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 1 (september, 1993) ISSN: 1053-1920
-----------------------------------------------------------------
Editors: Eyal Amiran, Issue Editor
John Unsworth
Review Editor: Jim English
List Manager: Chris Barrett
Editorial Assistant: Jonathan Beasley
Editorial Board:
Kathy Acker Chimalum Nwankwo
Sharon Bassett Patrick O'Donnell
Michael Berube Elaine Orr
Marc Chenetier Marjorie Perloff
Greg Dawes David Porush
R. Serge Denisoff Mark Poster
Robert Detweiler Carl Raschke
Henry Louis Gates, Jr. Mike Reynolds
Joe Gomez Avital Ronell
Robert Hodge Andrew Ross
bell hooks Jorge Ruffinelli
E. Ann Kaplan Susan M. Schultz
Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett William Spanos
Arthur Kroker Tony Stewart
Neil Larsen Gary Lee Stonum
Jerome J. McGann Chris Straayer
Stuart Moulthrop Paul Trembath
Larysa Mykyta Greg Ulmer
Phil Novak
-----------------------------------------------------------------
CONTENTS
AUTHOR & TITLE FN FT
Masthead, Contents, and CONTENTS.993
Instructions for retrieving files
Peter Hitchcock, "'It Dread Inna Inglan': HITCHCOC.993
Linton Kwesi Johnson, Dread, and Dub
Identity"
Stephanie Hammer, "On the Bull's Horn with HAMMER.993
Peter Handke: Debates, Failures, Essays,
and a Postmodern Livre de Moi"
Eugene W. Holland, "A Schizoanalytic Reading HOLLAND.993
of Baudelaire: The Modernist as
Postmodernist"
Elizabeth Fay, "Mapplethorpe's Art: Playing FAY.993
with the Byronic Postmodern"
George Bradley, "Another Autumn Refrain" and BRADLEY.993
"Two Thirds of a Second at the Center of
the Universe"
Lynda Hart, "That was Then: This is Now: HART.993
Ex-changing the Phallus"
Martin Rosenberg, "Dynamic and Thermodynamic ROSENBER.993
Tropes of the Subject in Freud and in
Deleuze and Guattari"
POPULAR CULTURE COLUMN:
Steven Shaviro, "If I Only Had a Brain" POP-CULT.993
REVIEWS:
Mark Fenster, "Authorizing Memory, Remembering
Authority." A Review of Michael Schudson's
_Watergate in American Memory: How We
Remember, Forget, and Reconstruct the
Past_, and Barbie Zelizer's _Covering the
Body: The Kennedy Assassination, the Media,
and the Shaping of Collective Memory_. REVIEW-1.993
Rita Barnard, "`Imagining the Unimaginable':
J.M. Coetzee, History, and Autobiography."
A Review of David Attwell's _J.M. Coetzee:
South Africa and the Politics of Writing_,
and J.M. Coetzee, _Doubling the Point:
Essays and Interviews_, ed. David Attwell. REVIEW-2.993
Heesok Chang, "Postmodern Communities: the
Politics of Oscillation." A Review of
Gianni Vattimo's _The Transparent Society_
and Giorgio Agamben, _The Coming
Community_. REVIEW-3.993
J.L. Lemke, "Practice, Politique, Postmodernism."
A review of Pierre Bourdieu and Lois J.D.
Wacquant's _An Invitation to Reflexive
Sociology_. REVIEW-4.993
John McGowan, "Postmodernist Purity." A review
of Craig Owens's _Beyond Recognition:
Representation, Power, and Culture_.
Ed. Scott Bryson, Barbara Kruger, Lynne
Tillman, and Jane Weinstock. REVIEW-5.993
SPECIAL MUSIC CLUSTER
Andrew Herman, "Fear of Music." A review of
Andrew Goodwin's _Dancing in the
Distraction Factory: Music Televison and
Popular Culture_. REVIEW-6.993
Marc Perlman, "Idioculture: De-Massifying the
Popular Music Audience." A review of
Susan D. Crafts, Daniel Cavicchi, Charles
Keil and the Music in Daily Life Project's
_My Music_. Foreword by George Lipsitz. REVIEW-7.993
Timothy D. Taylor, "The Sound of the
Avant-Garde." A review of Douglas Kahn
and Gregory Whitehead, eds., _The Wireless
Imagination: Sound, Radio, and the
Avant-Garde_. REVIEW-8.993
LETTERS:
Paul Miers, on Kip Canfield LETTERS.993
NOTICES:
Announcements and Advertisements [WWW Version only]
-----------------------------------------------------------------
ABSTRACTS
Peter Hitchcock, "'It Dread Inna Inglan': Linton Kwesi Johnson,
Dread, and Dub Identity"
ABSTRACT: This essay examines the production of
cultural voice in the work of Linton Kwesi Johnson (LKJ),
the African/Caribbean/European dub poet. It suggests that
the double-displacement of an African-Caribbean Black living
in England, diaspora upon diaspora, comes with a double-
indemnity--making and history. But what cultural logic
obtains in the contruction/reconstruction of subjectivity as
subaltern, the articulation of the margin, the trace, the
veve, that still allows a trenchant sense of history, of the
need to make history? Can we still conceive of subjects
that make history, have a history to make, remake at a
cocophanous rendezvous of victory? To understand why this
notion is not a mystery (the History, for instance, of
imperialist certitude) but a problematic, one must
understand what makes this history: one must come to terms
with the history of the voice, what Kamus Braithwaite calls
the "invitation and challenge" or what Edouard Glissant
defines as "literature" and "oraliture" (the fragmented and
therefore shared histories and voices of peoples). One can
read this history as an introduction in LKJ's sonorous beat,
and one can see this history in a dissidence of voice, in
all its synesthesia and dislocation. --PH
Stephanie Hammer, "On the Bull's Horn with Peter Handke: Debates,
Failures, Essays, and a Postmodern Livre de Moi"
ABSTRACT: This essay discusses Handke's critical
reception as it pertains to the postmdodern and "reads"
Handke's recent essay series (the VERSUCHE) against a
variety of concerns: desire, castration, subjectivity, and
the resonance of father-essayist Michel de Montaigne.
Handke's essays whittle away at the authority of traditional
male subjectivity in graphic ways, as though performing a
process of aesthetic self-castration in payment fo a new,
legitimitzed subjectivity. To paraphrase Michel Leiris,
Handke's autobiographical doubles not only expose themselves
to the bull's horn, they allow themselves to be gored; this
reverse matadorian spectacle is at once the performance to
which we are constantly invited and the radical cure which
we might also enact upon ourselves. --SH
Eugene W. Holland, "A Schizoanalytic Reading of Baudelaire: The
Modernist as Postmodernist"
ABSTRACT: This schizoanalytic reading of Baudelaire
draws on psychoanalytic, rhetorical, and
historical-materialist interpretations in order to show that
the historical momentum that carried Baudelaire out of
romanticism into modernism also propelled him "beyond"
modernism into a stance we recognize today as postmodern.
Connecting Deleuze and Guattari's notion of "decoding" with
the prevalence of metonymy over metaphor (in linguistic,
rhetorical, and psychoanalytic terms [Jakobson, Barbara
Johnson, and Lacan, respectively]) enables us to read the
sonnet "Beauty" as a subversion of the metaphoric poetics of
"Correspondences"--a subversion that continues into the
"Parisian Tableaus" section of _The Flowers of Evil_, and
culminates in the split stance of the narrator in the prose
poem collection. This trajectory is fueled by Baudelaire's
shock and dismay at the founding of a Second Empire on the
ruins of the Second Republic. While his modernism emerges
in the ability to distance himself serenely from former
romantic-idealistic selves, his postmodernism lies in the
recognition that the victims of Second Empire society he
contemplates and depicts from afar are actually split-off
versions of former selves, with which he cannot help but
identify. --EWH
Elizabeth Fay, "Mapplethorpe's Art: Playing With the Byronic
Postmodern"
ABSTRACT: There exist trenchant connections between
Byron's romantic creation of himself as a literary figure,
and Mapplethorpe's reinterpretation of the Byronic mode
towards a postmodern creation of possible selves. The
verbal and photographic "languages" employed by both artists
focus on issues that allow for a comparative analysis of
"staging," and what is termed here "the byronic postmodern."
Within this focus, the artistic meaning of "staging" applies
to the artistic "self" in ways that seduce the viewer into a
consuming appreciator of the artist's seemingly unlabored
work. It also entails a particular form of the visual
contract normatively understood to exist between artist and
viewer. Byronic artists are equipped to understand the
seductively teasing nature of this contract because they
base their art on the bodily interplay made permissible
between hetero-and homosexual worlds by costuming and role
playing. --EF
Lynda Hart, "That Was Then: This Is Now: Ex-changing the Phallus"
ABSTRACT: Masochism, Freud claimed, was "truly
feminine." In the 1970s, masochism was considered to be one
of the problems that feminists had to conquer. In the
1990s, masochism has been heralded as an emancipatory sexual
position for men. This essay considers some of the problems
raised by recent theorizing of male masochism, which
presumes that masochism, for or between "women," is a
reproduction of patriarchal womanhood. I argue that the
unarticulated ground for male masochism is the impossibility
of masochistic sexuality between women. The essay
contextualizes these questions within lesbian-produced
representations of dildoes as "the real thing(s)," butch-
femme roles, and sadomasochistic erotica. --LH
Martin Rosenberg, "Dynamic and Thermodynamic Tropes of the
Subject in Freud and in Deleuze and Guattari"
ABSTRACT: The descriptions of human consciousness in
Freud and in Deleuze and Guattari are problematic precisely
in their inverse, mirrored opposition, and we may discover
the "ground" for that opposition by examining the role
played by tropes from the discipline of physics in these
theorists' representations of subjectivity. We will need to
notice the historical differences in the ideological use of
these tropes. Yet, even contemporary theories of tropes
have had recourse to the discipline of physics in order to
model how tropes work. Drawing on Ilya Prigogine's
confrontation with the rhetoricity governing a "clash of
doctrines" between time-reversible (dynamic) and
time-irreversible (thermodynamic) assumptions underlying
investigations in the physical sciences, we will examine
first the role of oppositional tropes from physics in
theories of tropes. Second, we will observe the role that
these tropes play in representing the subject: in Freud's
"The Dreamwork," in Laplanche and Pontalis' account of
Freud's subject-systems, and in Stallybrass and White's
account of the unconscious as the site of the carnivalesque.
We will then show how Deleuze and Guattari's representations
of the subject in terms of the nomad and the rhizome, simply
invert Freud's valorizing of the dynamic laws controlling
thermodynamic processes, arguing instead for the celebration
of the contingent and the indeterminate. In a telling
passage on chess and Go as game theories of war in which
chess becomes the discourse of %physis%, while Go becomes
the discourse of %nomos%, Deleuze and Guattari seek to hide
their own claims for a time-irreversible model of cultural
resistance "grounded" in natural laws of a different sort
than those justifying the rules of domination governing
subjectivity and society since the Industrial
Revolution. --MER
_________________________________________________________________
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) 1993 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: