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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 6, Number 2 (January, 1996) ISSN: 1053-1920
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Editors: Eyal Amiran
Lisa Brawley, issue editor
Stuart Moulthrop
John Unsworth
Review Editor: Jim English
Managing Editor: Sarah Wells
Editorial Assistant: Jessamy Town
List Manager: Chris Barrett
Editorial Board:
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
Graham Hammill Peggy Phelan
Phillip Brian Harper David Porush
David Herman Mark Poster
bell hooks Carl Raschke
E. Ann Kaplan Avital Ronell
Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett Susan Schultz
Arthur Kroker William Spanos
Neil Larsen Tony Stewart
Tan Lin Allucquere Roseanne Stone
Saree Makdisi Gary Lee Stonum
Jerome McGann Chris Straayer
Uppinder Mehan Rei Terada
Jim Morrison Paul Trembath
Larysa Mykata Greg Ulmer
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CONTENTS
TITLE FILENAME
Paul Mann, "The Nine Grounds of mann.196
Intellectual Warfare"
Barbara Page, "Women Writers and the page.196
Restive Text: Feminism, Experimental Writing
and Hypertext"
Adrian Mackenzie, "'God Has No Allergies': mackenzie.196
Immanent Ethics and the Simulacra of the
Immune System"
C. Colwell, "Deleuze, Sense and the Event of colwell.196
AIDS"
Michael Epstein, "%Hyper% in 20th Century epstein.196
Culture: The Dialectics of Transition from
Modernism to Postmodernism"
Cory Brown, "Early Spring" & "Equinox" brown.196
RELATED READINGS [WWW Version only]
POPULAR CULTURE COLUMN:
Martin Spinelli, "Radio Lessons for the pop-cult.196
Internet"
REVIEWS
S. Brent Plate, "Lacan Looks at Hill and review-1.196
Hears His Name Spoken: An Interpretive Review
of Gary Hill through Lacan's 'I's' and Gazes."
Review of _Gary Hill_, Exhibition at the
Guggenheim Museum SoHo. May 11 - August 20.
Organized by Chris Bruce, Senior Curator,
Henry Art Gallery, Seattle.
A.H.S. Boy, "Biding Spectacular Time." review-2.196
Review of Guy Debord, _The Society of the
Spectacle_. trans. Donald Nicholson-Smith.
New York: Zone Books, 1994.
Minette Estevez, "Theorizing Public/Pedagogic review-3.196
Space: Richard Serra's Critique of Private
Property." Review of Richard Serra,
_Writings/Interviews_. Chicago: University
of Chicago Press, 1994.
Daniel Barbiero, "The First Amendment in an review-4.196
Age of Electronic Reproduction." Review of
Ronald K.L. Collins and David Skover, _The
Death of Discourse_. Boulder, CO: Westview
Press, 1995.
Jeff Schwartz, "It's Only Rock 'n' Roll?" review-5.196
Review of Simon Reynolds and Joy Press, _The
Sex Revolts: Gender, Rebellion, and Rock 'n'
Roll_. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University
Press, 1995.
Brian Evenson, "Rewiring the Culture." review-6.196
Review of Ben Marcus, _The Age of Wire and
String_. New York: Knopf, 1995
LETTERS:
Selected Letters from Readers letters.196
NOTICES:
Announcements and Advertisements [WWW Version only]
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ABSTRACTS
Paul Mann, "The Nine Grounds of Intellectual Warfare"
ABSTRACT: An essay on intellectual warfare as an extension
of and, differently, a refraction of the subject of warfare
generally. The essay is critical of the tendency within
contemporary criticism to metaphorize academic debate as
war, yet rather than dismiss the metaphor, the essay
explores its operations and symptoms, suggesting that war
talk is an indication of the "quite peripheral integration"
of academic knowledge production into forms of geopolitical
struggle that are actually anachronistic to the ways war is
being reconceptualized in war rooms and defense institutes.
At the same time, under the guise of this diagnosis, a set
of geographical figures appropriated from Sun Tzu's _Art of
War_ are used to explore -- in the most preliminary and no
doubt quite illicit manner -- the possibility of an engaged
criticism that is no longer simply positional, no longer
ideologically aligned in any clear and manifest way, no
longer committed to taking a stand and shoring up its
argumentative defenses, but rather "nomadic," tactical,
secretive. This essay thus proposes both to examine the
current conditions of intellectual warfare and to develop
models for intellectual war machines more responsive to
recent advances in military technology. -PM
Barbara Page, "Women Writers and the Restive Text: Feminism,
Experimental Writing and Hypertext"
ABSTRACT: This essay explores some contemporary women
writers who work in nonlinear, antihierarchical and de- or
re-centered forms, and who consciously incorporate into
their writing feminist discourses of resistance and the
refiguration of women's bodies, will and desire. All of the
writers under discussion aim to clear space for the
construction of new textual forms that give scope to the
self-articulation of women's subjectivity and women's
historical experience. Some attempt to open the discursive
field of the text by writing collaboratively, and, in the
instance of hypertext writers, by inviting the active
intervention of the reader in the text. For all of these
writers, both the themes and the structure of prose are in
contest, and all seek to alter the topography of the
text in order to give space and visual expression to
silences, disruptions, interpolations, and divisions of
voice. Given the aspiration of these writers to
rearticulate textual structures and codes, hypertext
would seem an inviting field for writing of this tendency,
though in its capacity for unbounded absorption it may
under some conditions undermine discourses of resistance
and the voicing of women's subjectivity. Among the print
writers discussed are Carole Maso, Theresa Hak Kyung Cha,
and -- in collaboration -- Daphne Marlatt and Betsy
Warland; among the hypertext writers discussed are Carolyn
Guyer and Martha Petry in collaboration, and Judy Malloy. -BP
C. Colwell, "Deleuze, Sense and the Event of AIDS"
ABSTRACT: AIDS, as cancer, syphilis, cholera, leprosy and
bubonic plague before it, has woven the threads of our
biological, social and moral existence together into a
complex disease entity that is much more than the physical
interaction between its cause(s) and the human organism.
It presents those already marginalized individuals and
communities most affected by it (so far) with personal
and political challenges that threaten their social and
physical existence. And it presents the scientific and
medical community with a challenge and puzzle that is the
equal, if not greater than, those that have preceded it.
But it is a mistake to separate these two arenas
(social/political and scientific) as they inscribe on one
another their codes of sense and meaning in a
hyper-dialectic of transcription and reverse transcription.
It is, as such, a mistake to take the biological objects
offered to us by science (specifically the HIV virus) as
referents free from infection by meanings ideally
supposed to be excluded from its domain. This essay
sketches out the multiple ways in which those senses,
meanings and referents are generated as a propaduetic to
finding ways of perverting and transforming those meanings.
The first part of this essay is a close reading of Gilles
Deleuze's notions of sense and event as presented in
_The Logic of Sense_. I argue that Deleuze provides us
with a conceptual strategy for understanding how the
currently actualized meanings of events arise and how such
meanings might be perverted and transformed. The second
part of the essay is an analysis of the particular
meanings of the event of AIDS showing how those meanings
are grounded in the various senses and events that border,
overlap and interpenetrate AIDS. In particular, I focus on
the social, political, economic and scientific dominance of
the HIV model of AIDS, arguing that this dominance is an
effect of the multiple senses that underlie AIDS (and, as
such, that the dominance is not due to purely 'scientific'
reasons). I conclude by suggesting the ways in which
tending to the sense(s) of AIDS allows for the possibility
of perverting and transforming the meaning(s) of the disease
event. -CC
Adrian Mackenzie, "'God Has No Allergies': Immanent Ethics and
the Simulacra of the Immune System"
ABSTRACT: We know that biopower -- the extension of
relations of power over life, throughout all its unfolding
-- is currently a crucial site of ethical concern. Yet
conventional approaches to ethics aim to contain that
concern outside the embodied %ethos%, as if there exists a
clean division between social/moral and objective
biological domains. Following the example of immunology,
this essay argues that such a containment overlooks the
ethical import of somatic individuation. In immunological
models of individuation, two forces of ancient metaphysical
provenance contest the field: the iconic and the
simulacral. The theoretical-pragmatic complex of
immunology is shot through with the traces of their
divergence and disparity. Their confrontation does not
result in a reconciliation, but in an unsettling of the
borders between self and other, and between interior and
exterior. In this instability might be found the
possibility of an immanent ethics that would not affirm
unity and identity as the origin of the embodied self, but
draw out the divergences that trouble any notion of an
immune self. -AM
Mikhail Epstein, "%Hyper% in 20th Century Culture: The Dialectics
of Transition from Modernism to Postmodernism"
ABSTRACT: This article explores the relationship of
Modernism and Postmodernism as the two complementary
aspects of one cultural paradigm, "hyper," which in the
subsequent analysis falls into the two connected
categories, those of "super" and "pseudo." If Russian and
Western Postmodernism have their common roots in their
respective Modernist past, in the revolutionary obsession
with the "super," so also their current engagement with the
"pseudo" allows us to glimpse the phenomenon of Postmodernism
in general in a new dimension.
My argument focuses on the variety of modernist approaches in
Soviet social and intellectual trends which expose the
phenomenon of "hyper" in its first stage, as a revolutionary
overturn of the "classic" paradigm and an assertion of a
"true, essential reality," or "*super*reality." In the
second stage, the same phenomena are realized and exposed
as "*pseudo*realities" thus marking the transformation of
"hyper" itself from a modernist to a postmodernist stage.
I argue for the necessary connection between these two
stages, "super" and "pseudo," in the development of 20th
century cultural paradigm. Certainly, this dialectical
development of "hyper" presents neither the classic Hegelian
dialectics of thesis and antithesis with subsequent
reconciliation in synthesis, nor the modernist model of
negative dialectics elaborated in the Frankfurt school, with
an irreducible opposition of a revolutionary antithesis to a
conservative thesis. Postmodernist dialectics implies
neither reconciliation nor revolution but the internal
tension of irony. Antithesis, pushed to an extreme, finds
thesis inside itself, moreover, exposes itself as an
extension and intensification of this very thesis. "Hyper"
is such a "super" that through excess and transgression
undermines its own reality and reveals itself as "pseudo."
In this way, *hyper*sociality inherent in the Soviet system
can be interpreted simultaneously as a *super*sociality and
a *pseudo*sociality. Communism proves to be not a
negation of individualism, but its most voluntarist form
ruthlessly destructive in regard to communality (the cult
of personality). Soviet materialism proves to be not a
negation of idealism, but its most radical and militant
form ruthlessly destructive in regard to materiality (the
dictatorship of ideology). Paradoxically, it was the
revolution as a quest and an affirmation of a
"supersignified," a "pure" or "essential" reality, which
has led to the formation of the pseudo-realities,
constituted by hollow, non-referential signs of reality,
with which postmodern culture plays in both Russia and the
West. -ME
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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 Oxford University Press, all rights
reserved. Items published by Postmodern Culture may be freely
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