Postmodern Culture Table of Contents v5n03 (May 1995) URL = http://infomotions.com/serials/pmc/pmc-v5n03-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 5, Number 3 (May, 1995) ISSN: 1053-1920 ----------------------------------------------------------------- Editors: Eyal Amiran John Unsworth, issue editor Review Editor: Jim English Managing Editor: 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 Pfiel Graham Hammill Mark Poster Phillip Brian Harper David Porush 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 TITLE FILENAME Abstracts abstracts.595 Phoebe Sengers, "Madness and Automation: sengers.595 On Institutionalization" Paul Naylor, "The 'Mired Sublime' of naylor.595 Nathaniel Mackey's _Song of the Andoumboulou_" Nathaniel Mackey, "Song of the mackey.595 Andoumboulou: 23" Joseph Arsenault and Tony Brinkley, arsebrin.595 "Towards an Indexical Criticism" Virginia Hooper, "The Lamentation" hooper.595 James Berger, "Cultural Trauma and the berger.595 'Timeless Burst': Pynchon's Revision of Nostalgia in _Vineland_" Elisabeth Frost, "Signifyin(g) on Stein: frost.595 The Revisionist Poetics of Harryette Mullen and Leslie Scalapino" Paul Mann, "Stupid Undergrounds" mann.595 RELATED READINGS [WWW version only] POPULAR CULTURE COLUMN: Jeffrey Cass, "Cyberspace, Capitalism, pop-cult.595 and Encoded Criminality: The Iconography of _Theme Park_" REVIEWS: Tatjana Pavlovic, "Demystifying review-1.595 Nationalism: Dubravka Ugresic and the Situation of the Writer in (Ex-)Yugoslavia." Review of Dubravka Ugresic, _Fording the Stream of Consciousness_. Evanston: Northwestern UP, 1993; ---, _In the Jaws of Life and Other Stories_. Evanston: Northwestern UP, 1993. Mark Poster, "Techno-Communities." Review review-2.595 of Steven Jones, ed., _Cybersociety: Computer-Mediated Communication and Community_. New York: Sage, 1995. Wendy Anson, "Intermedia '95" Review of review-3.595 the 10th Annual International Conference and Exposition on Multimedia and CD-ROM. March, 1995. Moscone Convention Center, San Francisco, CA. Rebecca Chung, "Rethinking Agency." Review review-4.595 of Patricia Mann, _Micropolitics: Agency in a Postfeminist Era_. Menneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1994. Myles Breen, "Presenting Paradise." Review review-5.595 of Elizabeth Buck, _Paradise Remade: The Politics of Culture and History in Hawai'i_. Philadelphia: Temple UP, 1993. Tom Benson, "New Political Journalism." review-6.595 Review of Richard Ben Cramer, _What It Takes: The Way to the White House_. New York: Random House, 1992. Ivan Strenski, "The Ethics of review-7.595 Ethnocentrism." Review of Tzvetan Todorov, _On Human Diversity_. Trans. Catherine Porter. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1993. LETTERS: Selected Letters from Readers letters.595 NOTICES: Announcements and Advertisements notices.595 ----------------------------------------------------------------- ABSTRACTS Phoebe Sengers, "Madness and Automation: On Institutionalization" ABSTRACT: This paper examines the ways in which totalizing institutions attempt to appropriate individuals, and the extent to which individual subjects can resist or subvert that appropriation. A paradigmatic site of totalization is the psychiatric institution. This institution mechanizes the patient; it reduces the patient to a sign. The patient's identity is restructured to enable absorption into the workings of the psychiatric machine. Breakdown occurs when the machine exceeds its own logic; at the same moment, the patient exceeds the institution's totalizing grasp. The very move to totalization leads to blind spots in which the patient can learn to move. The analysis is first made at the level of a specific instance of psychiatric institutionalization, then repeated on the plane of theory to show that it holds in all situations where institutions attempt to totalize and circumscribe individuals. --PS Paul Naylor, "The 'Mired Sublime' of Nathaniel Mackey's _Song of the Andoumboulou_" ABSTRACT: This essay situates Nathaniel Mackey's ongoing serial poem, _Song of the Andoumboulou_, in the tradition of the American "world-poem" begun in _The Cantos_ of Ezra pound and continued in Louis Zukofsky's _A_, H.D.'s _Trilogy_, and Robert Duncan's _Passages_. Each of these works, in their own distinct way, holds out the possibility of a utopian vision created in and by poetry. Yet these previous instances of the world-poem often have the unfortunate effects of reducing cultural diversity to a transcendent sameness in the service of an all-encompassing view of world history, in effect all too evident in parts of _The Cantos_. Mackey's _Song of the Andoumboulou_ not only extends the genre's range of cultural references by bringing together the traditions of African-American music, Caribbean and Arabic poetry, and West African mythology, among others, with the Western traditions of philosophy, poetry, and music; it also attempts to cure us of the desire to reduce the representation of diversity and difference to the kind of all-encompassing sameness that compromises some of the initial instances of the American world-poem. --PN Joseph Arsenault and Tony Brinkley, "Toward an Indexical Criticism" ABSTRACT: The essay has been choreographed as an open form, where what is said can be open to what is not. What goes unsaid may nevertheless be shown, indicated, or indexed (or show up). Points of departure for the essay include parallel distinctions in Heidegger and Wittgenstein between saying and showing. In addition to a semantics of saying, there might be this semantics as well, a semantics of showing that engages the ways in which "presencing . . . manifests itself [%selbst zeigt%]" (Heidegger) and "the inexpressible [%Unaussprechliches%] . . . shows itself [%zeigt sich%]" (Wittgenstein). Readings of Wittgenstein and Heidegger connect with readings of Peirce and Benjamin. A concern with the distinction between saying and showing opens onto the possibility of an indexical semantics. The question of indices will at times be the question of a just reading, adequate to the history that has produced the index, but often there is a historical reference from which I may want to hide. Although no one can jump over his own shadow. And what I leave unsaid may indicate something to add. The essay concludes with Benjamin's presentation of historical indices, where he has "nothing to say [%zu sagen%], only to show [%zu zeigen%, to indicate, to point out] . . . to let it come into its own [%zu ihrem Rechte%, into its right, into its justice]." --JA and TB James Berger, "Cultural Trauma and the 'Timeless Burst': Pynchon's Revision of Nostalgia in _Vineland_" ABSTRACT: This essay reevaluates the political and aesthetic implications of nostalgia. It argues that Thomas Pynchon's _Vineland_, a novel often criticized for its nostalgic portrayal of the 1960s, in fact revises conventional notions of nostalgia so as to render a more complex sense of how historical memory is transmitted. Crucial to this revision is Pynchon's representation of historical trauma. _Vineland_ returns to the 1960s not as to a site of wholeness and plenitude, but rather as to a site of catastrophe and betrayal. The moment of historical trauma insistently returns. And yet this same traumatic moment is simultaneously a moment of utopian possibility. This link of catastrophe and possibility in Pynchon bears resemblance to Walter Benjamin's notion of "jetztzeit," the critical, possibly redemptive "time of the now" that can emerge at moments of crisis far removed from each other. In _Vineland_, however, this moment is always mediated through the ideological lens through which it is received. Thus, _Vineland_ shows us the destabilizing political and cultural conflicts of the 1960s explicitly through the perspectives of 1980s consumer culture (those "fabulous 60s") and the political culture of Reaganism (the dangerous 60s). The traumatic/utopian returns of history cannot escape these ideological vessels; yet neither can they be fully contained by them. _Vineland_'s clear longing for the 1960s is neither quietist nor reactionary. The reunion that ends the novel is a reunion with a traumatic past (that has been partly and problematically "worked through") and with the sense of political possibilities that flashed into being at the same pivotal moments. --JB Elisabeth A. Frost, "Signifyin(g) on Stein: The Revisionist Poetics of Harryette Mullen and Leslie Scalapino ABSTRACT: This article takes Stein as one (if not the only) source for feminist avant-garde poetry--writing that uses experimental language to distinctly feminist ends. A number of recent feminist poets owe a debt to _Tender Buttons_, and Stein's work remains a subject of homage. But, changes working their way through feminist thought appear in some feminist avant-garde writing that doesn't simply acknowledge Stein's language experiments but contests them as well. I examine the influence of, and divergence from, Steinian poetics in Harryette Mullen and Stein's "modern" vision by merging "public" speech and "private" experience--the language of the public spheres of the street and the marketplace with the experiences of intimacy and the erotic. Mullen and Scalapino blur the border between public and private discourse that Stein relied upon in order to reveal (and, paradoxically, *not* reveal) her lesbian sexuality in a revolution of ordinary domestic language. In response in part to Stein, each poet illuminates language as a locus of the political and the erotic, altering both eroticized and "public" language as signs of a culture in need of a fundamental awareness about the relationships between our most private and public acts. --EF Paul Mann, "Stupid Undergrounds" ABSTRACT: In a seemingly endless series of bloated, aphoristic outtakes, micro-%Minima Moralia%, and not-so-blank parodies of po-mo parodies, the author offers to conduct you on a tour of various recently colonized sites in the so-called subculture. Here you will witness the suburbs of deterritorialization, tattoos and niiple piercings, subliminal imagery and sound-effects generators, cyberspace malls, the virtual Real, quack scientists and stupid gurus, hairbrained (or is it hair-triggered?) conspiracies, dour industrial bands, stupid day jobs, revenant Situationists, trademarked plagiarisms, fuzzy fun-seekers, secret codes that are never secret enough, any number of surrogate revolutions, and your choice of temporary apocalypses. Etc. Intellectual slumming at its finest. The purpose of it all? A maso-critical critique of criticism. You'd be stupid to download this one. --PM ---------------------------------------------------------------- PMC-MOO: The editors of _Postmodern Culture_ gratefully acknowledge the contributions of Lisa Brawley, Bill Garrett, Craig Horman, Mark Nunes, Heather Wagner, Ted Whalen, and Shawn Wilbur, who run PMC-MOO, the journal's text-based virtual reality facility. 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