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 7, Number 1 (September, 1996) ISSN: 1053-1920
-----------------------------------------------------------------
Editors: Eyal Amiran
Lisa Brawley
Graham Hammill, guest editor
Stuart Moulthrop
John Unsworth
Review Editor: Paula Geyh
Managing Editor: Sarah Wells
List Manager: Jessamy Town
Research Assistants: Anne Sussman
Steven Wagner
Editorial Board:
Sharon Bassett Phil Novak
Michael Berube Chimalum Nwankwo
Nahum Chandler Patrick O'Donnell
Marc Chenetier Elaine Orr
Greg Dawes Marjorie Perloff
J. Yellowlees Douglas Fred Pfeil
Jim English Peggy Phelan
Graham Hammill David Porush
Phillip Brian Harper Mark Poster
David Herman Carl Raschke
bell hooks Avital Ronell
E. Ann Kaplan Susan Schultz
Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett William Spanos
Arthur Kroker Tony Stewart
Neil Larsen Allucquere Roseanne Stone
Tan Lin Gary Lee Stonum
Saree Makdisi Chris Strayer
Jerome McGann Rei Terada
Uppinder Mehan Paul Trembath
Jim Morrison Greg Ulmer
Larysa Mykyta
Special Thanks: Jennifer Hoyt
-----------------------------------------------------------------
CONTENTS
TITLE FILENAME
ARTICLES:
Steven Helmling, "Jameson's Lacan" helmling.996
Veronique M. Foti, "Representation foti.996
Represented: Foucault, Velazquez,
Descartes"
Special Section--Psychoanalysis and Cultural Studies:
Graham Hammill, guest editor
Allen Meek, "Guides to the Electropolis: meek.996
Toward a Spectral Critique of the Media"
Angelika Rauch, "Saving Philosophy in rauch.996
Cultural Studies: The Case of Mother Wit"
Vadim Linetski, "Poststructuralist linetski.996
Paraesthetics and the Phantasy of the
Reversal of Generations"
POPULAR CULTURE COLUMN:
David Golumbia, "Hypertext" pop-cult.996
HYPERTEXT:
Matthew Miller, "TRIP" [WWW Version only]
REVIEWS:
Carina Yervasi, "Confessions of a Net review-1.996
Surfer: _New Chick_ and Grrrls on the
Web." Review of Carla Sinclair, _Net
Chick: A Smart-Girl Guide to the Wired
World_. New York: Henry Holt and Company,
1996.
Samuel Collins, "'Head Out On the Highway': review-2.996
Anthropological Encounters with the
Supermodern." Review of Marc Auge,
_Non-Places: Introduction to an
Anthropology of Supermodernity_. New York:
Verso, 1995.
Jon Ippolito, "Whose Opera Is This, Anyway?" review-3.996
Review of Tod Machover and MIT Media Lab's
interactive _Brain Opera_, performed at
Lincoln Center, NYC, July 23-August 3, 1996.
Thomas Swiss, "Music and Noise: Marketing review-4.996
Hypertexts." Review of Eastgate Systems,
Inc.
Theresa Smalec, "(Re)Presenting the review-5.996
Renaissance on a Post-Modern Stage." Review
of Susan Bennett, _Performing Nostalgia:
Shifting Shakespeare and the Contemporary
Past_. London and New York: Routledge,
1996.
Crystal Downing, "_Multiplicity_: %Una review-6.996
Vista de Nada%." Review of _Multiplicity_,
directed by Harold Ramis, Columbia Pictures
1996.
Brent Wood, "Resistance in Rhyme." Review review-7.996
of Russell Potter, _Spectacular Vernaculars:
Hip-Hop and the Politics of Postmodernism_.
Albany: Suny, 1995.
LETTERS:
Selected Letters from Readers letters.996
RELATED READINGS [WWW Version only]
NOTICES:
Announcements and Advertisements [WWW Version only]
-----------------------------------------------------------------
ABSTRACTS
Steven Helmling, "Jameson's Lacan"
ABSTRACT: This essay surveys Fredric Jameson's engagement
with the work of Jacques Lacan. Jameson is one of the few
among commentators on Lacan to foreground Lacan's cryptic
and enigmatic prose style: Jameson's earliest mention of
Lacan in _The Prison-House of Language_ (1971) departs
from the premise that Lacan's writing offers an
"initiatory" experience rather than systematic exposition;
and Jameson's 1977 essay, "Imaginary and Symbolic in
Lacan," climaxes with a celebration of Lacan's "discourse of
the analyst" as an ethic for "cultural intellectuals"--a
style of utterance closer to "listening" than speaking, more
a speaking-with than a speaking-to or -of. The Lacanian
scriptible (to borrow a term from Barthes that Jameson
favors) enacts or performs Lacan's conviction of the
irreducibility of particular speech acts to a paraphraseable
"meaning," an %enonce% (or "letter") dissociable from the
impulse (or "spirit") of the enunciation itself--a gesture
that appeals to Jameson because just such irreducibility is
what Jameson stipulates for "dialectical" writing as such.
The success with which Lacan's writing resists what Jameson
calls "thematization," the kind of commodification or
reification to which written texts are specifically liable,
exemplifies (Jameson hopes) a "utopian" resistance to
ideology, or break-out from "ideological closure."
But in _The Political Unconscious_ (1981), "ideological
closure" is a premise of the argument to an extent that
presupposes the impotence of any cultural production to break
out of it. In this context, the book's subtitle, _Narrative
as a Socially Symbolic Act_, implies the question whether
"socially symbolic" must not mean "ideological": whether a
"socially symbolic" protest against "ideological closure" can
escape functioning as a confirmation of it. In the book's
third chapter, Lacan is mobilized in ways that test this
sense of "symbolic" against the specifically Lacanian
evocation of "the Symbolic" as contrasted with "the
Imaginary." The "Imaginary/Symbolic" binary figures, on the
one hand, a fated devolution of desire and the libidinal
into the "ideological closure" of "the Symbolic," on the
other a more familiar ("Enlightenment") narrative of passage
from irrationalism to critical reason. "Imaginary/Symbolic"
transcodes in one way as "utopia/ideology," in another as
"ideology/critique." In the tension between these two
possibilities, Jameson maintains (one version or enactment
of) "the dialectic of utopia and ideology," in which cultural
production remains ever subject to ideological deformation,
yet also resists and preserves the promise of deliverance
from the closure of the ideological condition.--sh
Veronique M. Foti, "Representation Represented: Foucault,
Velazquez, Descartes"
ABSTRACT: I examine Foucault's analysis of the %episteme% of
representation with respect to Descartes's understanding (in
the _Regulae_) of a universal %mathesis%, and to the
self-representation of representation that Foucault traces in
Velazquez's painting _Las Meninas_. I call into question
Foucault's analysis of the painting as well as the critical
observations of Snyder and Cohen, who take it for granted
that Velazquez adhered to a univocal Albertian system of
perspective. As to Foucault, I argue that his understanding
(and assimilation) of vision and painting remains essentially
Cartesian, and that he is insufficiently attentive to the
materiality of painting which resists discursive
appropriation. Finally, I examine what a genuine
attentiveness to painting's materiality and to its
irreducibility to a theoretical exploration of vision would
mean for grasping the relevance of its specific order of
%poiesis% to postmodern thought.--vf
Allen Meek, "Guides to the Electropolis: Toward a Spectral
Critique of the Media"
ABSTRACT: The range of critical practices that currently
circulate in academic cultural studies has yet to acknowledge
the full scope of Derridean deconstruction. Now Derrida has
published for the first time an extensive meditation on Marx,
inviting renewed speculation about the ways that
deconstruction might comment on marxian theories of the
media. The figure of the specter, or ghost, that Derrida
"conjures" in his tribute to Marx guides a critique of the
media toward earlier encounters between marxism and
psychoanalysis. These include the writings of Andre Breton
and Walter Benjamin, recently discussed by Margaret Cohen
as belonging to an experimental tradition which she names
"Gothic Marxism."
Like Breton and Benjamin before him, Derrida pursues a
poetics of haunting and mourning that pervades the texts of
Marx and calls for a "politics of memory" arising out of a
sense of responsibility toward the ghosts of our collective
histories. For Breton and Benjamin these included the ghosts
of a revolutionary tradition that haunted the emergent
phantasmagoria of commodity capitalism in modern Paris.
Derrida addresses the collapse of Soviet communism and the
"revolution" in global telecommunications. When placed in the
company of Derrida's specters, can the Surrealist experiments
of the 20s and 30s serve as a guide for a spectral critique
of electronic media? Such a critique would call into question
the legitimacy of the dominant technologies and ideologies of
representation by reconstructing, in ways that owe much to
psychoanalysis, their repressed histories.
Anne Friedberg's study of cinema and shopping malls in Los
Angeles provides a contemporary context for considering the
legacies of Gothic Marxism. Like Cohen, Friedberg looks back
to Benjamin's Arcades Project as a model for cultural
studies. What is striking about the juxtaposition of these
two recent responses to Benjamin, however, is that in
Friedberg's analysis of postmodern culture we witness the
disappearance of those darker social forces which it would
be the project of Gothic Marxism to make visible.--am
Angelika Rauch, "Saving Philosophy for Cultural Studies"
ABSTRACT: This paper establishes Kant's aesthetics as a
postmodern project as it expands on Kant's distinction
between representative image and figure. "Figure" is the
crucial term because it operates according to unconscious
law's contingent resonant with rhetorical structures. From
a psychoanalytic and feminist perspective, Kant's discussion
of "wit" and "motherwit" appeals to the formative and
creative nature of judgments on aesthetic experience. The
author's thesis is that in aesthetic judgments, imagination
reveals a structure of re-membrance which recreates the
bond with the mother's body in the contingent feeling of
pleasure. Taste is inherently a bodily faculty that, in
analogy to the power of genius, translates affect into
cultural images. Judgment of taste is the product of
hermeneutic (i.e. mental and historical) process in which
wit engages the cultural past in and through language to
produce non-mimetic linguistic representations of emotional
experiences: "figures" not images.--ar
Vadim Linetski, "Poststructuralist Paraesthetics and the
Phantasy of the Reversal of Generations"
ABSTRACT: In its critique of patriarchy and logocentrism, and
in its attempts to replace these with a plurality of
identifications, post-structuralist theory enacts the very
fantasy of the reversal of generations which, Freud explains,
underpins the Oedipus complex. By developing Freud's notion
of sublimation alongside both Bakhtin's notions of dialogism
and Ernest Jones's theory of aphanasis, this essay argues for
a genuinely psychoanalytic narratology that lies outside
logocentric thought. One important significance of this
argument is that it allows for an engagement with
constructions of feminine sexuality without recapitulating
an Oedipal paradigm.--gh
David Golumbia, "Hypercapital"
ABSTRACT: As relatively egalitarian, pluralist theories of
hypertext (largely focusing on the medium's formal and
mechanical properties) have been written in the academy,
corporations have been shaping hypertext into a premier tool
of capitalist development. Like many such tools, the World
Wide Web is skewed toward Western ways of understanding and
the Western economic base. But unlike other tools of this
sort, the interplay between hypertext on the web and the
varied and burgeoning mechanisms for electronic transfer of
capital and credit suggests a more sinister development. For
the distinction between the transfer of information and the
transfer of capital is becoming blurred in the creation of
what I call "hypercapital" which in certain crucial respects
constitute a new form of capital itself. The body of the
paper discusses the consequences of this blurring for liberal
visions of information access, for the Marxian notion of
circulation, and for the politics of the subject. The paper
follows the recent web convention of embedding links to a
variety of web sites, whose contents help to demonstrate the
imminence (and the gravity) of the developments I discuss.
--dg
_________________________________________________________________
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) 1996 by
Postmodern Culture and the Institute for Advanced Technology in
the Humanities, 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: