario,
October 5-6, 1996, and the accompanying exhibition
"Speculations: Selected Works from 1983-1996," by
Barbara McGill Balfour.
Mike Hill, What Was (the White) Race? Memory, review-6.197
Categories, Change. Review of Noel Ignatiev and
John Garvey, eds, Race Traitor (New York: Routledge,
1996) and Mab Segrest, Memoir of a Race
Traitor (Boston: South End Press, 1994).
LETTERS:
Selected Letters from Readers letters.197
NOTICES:
Announcements and Advertisements [WWW Version only]
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ABSTRACTS
Arkady Plotnitsky, "But It Is Above All Not True": Derrida, Relativity,
and the "Science Wars"
Abstract: The article considers a remark by Jacques Derrida on
Einstein's relativity. This remark has been widely circulated
without proper scholarly and philosophical treatment in recent
discussions around the so-called "Science Wars," in the wake of
Paul R. Gross and Norman Levitt's Higher Superstition, and then
Alan Sokal's "hoax article." By examining several specific
responses to Derrida's statement and his work in general by
scientists and others, the article argues that this circulation is a
symptom of a deeper problem that permeates the current
intellectual landscape--still the landscape of "two cultures"
(scientific and humanistic) in spite, and even because, of massive
transformations of both these cultures and of the interactions
between them during recent decades. This problem shapes the
reception of the work of Derrida and several other figures, such
as Jean-François Lyotard, Michel Serres, and Gilles Deleuze, on
the part of the scientific community. The article examines the
circumstances, contexts and meanings of Derrida's remark, and
considers the general question of reading philosophical texts,
such as Derrida's, that engage or refer to mathematics and
science. It also suggests a reading of Derrida's statement itself
that will, hopefully, lead to more productive responses to the
work of Derrida and other recent thinkers on the part of the
scientific community.--ap
Maria Damon, Lenny Bruce's 1962 Obscenity Trial: Public Culture and
the Jewish Entertainer as Cultural Lightning Rod
Abstract: In 1962, comedian Lenny Bruce was tried for
obscenity in San Francisco and, for the only time in his many
subsequent arrests and trials, acquitted. The trial transcript
documents a moment in San Francisco's history, bringing
together the social currents surrounding the emergence of a gay
men's community; the discourse of expertise and the town/gown
politics of the Irish/Italian police force against the "long beards"
at Berkeley; and the tensions between the language of juridical
process and that of the carnivalesque. San Francisco was shortly
to become a center for several different countercultures noted
for their flamboyant aesthetic and their emphasis on alternate
social organizing units (the spectrum of gay relationships, hippie
"tribes," Third World arts communes, etc.), which questioned
the traditional relationship of sexuality to reproduction and family
life. I want to argue that, though he was neither gay, San
Franciscan, politically active in the conventional sense, nor
literary in the conventional sense, Bruce's role as hyperverbal
Jewish "entertainer" (in-betweener) set his trial as a moment
signaling cultural change in San Francisco. Further, this scenario
resonates with more recent and ongoing debates about the role of
non-normative artistic expression in civic life.--md
Tony Thwaites, Currency Exchanges: The Postmodern, Vattimo, et
cetera, Among Other Things (et cetera)
Abstract: A frequent criticism of the idea of the postmodern is
that it lacks both clear referent and conceptual coherence. It may
be more useful to see what is going on in such debates in terms
of a performative and asyndetic logic, whose figure is the
instability of the list, neither coherent nor incoherent. Drawing on
the work of Gianni Vattimo, this article tries to reframe the terms
of the debate by suggesting a concept of the aesthetic which
would be neither simply vanguardist nor populist, but linked
intimately to the possibility of community, history, the political
and social.--tt
Heikki Raudaskoski, "The Feathery Rilke Mustaches and Porky Pig
Tattoo on Stomach": High and Low Pressures in Gravity's Rainbow
Abstract: On one occasion Mikhail Bakhtin describes his famous
"chronotopes" as places "where knots of narrative are tied and
untied". While it is very difficult to find chronotopes like these in
Thomas Pynchon's Gravity's Rainbow, many passages in the
text nevertheless keep asking: where and how do characters and
readers (and the text itself) position themselves? What time are
they in? The novel certainly posits the existence of an epic,
unilinear, and apocalyptic time; however, this kind of time never
arrives inside the text. Thus possibilities for novelness,
something new, remain. What positional possibilities, then, does
this leave for characters and the narrator? This essay tries to find
answers to this question by studying how the binary opposition
of "high" and "low" works in the novel in various respects.
These positionalities prove "highly" unstable in the novel. The
vain search for high unities results in low-feeling melancholies.
On the other hand, only through low, popular cultural genres it is
possible, at least momentarily, to feel high. Neither high canon
(as, obviously, in Joyce's Ulysses) nor low carnivalism (as in
Bakhtin's reading of Rabelais) prove capable of attaining
supremacy. Yet this does not have to lead to "postmodernism" as
neutralized relativism. Gravity's Rainbow's labyrinthine
carnivalism is different. Although there are no pure, closed sites
for low marginals, either, positional tensions will not ease off. On
the contrary: just because transcendental subjects and dialectical
syntheses turn impossible, the novel is able to maintain hard and
urgent questions of positionality.--hr
Penelope Engelbrecht, Bodily Mut(il)ation: Enscribing Lesbian Desire
Abstract: "What do lesbians really want?"
I raise this question in my essay, and offer a conditional answer
that devolves from the inter/active relation of lesbian Other/Self
and lesbian Subject: a mutual relation mediated by their lesbian
Desire, that Desire characterizing and characterized by alinear
jouissance.
Because that pro/vocative lesbian jouissance may be construed in
analogy to Derridean différance, I perceive lesbian Desire as
enscribed in erotic textual site(s) of "saturated aporia." I explain
how the "un/mark" refers to those ambivalent signs of bodily
mutilation--s/m-inflicted bruises, scars of assault, and
particularly mastectomy scars--which may be read and re-read
as transformative signs, for example, of pain which becomes
pleasure, of horror which metamorphoses into and through
healing.
These bodily un/marks comprise the multi-valent signifiers of a
corporeal mut(il)ation which not only gestures toward an
"essentialistic" lesbian embodiment, but which also articulates
that essential materiality as/in an inter/active performativity. I
observe lesbian sign, text, body as mutable situations of relational
Desire even as they enable the endless mutation(s) of lesbian
Desire, a mutual activity which remains ever in(con)clusive.
One answer to the question? Lesbians Desire more time--pe
Steven Jones, The Book of Myst in the Late Age of Print
Abstract: This essay considers the CD-ROM game Myst,
arguably the most widely experienced hypernarrative (if not
exactly hypertext) of our time. In Myst and its paratexts--prequel,
sequel, sources, and marketing--we see dramatized some
fundamental cultural anxieties surrounding the emergence of
hypertext in the late age of print. The primary sign of these
anxieties in the game is the ubiquitous image of the magical
"linking" book, floating above the landscape or concealed in the
machines that structure the game-play, clearly representing
hypertext and what it portends for the aura of the Book in the
late age of print. From the game and its books we move to an
important precursor, Jules Verne's The Mysterious Island, which
serves in turn as a link to the subgenre of Victorian adventure
fiction and its bookish obsessions with technology (and islands).
Then, linking forward to a recent work, Neal Stephenson's SF
novel, The Diamond Age, the essay concludes by suggesting
how Myst inevitably exceeds the boundaries of its authors'
intentions, aura, and back-story novelization. The essay
recognizes that, on the one hand (as J. David Bolter has argued),
the book may be moving to the margins of culture, but on the
other hand (as Maurice Blanchot reminds us), culture remains
tenaciously "linked to the book." At the heart of a mass-audience
hypertext adventure game, the Book in Myst signals a profound
anxiety over the impending absence of the material book as an
object of cultural significance.--sj
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