CONTENTS 

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                         Articles

Rajeev S. Patke, Benjamin in Bombay? An Extrapolation

Lars Iyer, Blanchot, Narration, and the Event 

Dorothy Barenscott, Grand Theory/Grand Tour: Negotiating 
Samuel Huntington in the Grey Zone of Europe

Carlos Rojas, Cannibalism and the Chinese Body Politic: 
Hermeneutics and Violence in Cross-Cultural Perception


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                           Review Essay

Joseph Tate, Radiohead's Antivideos: Works of Art in the Age 
of Electronic Reproduction
  

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                             Reviews

Arkady Plotnitsky, Demonstration and
Democracy. A review of Bruno Latour, _Pandora's Hope: Essays 
on the Reality of Science Studies_. Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 
1999. 

Juan E. de Castro, The Deus Ex-Machina. A 
review of Jerry Hoeg, _Science, Technology, and Latin 
American Narrative in the Twentieth Century and Beyond_. 
Bethlehem, PA: Lehigh UP, 2000. 

Kelly Pender, Maintaining the Other. A review of Simon 
Critchley, _Ethics, Politics, and Subjectivity_. London: 
Verso, 1999.

Samuel Gerald Collins, Information and the Paradox of 
Perspicuity. A review of Albert Borgmann, _Holding On to 
Reality: The Nature of Information at the Turn of the 
Millennium_. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 2000. 

William B. Warner, Computable Culture and the Closure of the 
Media Paradigm. A review of Lev Manovich, _The Language of 
New Media_. Cambridge, MA: MIT P, 2000.

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                     Related Readings
                    (WWW Version Only)

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                     Bibliography of
                      Postmodernism
                   and Critical Theory
                    (WWW Version Only)

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                         Notices
                    (WWW Version Only)

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                  Notes on Contributors

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                        Abstracts

Rajeev S. Patke, Benjamin in Bombay? An Extrapolation


    o Abstract: Walter Benjamin read cities as if they 
    were texts in which one could read the progressive 
    development of the materiality of culture. He applied 
    to this reading a form of interpretive violence
    recognizable as the ideal of an idea enshrined in the 
    surrealist movement. His characteristic metaphors for 
    the modern metropolis included the labyrinth, the maze, 
    the rune, the fragment, and kitsch. The essay explores 
    the uses and limits of such metaphors when applied to 
    times and places later and other than those that 
    provided Benjamin with his terms of reference. The aim 
    of the experiment is to test the viability of the 
    Benjaminian perspective as a refractive lens focused on 
    metropolitan culture, while using it to generate a 
    discourse about the diversity of metropolitan 
    experiences as globalized forms of the local. The 
    literary productions of contemporary Bombay, ranging 
    from the fictional Parsi world of Rohinton Mistry to 
    the polemic and political writings of the Dalit movement 
    in Marathi poetry, are used to identify the limit factor 
    of the extrapolation. In his essay "Critique of 
    Violence," Benjamin had envisioned a form of divine and 
    bloodless violence as an apocalyptic end to history. The 
    irony of that vision has been often noted in the context 
    of his own subsequent flight from persecution into 
    suicide. The present essay addresses another, and equally 
    bitter, irony that serves to show how the history of a 
    modern and postcolonial city like Bombay resists the 
    Benjaminian in its bloody version of a communitarian 
    apocalypse.--rp 

Lars Iyer, Blanchot, Narration, and the Event 

    o Abstract: In this paper, I explore the contribution 
    of Blanchot's notion of narration to the so-called 
    "narrative turn" in the humanities. The turn in 
    question is aimed at foregrounding the importance of  
    narrative in the construction of selves and 
    communities. Narrativists focus on the way in which 
    experience is structured through the narrative 
    interconnection of elements in a meaningful sequence. 
    They are often drawn to literary criticism, in which 
    attention to narrative structures has always been 
    important. But literary critics often posit a contrast 
    between a narrated event and the subsequent 
    constitution of the event through narrative 
    representation, and it is this contrast that many 
    narrativists want to overturn. I argue that Blanchot's 
    non-representational account of literature offers a 
    more productive notion of the relationship between 
    narrative and event since it does not depend on this 
    contrast. --li 

Dorothy Barenscott, Grand Theory/Grand Tour: Negotiating 
Samuel Huntington in the Grey Zone of Europe

    o Abstract: In 1996, the Russian-based photo-
    conceptualist group AES launched its mock "Travel 
    Agency to the Future" with the "Islamic Project," a 
    series of digitally altered images depicting the 
    monuments and spaces of familiar tourist destinations 
    in the year 2006, invaded, occupied, and altered by 
    Islamic civilization. Drawing inspiration from Samuel 
    Huntington's "The Clash of Civilizations?"--the popular 
    and highly influential political paradigm emerging in 
    the mid-1990s anticipating the time when "Islamic" and 
    "Western" civilizations would come violently into 
    collision--AES and its fictitious travel agency has 
    promoted its project as Huntington's vision of the 
    "Grand Tour" into the future. Cultural difference 
    explored through the rhetoric, gestures, and 
    construction of such a tourist gaze facilitates a mode 
    of political engagement far removed from the 
    specificity of place or history. The unique position of 
    AES to begin critically exploring, problematizing, and 
    articulating what is at stake in the construction of 
    such monolithic stereotypes emerges out of its own 
    status as postcommunist citizens on the fault line 
    between "East" and "West," in what Piotr Piotrowski 
    terms the "grey zone of Europe." Therein, the processes
    and rhetoric of globalization and multiculturalism have 
    played out on the terrain of a hotly divided and 
    increasingly nationalistic social body where geographic 
    tensions have undermined the West's call for a 
    harmonizing of all divisions--a united Europe. 
    Therefore, AES utilizes the visual effect of montage to 
    critically link the more abstract ideas of Huntington 
    with a wider geo-political conflict emerging in Central 
    Europe. --db 

Carlos Rojas, Cannibalism and the Chinese Body Politic: 
Hermeneutics and Violence in Cross-Cultural Perception

    o Abstract: Typically eliciting a combination of horror 
    and fascination, cannibalism can be seen as a sort of 
    archetypal stain that both reinforces and challenges our 
    notion of who "we" are. Fantasies of cannibalism occupy 
    a crucial liminal space where the boundaries of Self, 
    society, and even representation itself are constituted 
    and contested. This essay elaborates a selective 
    genealogy of representations of cannibalism in modern 
    Chinese culture, with examples drawn from literary, 
    political, and avant-garde performative texts. Rather 
    than focusing on the physical act of cannibalism, this 
    study instead uses the discursive tradition of cannibalism 
    as a prism through which to reflect on the processes of 
    identification and differentiation by which not only the 
    Self but also an array of social collectivities are 
    constituted. These psychic, social, and epistemological 
    constructs are, it is argued, the result of complex flows 
    of equivalence and alterity, and often it is, ironically, 
    precisely at the closest points of identification that the 
    most systematic patterns of social rupture are produced. 
    Finally, this cross-cultural reading of cannibalism is 
    used to reflect on the challenges, and possibilities, of 
    cross-cultural reading itself. While noting the inherent 
    difficulties of "reading" cannibalism in a cross-cultural 
    context, this essay argues that the trope of cannibalism 
    also presents a useful model for rethinking the 
    possibility of cross-cultural perception itself. Cross-
    cultural perception may sometimes be perceived as an 
    epistemologically "violent" act, an act of symbolic 
    incorporation which, simultaneously, retrospectively 
    constructs and reaffirms the imaginary boundaries between 
    Self and Other which make such reading meaningful in the 
    first place.--cr