CONTENTS
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Articles
Simon Chesterman, "Ordering the New World:
Violence and its Re/Presentation in the Gulf War and
Beyond"
Gregg Lambert, "On the Uses and Abuses of
Literature for Life: Gilles Deleuze and the
Literary Clinic"
Scott DeShong, "Sylvia Plath, Emmanuel Levinas, and
the Aesthetics of Pathos"
Stefan Mattessich, "Ekphrasis, Escape, and Thomas
Pynchon's _The Crying of Lot 49_"
Michele Pierson, "Welcome to Basementwood: Computer
Generated Special Effects in _Wired_ Magazine"
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Colloquy
Mark Nunes et al., Postmodern Spacings [WWW Version only]
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Reviews
Nicky Marsh, "Note on My Writing: Poetics as
Exegis." A review of Susan Howe's _Frame
Structures: Early Poems 1974-1979_. New York:
New Directions, 1996, and Leslie Scalapino's
_Green and Black: Selected Writings_. Jersey
City: Talisman, 1996.
Christopher Sieving, "Eve, Not Edie: The Queering
of Andy Warhol." A review of Jennifer Doyle,
Jonathan Flatley, and José Esteban Muńoz, eds.'
_Pop Out: Queer Warhol_. Durham, NC: Duke UP,
1996.
Thomas Lavazzi, "Too Far In to Be 'Out.'" A review
of Mark Russell, ed.'s _Out of Character: Rants,
Raves, and Monologues from Today's Top Performance
Artists_. New York: Bantam, 1997.
Mark Goble, "Culture on Vacation." A review of
James Clifford's _Routes: Travel and Translation
in the Late Twentieth Century_. Cambridge:
Harvard UP, 1997.
Scott Michaelsen, "Hybrid Bound." A review of
Jose David Saldívar's _Border Matters: Remapping
American Cultural Studies_. Berkeley: U of
California P, 1997.
Arkady Plotnitsky, "The Cosmic Internet." A review
of Lee Smolin's _The Life of the Cosmos_. New
York: Oxford UP, 1997.
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Notices
[WWW Version only]
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Notes on Contributors
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Abstracts
Simon Chesterman, "Ordering the New World: Violence and
its Re/Presentation in the Gulf War and Beyond"
o Abstract: Jean Baudrillard's controversial
thesis advanced during the Gulf War that it was
in no sense a "real" war and his provocative claim
that "the Gulf War did not take place" were
lambasted at the time as exposing the political
bankruptcy of postmodern scholarship. At their
most extreme, such critiques asserted an
ideological complicity between anti-realist or
irrationalist doctrine and "the crisis of moral
and political nerve" said to be afflicting
Western intellectuals. In this article, I explore
the theoretical and practical consequences of
taking Baudrillard's discussion of the Gulf War
%qua% non-event seriously. In particular, I use
his thesis as the departure point for a
consideration of the presentation and
representation of violence in the post-Cold War
era more generally. Crucially, I argue that
Baudrillard's approach opens up a productive
line of inquiry into violence, and its
antagonistic and symbiotic relationship to
*order*. This critique has implications for the
analysis of international relations, but may also
open up a more productive engagement between
international relations and international law. In
distinct ways, each discourse holds statism as
axiomatic as the unitary locus of power and
legitimacy respectively. A critique of violence
may provoke a doctrinal reassessment of the
%a priori% equation of order and law that
presently legitimates the realist presumptions of
international relations and forecloses an
interrogation of the theoretical bases of
international law.--sc
Scott DeShong, "Sylvia Plath, Emmanuel Levinas, and the
Aesthetics of Pathos"
o Abstract: The essay engages poems by Sylvia Plath
to demonstrate a way of reading that derives from
the ethics of Emmanuel Levinas. According to
Levinas, ethics requires one to face others in
such a way that the incommensurable weight of the
other's lived existence is primary to discernible
contours or articulable characteristics of the
other. The desire to approach the other's affect
provides a new basis for philosophy, Levinas says,
as ethics becomes first philosophy, prior even to
ontology. In the language of literary criticism
and rhetoric, "pathos" (apprehension of feeling)
comes prior to "ethos" (judgment of character) in
a reader's or audience's apprehension of alterity.
This connection implies an aesthetic aspect to
Levinas's ethics, while at the same time
suggesting that the related way of reading has an
ethical dimension. But aesthetics may be
decentered as ethics cannot be; the desire to
approach the other's affect exceeds the
metaphysics of the good. By reading in such a way
that the affective dimensions of texts disrupt the
intellectual activity of judgment, the essay
develops an untotalized, denatured aesthetics and
a correlative--thus problematic--Levinasian
ethics.--sd
Gregg Lambert, "On the Uses and Abuses of Literature
for Life: Gilles Deleuze and the Literary Clinic"
o Abstract: In his final work, _Critique et
Clinique_, Gilles Deleuze addresses various issues
that surround "the problem of writing" and
outlines the possibility of a clinical in addition
to a critical use of literature. Using the
introductory essay to this volume, as well other
major statements on literature which are drawn
from the writings of Deleuze and Felix Guattari,
this essay offers a preliminary description of the
different criteria which would comprise what
Deleuze had earlier defined as "a generalized
literary clinic." The essay provides a definition
of several concepts that are integral to Deleuze's
description of literature as "symptomatology,"
"fabulation," and as "process," and offers an
account of the conditions in which, according to
Deleuze, the final aim of literature can be
understood as "a passage of life into language
that creates ideas." As well as describing the
different criteria that would comprise a clinical
as well as a critical use of literature, the essay
returns to discuss the concept of "minor
literature" as one of the principle themes of the
_Capitalism and Schizophrenia_ project, and argues
that a clinical usage may alter the representation
of literature by critics today and may emerge as a
"war-machine" against how the uses of literature
have been determined by the dominance of
institutionalized criticism in the modern
period.--gl
Stefan Mattessich, "Ekphrasis, Escape, and Thomas
Pynchon's _The Crying of Lot 49_"
o Abstract: This essay explores in Pynchon's second
novel a constitutive incoherence (often seen as a
flaw, and often read *out* of it by interpreters)
that never finally yields to any consistent
explanation. Oedipa Maas's search for the meaning
of the Tristero and of the communication system
known as W.A.S.T.E. is never far away from a
certain impoverishment of sense, a flatness of
affect that threatens to collapse the novel into a
heap of ambiguous signs. I argue in this essay
that this impoverishment is the mode by which the
novel performs its critique of a late modern
American culture characterized by standardization,
consumerism and the growing influence of mass
media. I analyze this critique in the themes
1) of escape or escapism, 2) complicity in a
simulacral order, and 3) repetition or citation.
I center my discussion of these themes around a
reading of the painting by Remedios Varo that
Pynchon quotes near the beginning of the novel
_Embroidering the Earth's Mantle_. This painting
forms the central panel of a triptych that I
interpret for how it raises the question of
escape from an alienated condition. I argue that
escape as thematized in the triptych is not an
escape *from* anything so much as a complex and
ambivalent recognition of a field of production in
which the subject ceases to have a reliable
social, political, or textual orientation. This
very disorientation becomes the sign of an
implicated relationship to the world that
catalyzes a different kind of escape. The novel,
I maintain, posits escape only in the recognition
of the degree to which reality itself is
constructed; one doesn't escape from this
virtuality of the real, but *in* it, through its
deliberate exacerbation. By *construction* here,
however, I emphatically do not mean a naive
nominalism. Construction for Pynchon is not the
activity of a subject but a modality of repetition
by which the subject who acts comes into being.
This is why *Oedipa* is not a character but a
caricature, and why the novel is fundamentally
parodic. I analyze the tropes of paradox and
tautological doubling in the novel for how they
register this displacement of subjectivity and its
relation to American social life in the postwar
period.--sm
Michele Pierson, "Welcome to Basementwood: Computer
Generated Special Effects in _Wired_ Magazine"
o Abstract: This article suggests some ways of
thinking about how the visual and discursive
rendering of computer generated special effects
converge in _Wired_ magazine. This includes
thinking first of all, about how the interlocking
logics of image production and technological
consumption get articulated in relation to special
effects, and secondly, involves speculating about
some of the fantasies that these discursive and/or
image formations appeal to. Through an
examination of some of the cultural and
institutional contexts in which the aesthetic
dimensions of computer generated imagery (or CGI),
have been explored over the years, this article
also suggests that the history of CGI cannot be
conceptualized in linear terms. The aesthetic
project governing the development of entertainment
applications for computer generated imagery has
most often been described in terms of simulation
and illusionism. But whether they have been
created for a blockbuster science fiction film, a
digital art exhibit, or the pages of _Wired_
magazine, many of the computer generated images
glimmering on our contemporary mediascape exhibit
a popular, techno-futurist aesthetic which
foregrounds the hyperreal properties of this new
electronic medium.--mp
Mark Nunes et al., "Postmodern Spacings" [WWW Version only]
o Abstract: Starting in February of 1997, a dozen
individuals began working on a collaborative
on-line project entitled _Postmodern Spacings_.
These individuals came from various academic and
professional fields in North America, Europe, and
Australia. Together, they drew up a syllabus, met
for real-time discussions in the 1k+1 MOO
(hero.village.virginia.edu:7777), carried on
conversations via a listserv, and constructed
collaborative, interwoven texts. This current
hypermedia work is the culmination of that effort.
_Postmodern Spacings_ attempts to address the
significance of "space" in contemporary cultural
discourse. It looks at manifestations of bodily
space, the space of the text, and social space,
and it attempts to question the current relevance
of a philosophy of space. The project also
considers the intersection of these domains and
the various hybrid spaces produced by these
crossings. Since discussions took place on-line,
the "virtual" and "the real" occurred somewhat as
a motif in various postings and conversations, but
by no means was it a limiting topic.
The distributive nature of this work (in both
process and production) at times makes it
difficult to determine where the project begins or
ends. Perhaps it is best, then, to consider
_Postmodern Spacings_ as a network of experiments
and trials--essays--that point in the direction of
further collaborative work.--mn
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