Postmodern Culture Table of Contents v4n03 (May 1994) URL = http://infomotions.com/serials/pmc/pmc-v4n03-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 3 (May, 1994) ISSN: 1053-1920 ----------------------------------------------------------------- Editors: Eyal Amiran, issue editor John Unsworth Review Editor: Jim English Managing Editors: Jonathan Beasley Chris Barrett Editorial Assistant: Amy Sexton List Manager: Chris Barrett Editorial Board: Sharon Bassett Phil Novak Michael Berube Patrick O'Donnell Marc Chenetier Elaine Orr Greg Dawes Marjorie Perloff bell hooks Fred Pfeil Graham Hammill David Porush Phillip Brian Harper Mark Poster David Herman Carl Raschke E. Ann Kaplan Avital Ronell Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett Susan Schultz Arthur Kroker William Spanos Neil Larsen Gary Lee Stonum Tan Lin Tony Stewart Jerome McGann Chris Straayer Jim Morrison Rei Terada Stuart Moulthrop Paul Trembath Larysa Mykyta Greg Ulmer ----------------------------------------------------------------- CONTENTS AUTHOR & TITLE FN FT Masthead, Contents, Abstracts, CONTENTS.594 Instructions for retrieving files Jonathan Beller, "Cinema, Capital of the BELLER.594 Twentieth Century" Valerie Fulton, "An Other Frontier: Voyaging FULTON-V.594 West with Mark Twain and _Star Trek_'s Imperial Subject" Ann Larabee, "Remembering the Shuttle, Forgetting LARABEE.594 the Loom: Interpreting the Challenger Disaster" Geoffrey Sharpless, "Clockwork Education: The SHARPLES.594 Persistence of the Arnoldian Ideal" Alice Fulton, Three Poems FULTON-A.594 Steven Helmling, "Historicizing Derrida" HELMLING.594 Eric Murphy Selinger, "Important Pleasures and SELINGER.594 Others: Michael Palmer, Ronald Johnson" POPULAR CULTURE COLUMN: Gregory Ulmer, "'Metaphoric Rocks: A POP-CULT.594 Psychogeography of Tourism and Monumentality" REVIEWS: Jim Hicks, "Forward into the Past." Review of REVIEW-1.594 Bruno Latour, _We Have Never Been Modern_, Trans. Catherine Porter. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1993; and Ivan Illich, _In the Vineyard of the Text_. Chicago: Chicago UP, 1993. Vitaly Chernetsky, "Late Soviet Culture: A REVIEW-2.594 Parallax For Postmodernism." Review of Lahusen, Thomas, and Gene Kuperman, eds., _Late Soviet Culture_. Durham: Duke UP, 1993. Brent Wood, "From Technology to Machinism." REVIEW-3.594 Review of Verena Andermatt Conley, ed., _Rethinking Technologies_. Minneapolis: Minnesota UP, 1993. Gregory Ulmer, "Unthinkable Writing." Review REVIEW-4.594 of _Perforations_ 5 (1994): "Bodies, Dreams, Technologies." Public Domain, Inc., POB 8899, Atlanta, GA. 31106-0899. INFO@PD.ORG Ira Lightman, "Coalitions and Coteries." REVIEW-5.594 Review of Tim Edwards, _Erotics and Politics_. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1994. Woodrow B. Hood, "Laurie Anderson and the REVIEW-6.594 Politics of Performance." Review of Laurie Anderson, _Stories from the Nerve Bible: A Retrospective 1972-1992_. Performed at the Lied Arts Center, Lawrence, Kansas, March 29, 1994. Announcements and Advertisements NOTICES.594 (17 files) ----------------------------------------------------------------- ABSTRACTS Jonathan L. Beller, "Cinema, Capital of the Twentiety Century." ABSTRACT: The lithograph, the printing press and the museum, all machines for putting images in motion, are forms of early cinema. As the intensity of visual circulation increases, Benjamin's "aura" undergoes a change of state (or density) and passes over to simulacrum. Aura and simulacra are the result of value accreting on images in circulation--visual fetishes, which are the result of the captured labor of looking. The concept of visual economy is developed using _Cinema 1_ and _Cinema 2_ of Gilles Deleuze. By arguing that _Cinema_ might have been for the twentieth century what Marx's _Capital_ was for the nineteenth, had Deleuze not suppressed the immanence of political economy--cinema's "internal struggle with informatics"--the cinematic events articulated in Deleuze's concepts can be read as systemic experiments concerned with what can be done to the body through the eye. Cinema realizes a new interface between machines and bodies. The sublimity that Deleuze finds in cinema's time-image, its "severing of the sensory-motor link," is then considered in relation to popular mediations and the *necessary* inaction of contemporary viewers. From the premise that "to look is to labor" I derive "the attention theory of value." Other texts considered include the Coen brothers' _Barton Fink_, Orson Welles' _Citizen Cane_, and the IMAX film _Blue Planet_. --JLB Valerie Fulton, "An Other Frontier: Voyaging West with Mark Twain and _Star Trek_'s Imperial Subject." ABSTRACT: _Star Trek: The Next Generation_, a television program about the future's altruistic exploration of space, remains grounded in contemporary ideological representations of the American frontier, radical individualism, and naturalized versions of identity. This essay examines one significant way in which the program remystifies, so as tacitly to perpetuate, the notion of a colonial "self" in the midst of alien "others." In a two-part episode that features Samuel Clemens, the anti-imperialist tenor of the writer's work is gradually suppressed in favor of a more assessible (and commodified) representation of Twain as America's "gatekeeper to the West." This process by which commodification stifles alternative discourse--and, in particular, the process by which the commodified subject becomes imperial--is an effect of television not because the medium attracts a popular (and therefore "uncritical") audience, but because television is so clearly dependent on the same corporate agencies that have sought economic control in the global arena. --VF Ann Larabee, "Remembering the Shuttle, Forgetting the Loom: Interpreting the Challenger Disaster." ABSTRACT: The Challenger space shuttle explosion in 1986 threatened political mythologies of the final frontier, and, in a larger sense, cast doubt on systems theories and the entire cultural project of biotechnical systems building. In the public discourse of the Challenger disaster, extending into public hearings and sociological analyses of NASA, the body was reconstructed within an organizational safety model that denied any further possibility of collapse. The Rogers Commission attempted to reinstate national faith in technological existence, made safe through vigilance and the most minute surveillance of body-machine relations. Invested in government consulting, the academic response was an effort to restore the vision of manned space flight, and, in an entirely self-referential mode, to reassure its academic audience that their ideologies, disciplines, and bodies were still in place and all was right with the world. Thus, the disaster provided the text for the post-catastrophe extraterrestrial survival of the knowledge class, constructed and maintained through living systems theories. While the Challenger disaster suggested that biotechnical organization was ever on the verge of collapse; the massive public relations campaign for space settlements imagined a safe new biosphere, a closed ecology, for academics, civil servants, and corporate managers, freed from environmental disaster, atmospheric impurity, starvation, poverty, disease, and gravity. --AL Geoffrey Sharpless, "Clockwork Education: The Persistence of Arnoldian Masculinity." ABSTRACT: Burgess's _A Clockwork Orange_ is nostalgic for a version of masculinity best understood as typical of the Arnoldian public school. The Russianized argot and Dionysian "ultra-violence" of Alex the droog do not immediately evoke Hughes's Tom Brown's School-days or other portraits of the public school boy; nonetheless, reading Alex and Tom as twins, it does not take long to discover even in Hughes's happy fantasy of Rugby that his Arnoldian telos of self-control, heterosexual love, moderation, and upright morality is interpenetrated with perversity, pederasty, a fetishization of style, Machiavellian management training, an interest in hand-to-hand combat and blood-letting, and, ultimately, a droogish conviction that adult heterosexual manliness smacks of death. The Arnoldian schoolboy and the droog prove to have always been thoroughly integrated; Alex's wickedness and cruelty are as much the stuff of empire-building as is the Arnoldian gentleman's phantasy of morality. In effect, though Rugby's classrooms are now called Correctional Schools, State Jails, and conditioning laboratories, and the playing fields have become the London streets, Alex's education terminates in the same phantasized ideal of adult masculinity as Tom Brown's. Burgess's vision has not overturned a public school idea of proper masculine development, but fulfilled Dr. Thomas Arnold's ambition to write his pedagogy across the face of the world. --GS Steve Helmling, "Historicizing Derrida." ABSTRACT: Accounts of Derrida's work stress its diversity, and handle it in various ways; but none that I know of narrativizes this diversity, whether to relate it to its historical period, or to treat it as a corpus with a development, an evolving play of tensions or contradictions--in short, a history--of its own. This paper aims to initiate such an account, by confronting early Derrida with late(r)--for purposes of argument, Derrida before 1968 and after. The focus is on "writing" in two senses: 1) as *theme*, the object of Derrida's "grammatology," and 2) as Derrida's own writing *practice*--what he calls "perverformativity," or "writing otherwise." Before 1968, in _Of Grammatology_ (1967), "writing" was thematized (implicitly on the model of Hegel's master/slave) as the agent or figure of an imminent %Aufhebung% of "speech" (i.e., phonocentric logocentrism). But by the early '70s, "writing" had become (and has since remained) merely another "inscription"--*the* inscription--of logocentric closure. This shift in *theme* corresponds with a shift in Derrida's own writing *practice*, from the analytic and expository deconstruction of the earlier work to a self-regarding %ecriture% in which deconstruction is enacted rather than argued. Throughout, the paper considers the politics of such movements within Derrida's oeuvre in relation both to Derrida's precursors (Marcel Mauss, Sartre) and his postmodern contemporaries (Foucault, Jameson, Lyotard) in an effort to "historicize" not only Derrida's work, but its reception, its influence, and its success. --SH Eric Murphy Selinger, "Important Pleasures and Others: Michael Palmer, Ronald Johnson." ABSTRACT: Discussions of experimental poetry frequently speak of its disruptive or subversive importance, leaving questions of pleasure to languish, all-but unaddressed. This essay explores two texts, Michael Palmer's _Sun_ and Ronald Johnson's _ARK_, which engage the question of plesure in the context of opposed aesthetic and ethical traditions. In his efforts to write about historical atrocity without neglecting "the mysteries of reference," Palmer becomes a poet of the sublime--at least of that limited sublimity of shock which Lyotard finds at the heart of the postmodern. Johnson, by contrast, makes an exultant Longinian sublime a constituent part of the experience of beauty. An "artist of abundancies," in Robert Duncan's phrase, Johnson draws on physics and biology to write a poetry where pleasure is not ideologically suspect, and where linguistic self-reference is not a critique of appropriative naming, but a version of nature's fractal flowering. --EMS ---------------------------------------------------------------- PMC-MOO: The editors of _Postmodern Culture_ gratefully acknowledge the contributions of Lisa Brawley, Craig Horman, Paul Outka, and Shawn Wilbur, who run PMC-MOO, the journal's text-based virtual reality facility. ----------------------------------------------------------------- POSTMODERN CULTURE is published by Oxford University Press three times a year (September, January, and May). 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