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
-----------------------------------------------------------------
Volume 4, Number 3 (May, 1994) ISSN: 1053-1920
-----------------------------------------------------------------
Editors: Eyal Amiran, issue editor
John Unsworth
Review Editor: Jim English
Managing Editors: Jonathan Beasley
Chris Barrett
Editorial Assistant: Amy Sexton
List Manager: Chris Barrett
Editorial Board:
Sharon Bassett Phil Novak
Michael Berube Patrick O'Donnell
Marc Chenetier Elaine Orr
Greg Dawes Marjorie Perloff
bell hooks Fred Pfeil
Graham Hammill David Porush
Phillip Brian Harper Mark Poster
David Herman Carl Raschke
E. Ann Kaplan Avital Ronell
Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett Susan Schultz
Arthur Kroker William Spanos
Neil Larsen Gary Lee Stonum
Tan Lin Tony Stewart
Jerome McGann Chris Straayer
Jim Morrison Rei Terada
Stuart Moulthrop Paul Trembath
Larysa Mykyta Greg Ulmer
-----------------------------------------------------------------
CONTENTS
AUTHOR & TITLE FN FT
Masthead, Contents, Abstracts, CONTENTS.594
Instructions for retrieving files
Jonathan Beller, "Cinema, Capital of the BELLER.594
Twentieth Century"
Valerie Fulton, "An Other Frontier: Voyaging FULTON-V.594
West with Mark Twain and _Star Trek_'s
Imperial Subject"
Ann Larabee, "Remembering the Shuttle, Forgetting LARABEE.594
the Loom: Interpreting the Challenger
Disaster"
Geoffrey Sharpless, "Clockwork Education: The SHARPLES.594
Persistence of the Arnoldian Ideal"
Alice Fulton, Three Poems FULTON-A.594
Steven Helmling, "Historicizing Derrida" HELMLING.594
Eric Murphy Selinger, "Important Pleasures and SELINGER.594
Others: Michael Palmer, Ronald Johnson"
POPULAR CULTURE COLUMN:
Gregory Ulmer, "'Metaphoric Rocks: A POP-CULT.594
Psychogeography of Tourism and Monumentality"
REVIEWS:
Jim Hicks, "Forward into the Past." Review of REVIEW-1.594
Bruno Latour, _We Have Never Been Modern_,
Trans. Catherine Porter. Cambridge: Harvard
UP, 1993; and Ivan Illich, _In the Vineyard
of the Text_. Chicago: Chicago UP, 1993.
Vitaly Chernetsky, "Late Soviet Culture: A REVIEW-2.594
Parallax For Postmodernism." Review of
Lahusen, Thomas, and Gene Kuperman, eds.,
_Late Soviet Culture_. Durham: Duke UP,
1993.
Brent Wood, "From Technology to Machinism." REVIEW-3.594
Review of Verena Andermatt Conley, ed.,
_Rethinking Technologies_. Minneapolis:
Minnesota UP, 1993.
Gregory Ulmer, "Unthinkable Writing." Review REVIEW-4.594
of _Perforations_ 5 (1994): "Bodies,
Dreams, Technologies." Public Domain, Inc.,
POB 8899, Atlanta, GA. 31106-0899.
INFO@PD.ORG
Ira Lightman, "Coalitions and Coteries." REVIEW-5.594
Review of Tim Edwards, _Erotics and
Politics_. London: Routledge and Kegan
Paul, 1994.
Woodrow B. Hood, "Laurie Anderson and the REVIEW-6.594
Politics of Performance." Review of Laurie
Anderson, _Stories from the Nerve Bible: A
Retrospective 1972-1992_. Performed at the
Lied Arts Center, Lawrence, Kansas, March 29,
1994.
Announcements and Advertisements [WWW Version only]
(17 files)
-----------------------------------------------------------------
ABSTRACTS
Jonathan L. Beller, "Cinema, Capital of the Twentiety Century."
ABSTRACT: The lithograph, the printing press and the
museum, all machines for putting images in motion, are forms
of early cinema. As the intensity of visual circulation
increases, Benjamin's "aura" undergoes a change of state (or
density) and passes over to simulacrum. Aura and simulacra
are the result of value accreting on images in
circulation--visual fetishes, which are the result of the
captured labor of looking. The concept of visual economy is
developed using _Cinema 1_ and _Cinema 2_ of Gilles Deleuze.
By arguing that _Cinema_ might have been for the twentieth
century what Marx's _Capital_ was for the nineteenth, had
Deleuze not suppressed the immanence of political
economy--cinema's "internal struggle with informatics"--the
cinematic events articulated in Deleuze's concepts can be
read as systemic experiments concerned with what can be done
to the body through the eye. Cinema realizes a new
interface between machines and bodies. The sublimity that
Deleuze finds in cinema's time-image, its "severing of the
sensory-motor link," is then considered in relation to
popular mediations and the *necessary* inaction of
contemporary viewers. From the premise that "to look is to
labor" I derive "the attention theory of value." Other
texts considered include the Coen brothers' _Barton Fink_,
Orson Welles' _Citizen Cane_, and the IMAX film _Blue
Planet_. --JLB
Valerie Fulton, "An Other Frontier: Voyaging West with Mark
Twain and _Star Trek_'s Imperial Subject."
ABSTRACT: _Star Trek: The Next Generation_, a
television program about the future's altruistic
exploration of space, remains grounded in contemporary
ideological representations of the American frontier,
radical individualism, and naturalized versions of identity.
This essay examines one significant way in which the program
remystifies, so as tacitly to perpetuate, the notion of a
colonial "self" in the midst of alien "others." In a
two-part episode that features Samuel Clemens, the
anti-imperialist tenor of the writer's work is gradually
suppressed in favor of a more assessible (and commodified)
representation of Twain as America's "gatekeeper to the
West." This process by which commodification stifles
alternative discourse--and, in particular, the process by
which the commodified subject becomes imperial--is an effect
of television not because the medium attracts a popular (and
therefore "uncritical") audience, but because television is
so clearly dependent on the same corporate agencies that
have sought economic control in the global arena. --VF
Ann Larabee, "Remembering the Shuttle, Forgetting the Loom:
Interpreting the Challenger Disaster."
ABSTRACT: The Challenger space shuttle explosion in
1986 threatened political mythologies of the final frontier,
and, in a larger sense, cast doubt on systems theories and
the entire cultural project of biotechnical systems
building. In the public discourse of the Challenger
disaster, extending into public hearings and sociological
analyses of NASA, the body was reconstructed within an
organizational safety model that denied any further
possibility of collapse. The Rogers Commission attempted to
reinstate national faith in technological existence, made
safe through vigilance and the most minute surveillance of
body-machine relations. Invested in government consulting,
the academic response was an effort to restore the vision of
manned space flight, and, in an entirely self-referential
mode, to reassure its academic audience that their
ideologies, disciplines, and bodies were still in place and
all was right with the world. Thus, the disaster provided
the text for the post-catastrophe extraterrestrial survival
of the knowledge class, constructed and maintained through
living systems theories. While the Challenger disaster
suggested that biotechnical organization was ever on the
verge of collapse; the massive public relations campaign for
space settlements imagined a safe new biosphere, a closed
ecology, for academics, civil servants, and corporate
managers, freed from environmental disaster, atmospheric
impurity, starvation, poverty, disease, and gravity. --AL
Geoffrey Sharpless, "Clockwork Education: The Persistence of
Arnoldian Masculinity."
ABSTRACT: Burgess's _A Clockwork Orange_ is nostalgic for
a version of masculinity best understood as typical of the
Arnoldian public school. The Russianized argot and
Dionysian "ultra-violence" of Alex the droog do not
immediately evoke Hughes's Tom Brown's School-days or other
portraits of the public school boy; nonetheless, reading
Alex and Tom as twins, it does not take long to discover
even in Hughes's happy fantasy of Rugby that his Arnoldian
telos of self-control, heterosexual love, moderation, and
upright morality is interpenetrated with perversity,
pederasty, a fetishization of style, Machiavellian
management training, an interest in hand-to-hand combat and
blood-letting, and, ultimately, a droogish conviction that
adult heterosexual manliness smacks of death. The Arnoldian
schoolboy and the droog prove to have always been thoroughly
integrated; Alex's wickedness and cruelty are as much the
stuff of empire-building as is the Arnoldian gentleman's
phantasy of morality. In effect, though Rugby's classrooms
are now called Correctional Schools, State Jails, and
conditioning laboratories, and the playing fields have
become the London streets, Alex's education terminates in
the same phantasized ideal of adult masculinity as Tom
Brown's. Burgess's vision has not overturned a public
school idea of proper masculine development, but fulfilled
Dr. Thomas Arnold's ambition to write his pedagogy across
the face of the world. --GS
Steve Helmling, "Historicizing Derrida."
ABSTRACT: Accounts of Derrida's work stress its
diversity, and handle it in various ways; but none that I
know of narrativizes this diversity, whether to relate it to
its historical period, or to treat it as a corpus with a
development, an evolving play of tensions or
contradictions--in short, a history--of its own. This paper
aims to initiate such an account, by confronting early
Derrida with late(r)--for purposes of argument, Derrida
before 1968 and after. The focus is on "writing" in two
senses: 1) as *theme*, the object of Derrida's
"grammatology," and 2) as Derrida's own writing
*practice*--what he calls "perverformativity," or "writing
otherwise." Before 1968, in _Of Grammatology_ (1967),
"writing" was thematized (implicitly on the model of Hegel's
master/slave) as the agent or figure of an imminent
%Aufhebung% of "speech" (i.e., phonocentric logocentrism).
But by the early '70s, "writing" had become (and has since
remained) merely another "inscription"--*the*
inscription--of logocentric closure. This shift in *theme*
corresponds with a shift in Derrida's own writing
*practice*, from the analytic and expository deconstruction
of the earlier work to a self-regarding %ecriture% in which
deconstruction is enacted rather than argued. Throughout,
the paper considers the politics of such movements within
Derrida's oeuvre in relation both to Derrida's precursors
(Marcel Mauss, Sartre) and his postmodern contemporaries
(Foucault, Jameson, Lyotard) in an effort to "historicize"
not only Derrida's work, but its reception, its influence,
and its success. --SH
Eric Murphy Selinger, "Important Pleasures and Others: Michael
Palmer, Ronald Johnson."
ABSTRACT: Discussions of experimental poetry
frequently speak of its disruptive or subversive importance,
leaving questions of pleasure to languish, all-but
unaddressed. This essay explores two texts, Michael
Palmer's _Sun_ and Ronald Johnson's _ARK_, which engage the
question of plesure in the context of opposed aesthetic and
ethical traditions. In his efforts to write about
historical atrocity without neglecting "the mysteries of
reference," Palmer becomes a poet of the sublime--at least
of that limited sublimity of shock which Lyotard finds at
the heart of the postmodern. Johnson, by contrast, makes an
exultant Longinian sublime a constituent part of the
experience of beauty. An "artist of abundancies," in Robert
Duncan's phrase, Johnson draws on physics and biology to
write a poetry where pleasure is not ideologically suspect,
and where linguistic self-reference is not a critique of
appropriative naming, but a version of nature's fractal
flowering. --EMS
_________________________________________________________________
COPYRIGHT: Unless otherwise noted, copyrights for the texts which
comprise this issue of Postmodern Culture are held by their
authors. The compilation as a whole is Copyright (c) 1994 by
Postmodern Culture and Oxford University Press, all rights
reserved. Items published by Postmodern Culture may be freely
shared among individuals, but they may not be republished in any
medium without express written consent from the author(s) and
advance notification of the editors. Issues of Postmodern
Culture may be archived for public use in electronic or other
media, as long as each issue is archived in its entirety and no
fee is charged to the user; any exception to this restriction
requires the written consent of the editors and of the publisher.
_________________________________________________________________
IATH WWW Server
Last Modified: