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 5, Number 3 (May, 1995) ISSN: 1053-1920
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Editors: Eyal Amiran
John Unsworth, issue editor
Review Editor: Jim English
Managing Editor: 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 Mark Poster
Phillip Brian Harper David Porush
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
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CONTENTS
TITLE FILENAME
Abstracts abstracts.595
Phoebe Sengers, "Madness and Automation: sengers.595
On Institutionalization"
Paul Naylor, "The 'Mired Sublime' of naylor.595
Nathaniel Mackey's _Song of the
Andoumboulou_"
Nathaniel Mackey, "Song of the mackey.595
Andoumboulou: 23"
Joseph Arsenault and Tony Brinkley, arsebrin.595
"Towards an Indexical Criticism"
Virginia Hooper, "The Lamentation" hooper.595
James Berger, "Cultural Trauma and the berger.595
'Timeless Burst': Pynchon's Revision of
Nostalgia in _Vineland_"
Elisabeth Frost, "Signifyin(g) on Stein: frost.595
The Revisionist Poetics of Harryette
Mullen and Leslie Scalapino"
Paul Mann, "Stupid Undergrounds" mann.595
RELATED READINGS [WWW version only]
POPULAR CULTURE COLUMN:
Jeffrey Cass, "Cyberspace, Capitalism, pop-cult.595
and Encoded Criminality: The
Iconography of _Theme Park_"
REVIEWS:
Tatjana Pavlovic, "Demystifying review-1.595
Nationalism: Dubravka Ugresic and the
Situation of the Writer in
(Ex-)Yugoslavia." Review of Dubravka
Ugresic, _Fording the Stream of
Consciousness_. Evanston: Northwestern
UP, 1993; ---, _In the Jaws of Life and
Other Stories_. Evanston: Northwestern
UP, 1993.
Mark Poster, "Techno-Communities." Review review-2.595
of Steven Jones, ed., _Cybersociety:
Computer-Mediated Communication and
Community_. New York: Sage, 1995.
Wendy Anson, "Intermedia '95" Review of review-3.595
the 10th Annual International Conference
and Exposition on Multimedia and CD-ROM.
March, 1995. Moscone Convention Center,
San Francisco, CA.
Rebecca Chung, "Rethinking Agency." Review review-4.595
of Patricia Mann, _Micropolitics: Agency in
a Postfeminist Era_. Menneapolis: University
of Minnesota Press, 1994.
Myles Breen, "Presenting Paradise." Review review-5.595
of Elizabeth Buck, _Paradise Remade: The
Politics of Culture and History in Hawai'i_.
Philadelphia: Temple UP, 1993.
Tom Benson, "New Political Journalism." review-6.595
Review of Richard Ben Cramer, _What It
Takes: The Way to the White House_.
New York: Random House, 1992.
Ivan Strenski, "The Ethics of review-7.595
Ethnocentrism." Review of Tzvetan Todorov,
_On Human Diversity_. Trans. Catherine
Porter. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1993.
LETTERS:
Selected Letters from Readers letters.595
NOTICES:
Announcements and Advertisements [WWW Version only]
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ABSTRACTS
Phoebe Sengers, "Madness and Automation: On Institutionalization"
ABSTRACT: This paper examines the ways in which totalizing
institutions attempt to appropriate individuals, and the
extent to which individual subjects can resist or subvert
that appropriation. A paradigmatic site of totalization is
the psychiatric institution. This institution mechanizes
the patient; it reduces the patient to a sign. The
patient's identity is restructured to enable absorption
into the workings of the psychiatric machine. Breakdown
occurs when the machine exceeds its own logic; at the same
moment, the patient exceeds the institution's totalizing
grasp. The very move to totalization leads to blind spots
in which the patient can learn to move. The analysis is
first made at the level of a specific instance of
psychiatric institutionalization, then repeated on the
plane of theory to show that it holds in all situations
where institutions attempt to totalize and circumscribe
individuals. --PS
Paul Naylor, "The 'Mired Sublime' of Nathaniel Mackey's
_Song of the Andoumboulou_"
ABSTRACT: This essay situates Nathaniel Mackey's ongoing
serial poem, _Song of the Andoumboulou_, in the tradition
of the American "world-poem" begun in _The Cantos_ of Ezra
pound and continued in Louis Zukofsky's _A_, H.D.'s
_Trilogy_, and Robert Duncan's _Passages_. Each of these
works, in their own distinct way, holds out the possibility
of a utopian vision created in and by poetry. Yet these
previous instances of the world-poem often have the
unfortunate effects of reducing cultural diversity to a
transcendent sameness in the service of an all-encompassing
view of world history, in effect all too evident in parts
of _The Cantos_. Mackey's _Song of the Andoumboulou_ not
only extends the genre's range of cultural references by
bringing together the traditions of African-American music,
Caribbean and Arabic poetry, and West African mythology,
among others, with the Western traditions of philosophy,
poetry, and music; it also attempts to cure us of the
desire to reduce the representation of diversity and
difference to the kind of all-encompassing sameness that
compromises some of the initial instances of the American
world-poem. --PN
Joseph Arsenault and Tony Brinkley, "Toward an Indexical Criticism"
ABSTRACT: The essay has been choreographed as an open form,
where what is said can be open to what is not. What goes
unsaid may nevertheless be shown, indicated, or indexed (or
show up). Points of departure for the essay include
parallel distinctions in Heidegger and Wittgenstein between
saying and showing. In addition to a semantics of saying,
there might be this semantics as well, a semantics of
showing that engages the ways in which "presencing . . .
manifests itself [%selbst zeigt%]" (Heidegger) and "the
inexpressible [%Unaussprechliches%] . . . shows itself
[%zeigt sich%]" (Wittgenstein). Readings of Wittgenstein
and Heidegger connect with readings of Peirce and Benjamin.
A concern with the distinction between saying and showing
opens onto the possibility of an indexical semantics. The
question of indices will at times be the question of a just
reading, adequate to the history that has produced the
index, but often there is a historical reference from which
I may want to hide. Although no one can jump over his own
shadow. And what I leave unsaid may indicate something to
add. The essay concludes with Benjamin's presentation of
historical indices, where he has "nothing to say [%zu
sagen%], only to show [%zu zeigen%, to indicate, to point
out] . . . to let it come into its own [%zu ihrem Rechte%,
into its right, into its justice]." --JA and TB
James Berger, "Cultural Trauma and the 'Timeless Burst': Pynchon's
Revision of Nostalgia in _Vineland_"
ABSTRACT: This essay reevaluates the political and
aesthetic implications of nostalgia. It argues that Thomas
Pynchon's _Vineland_, a novel often criticized for its
nostalgic portrayal of the 1960s, in fact revises
conventional notions of nostalgia so as to render a more
complex sense of how historical memory is transmitted.
Crucial to this revision is Pynchon's representation of
historical trauma. _Vineland_ returns to the 1960s not as
to a site of wholeness and plenitude, but rather as to a
site of catastrophe and betrayal. The moment of historical
trauma insistently returns. And yet this same traumatic
moment is simultaneously a moment of utopian possibility.
This link of catastrophe and possibility in Pynchon bears
resemblance to Walter Benjamin's notion of "jetztzeit," the
critical, possibly redemptive "time of the now" that can
emerge at moments of crisis far removed from each other.
In _Vineland_, however, this moment is always mediated
through the ideological lens through which it is received.
Thus, _Vineland_ shows us the destabilizing political and
cultural conflicts of the 1960s explicitly through the
perspectives of 1980s consumer culture (those "fabulous
60s") and the political culture of Reaganism (the dangerous
60s). The traumatic/utopian returns of history cannot
escape these ideological vessels; yet neither can they be
fully contained by them. _Vineland_'s clear longing for
the 1960s is neither quietist nor reactionary. The reunion
that ends the novel is a reunion with a traumatic past
(that has been partly and problematically "worked through")
and with the sense of political possibilities that flashed
into being at the same pivotal moments. --JB
Elisabeth A. Frost, "Signifyin(g) on Stein: The Revisionist Poetics
of Harryette Mullen and Leslie Scalapino
ABSTRACT: This article takes Stein as one (if not the
only) source for feminist avant-garde poetry--writing that
uses experimental language to distinctly feminist ends. A
number of recent feminist poets owe a debt to _Tender
Buttons_, and Stein's work remains a subject of homage.
But, changes working their way through feminist thought
appear in some feminist avant-garde writing that doesn't
simply acknowledge Stein's language experiments but
contests them as well. I examine the influence of, and
divergence from, Steinian poetics in Harryette Mullen and
Stein's "modern" vision by merging "public" speech and
"private" experience--the language of the public spheres of
the street and the marketplace with the experiences of
intimacy and the erotic. Mullen and Scalapino blur the
border between public and private discourse that Stein
relied upon in order to reveal (and, paradoxically, *not*
reveal) her lesbian sexuality in a revolution of ordinary
domestic language. In response in part to Stein, each poet
illuminates language as a locus of the political and the
erotic, altering both eroticized and "public" language as
signs of a culture in need of a fundamental awareness about
the relationships between our most private and public acts.
--EF
Paul Mann, "Stupid Undergrounds"
ABSTRACT: In a seemingly endless series of bloated,
aphoristic outtakes, micro-%Minima Moralia%, and
not-so-blank parodies of po-mo parodies, the author offers
to conduct you on a tour of various recently colonized
sites in the so-called subculture. Here you will witness
the suburbs of deterritorialization, tattoos and nipple
piercings, subliminal imagery and sound-effects generators,
cyberspace malls, the virtual Real, quack scientists and
stupid gurus, hairbrained (or is it hair-triggered?)
conspiracies, dour industrial bands, stupid day jobs,
revenant Situationists, trademarked plagiarisms, fuzzy
fun-seekers, secret codes that are never secret enough, any
number of surrogate revolutions, and your choice of
temporary apocalypses. Etc. Intellectual slumming at its
finest. The purpose of it all? A maso-critical critique
of criticism. You'd be stupid to download this one. --PM
_________________________________________________________________
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) 1995 by
Postmodern Culture and Oxford University Press, all rights
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