CONTENTS 

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Steve Garlick, Code-Scripting the Body: Sex and
the Onto-Theology of Bioinformatics

Kalindi Vora, Others' Organs: South Asian Domestic
Labor and the Kidney Trade

Jillian Smith, Tolerating the Intolerable, Enduring
the Unendurable: Representing the Accident in
Driver's Education Films

David Greven, Cyborg Masochism, Homo-Fascism:
Rereading Terminator 2


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                      Popular Culture Column

Stuart Moulthrop, Watchmen Meets The Aristocrats


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                      Reviews
 
Darren Wershler, "Kenneth Goldsmith's American
Trilogy." A review of Kenneth Goldsmith, _The
Weather_. Los Angeles: Make Now, 2005; Goldsmith,
_Traffic_. Los Angeles: Make Now, 2007; and
Goldsmith, _Sports_. Los Angeles: Make Now, 2008.

Susan A. Crane, "The Special Case of Four Auschwitz
Photographs." A review of Georges Didi-Huberman,
_Images in Spite of All: Four Photographs from
Auschwitz_. Trans. Shane B. Lillis. U of
Chicago P, 2008.

Graham Hammill, "Stupid Pleasures." A review of
Michael D. Snediker, _Queer Optimism: Lyric
Personhood and Other Felicitous Persuasions_.
Minneapolis and London: U of Minnesota P, 2008.

Christopher C. Robinson, "Space and Vision in
Language." A review of Nana Last, _Wittgenstein's
House: Language, Space, & Architecture_. New
York: Fordham UP, 2008.

Suzanne Diamond, "Embracing Aporia? The Lessons
of Popular Knowledge." A review of Clare
Birchall, _Knowledge Goes Pop: From Conspiracy
Theory to Gossip_. Oxford: Berg, 2006. 

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                  Notes on Contributors


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                         Abstracts

Steve Garlick, Code-Scripting the Body: Sex and
the Onto-Theology of Bioinformatics

    * Abstract: It is generally acknowledged that
molecular biology has been enamored with discourses
of information theory and cybernetics from its
earliest days. Equally common, in critical theory,
is the belief that biological science has lost
purchase on important dimensions of embodied life
as a result. This essay suggests, however, that
when we examine the work of 'cyberscience'
pioneers such as Edwin Schrödinger, Norbert Wiener,
and Claude Shannon, we find an ambiguous embrace of
the complexity of embodied life and freedom at the
level of the living organism or cybernetic system,
counteracted by a underlying desire for order and
informatic determinism at the level of code or
message. Moreover, these competing tendencies
towards organicism and informatics feed into two
central and interrelated tensions that inhabit
modern biological thought. The first tension
concerns the efforts of biologists to dispel
vitalism and the specter of God underlying the
natural order, while the second involves the
concept of (hetero)sexual difference and its
substitution for God as guarantor of biological
knowledge. This essay makes the argument that sex
is often an unrecognized point of articulation in
attempts to resolve these tensions and, as such,
is central to the potential of bioinformatic
bodies. --sg

David Greven, Cyborg Masochism, Homo-Fascism:
Rereading Terminator 2

    * Abstract: As the most important and
sustained cyborg narrative in Hollywood film,
the Terminator films, particularly the first two,
continue to demand a considerable amount of
critical scrutiny. When the highly charged
allegorical power of the figure of the cyborg is
added to Arnold Schwarzenegger's star persona,
now evolved into that of national political
figure, this persona emerges as a welter of
gendered, sexual, and racial anxieties that
relate in multivalent ways.  In his famous essay
"Is the Rectum a Grave?" Leo Bersani argues that
the "logic of homosexual desire includes the
potential for a loving identification with the
gay man's enemies."  This essay argues that films
like Terminator 2 enact the queer theory debates
indexed in Bersani's essay, revealing the
complicity with normative standards of gendered
identity in queer desire, but also exposing the
queer nature of these normative standards.  The
film forces us to acknowledge that while queer
desire may be troublingly complicit in the
structures of normative power that pathologize it,
those very same structures proceed from an oddly
analogous fascination with the homoerotics of
power, especially in its most virulent, which is
to say, its fascist, form.  Terminator 2 cloaks
its sadomasochistic fascist fantasies in the
guise of the violent, melodramatic family film.
The film is exemplary of the "Bush to Bush" era--
from 1989 to 2008, the period presided over by
Bush I, Clinton, and Bush II. Terminator 2
illuminates the split between narcissistic and
masochistic modes of male sexuality that informs
the period's representational practices. --dg

Jillian Smith, Tolerating the Intolerable, Enduring
the Unendurable: Representing the Accident in
Driver's Education Films
    * Abstract: Driver's Education, like all
accident-prevention discourses, attempts to
govern that which it cannot represent.
Representing the accident reduces the multiple,
complex force of its coming forth. The images
of accidents shown to students in driver's
education can never be the accident that awaits
them, and the accident that awaits them can
never be known in advance.  Such conservative
management produces a blindly reactive discourse
(in the Nietzschean/Deleuzian sense) deeply
preoccupied with self-preservation. Faced with
active forces of potential disorganization,
accident prevention aims to conserve, not spend,
to turn forces back toward the conservation and
enclosure of the integral self and to harness
repetition toward the security of the same. In
accident prevention, variation is the enemy.
Yet, in driver's education carnage films--
shocking documentaries of extreme highway
accidents that prominently display their dying
and dismembered victims--driver's education
unwittingly unleashes the very variation its
discourse attempts to control, and in the process
transforms representation and seeing.  This essay
analyzes accident films, arguing that they
exemplify a version of Gilles Deleuze's time-image.
Viewers are clutched in the experience of
uncontrolled, deformed time, the timeless time of
the accident, where the interval reigns as
indeterminate potential of unpredictable
convergence and potentially violent change. The
highway carnage film projects a series of images
to viewers that they don't really see, but rather
endure, and places them in the perception of time
that is unendurable.  Without actually showing
accidents, the films capture the intolerable
interval that is the force of accident.  This
essay suggests that the reactive shape of accident-
prevention discourse is not limited to driver's
education, but more seriously pervades the accident
theory of Paul Virilio, the Bush Administration's
war rhetoric, and U.S. nuclear diplomacy.--js

Kalindi Vora, Others' Organs: South Asian Domestic
Labor and the Kidney Trade

    * Abstract: "Others' Organs" explores the
particular limits on the mobility of rural
agriculturalist South Indians, middle class Sri
Lankan women, and young Indian and Pakistani men,
whose needs for jobs become entwined with the
commodification of "life." I argue that the
material constraints on these workers, as well as
the creation of excess body parts and lives
through medical and transportation technologies,
creates a system where Indian lives function to
support other lives in the West, rather than their
own. Using recent ethnographic material on these
sites, I juxtapose these different forms of
migrations and labor to see how certain bodies,
body parts, and portions of life can be made
surplus in the interests of the market. I argue
that the selling of kidneys in South India and
the exporting of feminized labor from Sri Lanka
to the Gulf, can be explained in terms of supply
and demand, and result from an interaction of
changing economic structures in India, the
gendering of labor, and India's postcolonial
structural relationships to external centers of
production. The excessiveness of certain parts,
like the kidney, of particular family members,
or even of certain arenas of existence, is
produced in conversation with the production of
need within the market, in this instance of the
need for transplants and for hired labor within
the home, creating the "need" to sell a kidney
or to migrate. The second kidney and "spare"
family members are actually necessities that are
made surplus and then commodified. --kv