CONTENTS 

Editor's Note: Postmodern Culture remembers Fred Pfeil 
(1949-2005).

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		     Articles

     
Michael Snediker, Queer Optimism

Cary Wolfe, Lose the Building: Systems Theory, 
Architecture, and Diller+Scofidio's Blur

Ulrik Ekman, The Speed of Beauty: An Interview with 
Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht

Carsten Strathausen, A Critique of Neo-Left 
Ontology

Laura Shackelford, Counter-Networks in a Network 
Society: Leslie Marmon Silko's Almanac of the Dead


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                      Reviews
 
Justus Nieland, Mystics of a Materialist Age. A review of 
Marcus Boon, The Road of Excess: A History of Writers 
on Drugs. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 2002.

Manisha Basu, The Hamartia of Light and Shadow: 
Susan Sontag in the Digital Age. A review of Susan Sontag, 
Regarding the Pain of Others. New York: Picador, 2003.

John Garrison, The Politics of Ontology. A review of 
Judith Butler, Undoing Gender. New York: Routledge, 2004.


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                  Notices (HTML Version Only)


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                  Notes on Contributors


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                         Abstracts

Ulrik Ekman, The Speed of Beauty: An Interview with 
Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht

* Professor Gumbrecht was interviewed after his visit in 
November 2005 to the Department for Cultural Studies and the 
Arts, Copenhagen University, Denmark, arranged by the Research 
Forum for Intermedial Digital Aesthetics directed by Ulrik 
Ekman. On that occasion, Gumbrecht gave a seminar titled 
"Benjamin in the Digital Age," which focused on his editorial 
work with Professor Michael Marrinan (Stanford) on the essay 
anthology, Mapping Benjamin: The Work of Art in the Digital 
Age. The interview originated in conversations during 
Gumbrecht's visit and continued to develop further ideas 
raised in the seminar. The interview took place mainly by 
email during the first three months following Gumbrecht's 
Denmark seminar. 

Laura Shackelford, Counter-Networks in a Network Society: 
Leslie Marmon Silko's Almanac of the Dead

    * Abstract: This essay calls into question the opposition 
between global capitalist economic, cultural, and social 
networks and modernity's industrial capitalist social spaces, 
an opposition between the "space of flows" and the "space of 
places," as it is developed in Manuel Castells's thoroughgoing 
analysis of the information economy. Putting Castells's 
insights to cross-purposes, the essay foregrounds troubling 
continuities and collaboration between these divergent social 
spaces. The essay reads Leslie Marmon Silko's novel Almanac 
of the Dead for its critical reflection on global capitalist 
networks and examines its spatio-temporal mapping of the 
Americas, which implicates these purportedly novel, 
deterritorialized spatial networks in a five hundred year 
system of colonial and imperial expansion. The novel's spatio-
temporal mapping of the Americas rethinks the socio-spatial 
logics informing global capitalist networks in light of these 
continuities, identifying a resistant potential within them. 
Its counternetworks take advantage of global capitalism's 
dismantling of the three worlds system, developing a 
transnational, subaltern model of resistance that refuses 
both a nationalist, essentialist conception of identity 
grounded in place and a liberal multicultural identity 
politics encouraged by global capitalism's "space of 
flows." --ls 

Michael Snediker, Queer Optimism

    * Abstract: "Queer Optimism" argues that queer theory's 
attachment to a vocabulary of melancholy, self-shattering, 
shame, and the death drive precludes a potentially more 
rigorous and generative understanding of queery theory and 
of optimism. Through critiques of Butler, Bersani, Sedgwick 
and Edelman, "Queer Optimism" notes exemplary moments of 
"queer pessimism," and insists upon a non-Leibnizian 
optimistic field temporally located beyond the futural, and 
solicitous of (rather than allergic to) meticulous, vigorous 
thought.--ms 

Carsten Strathausen, A Critique of Neo-Left Ontology

    * Abstract: This essay investigates why "ontology" has 
become an increasingly important topic for a number of 
contemporary political philosophers. It is divided into two 
parts, the first of which contrasts what it calls "neo-left" 
thinkers with more traditionally minded Marxists (such as 
Theodor Adorno and Fredric Jameson), focusing in particular 
on their different understanding of the meaning of "ontology." 
The second part provides a comparative commentary on Ernesto 
Laclau, Slavoj Zizek, Alain Badiou, Antonio Negri and Michael 
Hardt, as well on Giorgio Agamben, in order to analyze their 
use of and reference to "ontology" as a crucial concept for 
much leftist political discourse today. Here the focus lies 
on three interrelated categories: "space," "political acts," 
and "subject(ivity)." The ontological neo-left faces two 
basic options: either to adopt a discursive ontology 
structured around the void (Derrida, Laclau, Mouffe, Badiou, 
Zizek) or a biopolitical ontology that embraces the 
productivity of life (Foucault, Deleuze, Agamben, Hardt and 
Negri). --cs 

Cary Wolfe, Lose the Building: Systems Theory, Architecture, 
and Diller+Scofidio's Blur

    * Abstract: In October of 2002, the Blur building of the 
architectural team Diller+Scofidio opened in Switzerland to 
nearly universal acclaim. The "building"--a cloud manufactured 
by a nozzle-laced tensegrity structure hovering over Lake 
Neuchatel--audaciously rethinks architecture as "the making of 
nothing" (to use the architects' words). This 
dematerialization of the architectural medium raises all sorts 
of interesting questions about the concept and function of 
form in architecture (and in art more generally)--questions 
that Diller+Scofidio mobilize in relation to the dynamics of 
spectacle in mass media society. This essay uses the work of 
systems theorist Niklas Luhmann to understand the central 
paradox of the Blur project: that the "weakness" of its formal 
intervention as an object is precisely its strength when form 
is understood in more abstract terms. This relentless but 
necessary abstraction of the concept of form in art helps us 
gain some distance on the more or less conventionally 
"romantic" associations that the project invites--associations 
that Diller+Scofidio rightly insist have no place in 
understanding the project's conceptual underpinnings. And it 
also helps us grasp how the project deploys and redirects 
certain modes of visuality that are taken for granted by mass 
media society and its apotheosis in the society of 
spectacle--modes that the project itself "blurs," and not 
without ethical and political implications. --cw