Postmodern Culture Table of Contents v4n01 (September 1993) URL = http://infomotions.com/serials/pmc/pmc-v4n01-contents.txt 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 NOTICES.993 ----------------------------------------------------------------- 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: The concept of masochism has had to be rethought in light of recent developments in psychoanalysis, feminism, and gay and lesbian studies. Bersani and others, for example, have suggested that submission may be sexually emancipatory for men, thus making it a privileged rather than an oppressed position; women, meanwhile, continue to be considered naturally rather than performatively masochistic, and thus unable to benefit from masochism as a strategy. Such conceptualizations of the reality and/or theatricality of masochism and pornography still require lesbianism to be a negative ontology. The lesbian phallus, however, instigates a representational crisis by making no reference to the Real of the penis; it does not signify the presistence of a masculine or heterosexual identification. Rather, the lesbian phallus is the property of she who has given up what no one has. --[Ed.] 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 ---------------------------------------------------------------- INSTRUCTIONS LISTSERV: NB: The Unix Listserv program does not accept the "f=mail" switch after get requests. Those of you who are familiar with the VM listserv procedures should NOT continue to use "f=mail" in your requests to the Unix Listserv. Likewise, the "package files" which we used with the VM Listserv to retrieve the entire issue with a one-line command are no longer available, but see the ftp instructions, below, for an easy way to retrieve the entire issue. To retrieve the items listed in the table of contents, send a mail message to listserv@listserv.ncsu.edu, containing as its one and only line the command get pmc-list [fn.ft] (replace [fn.ft] with the filename and filetype for the file you want to receive, as listed in the table of contents). There should be no blank lines, spaces, or other text preceding this line--however, you can type more than one get command in your mail to listserv, as long as each command is on its own line. More detailed Listserv instructions are available in the file NEWUSER.PREFACE: to retrieve this file, send mail to listserv@listserv.ncsu.edu with the command get pmc-list newuser.preface ANONYMOUS FTP: All PMC files are available via anonymous ftp; to retrieve items in this way, you will need to be on the internet. To connect to the ftp server, type the following at your command prompt, hitting the enter key at the end of each line of commands: ftp ftp.ncsu.edu The machine name ftp.ncsu.edu is a registered alias for the host infopoint.cc.ncsu.edu: if you can't connect using the alias, try using the literal hostname. Once you are connected, you can log in as "anonymous" or "ftp" using your email userid as a password. When you have logged in, type: cd pub/ncsu/pmc/pmc-list To make sure that the ftp program expects to transfer ascii text, type ascii at this point. Now you can transfer individual files or groups of files. To transfer an individual file--for example, this table of contents--type: get contents.993 Note that, although the filenames are listed above in uppercase letters, for readability, the ftp program is case-sensitive, and you will probably need to use only lowercase letters when you ask ftp for PMC files. To transfer a group of files--for example, the entire September, 1993 issue of PMC--type: mget *.993 When you're done with your file tranfer, type "quit" to return to your own command prompt. IF NONE OF THE ABOVE WORKS FOR YOU, CONTACT THE EDITORS. --------------------------------------------------------------- FORMAT: _Postmodern Culture_ uses only ASCII text (the character-code common to all personal computers): this means that readers can download the text of the journal from the mainframe (where mail is received) to any personal computer and import it into almost all word-processing programs. Journal text is formatted with a 65-character line, so you should set your margins accordingly before importing journal files into a word-processing program. 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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. -----------------END OF CONTENTS 993 FOR PMC 4.1----------------