Postmodern Culture Table of Contents v7n01 (September 1996) URL = http://infomotions.com/serials/pmc/pmc-v7n01-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 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 Lisa 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 Special Thanks: Jennifer Hoyt ----------------------------------------------------------------- CONTENTS TITLE FILENAME 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 notices.996 ----------------------------------------------------------------- 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 ----------------------------------------------------------------- POSTMODERN CULTURE is published by the Institute for Advanced Technology in the Humanities three times a year (September, January, and May). PMC's distribution sites are PMC-LIST@LISTSERV.NCSU.EDU (UNIX Listprocessor), JEFFERSON.VILLAGE.VIRGINIA.EDU in pub/pubs/pmc (anonymous ftp), JEFFERSON.VILLAGE.VIRGINIA.EDU (gopher) and http://jefferson.village.virginia.edu/pmc/contents.all.html (World-Wide Web). This issue is published with support from North Carolina State University and the University of Virginia. Postmodern Culture is a member of the Conference of Editors of Learned Journals (CELJ) and of the Association of Electronic Scholarly Journals (AESJ). ----------------------------------------------------------------- INSTRUCTIONS HOW TO GET PMC BY E-MAIL: To automatically receive the table of contents each time a new issue is published, send an email message to the internet address listserv@listserv.ncsu.edu with the one and only line: subscribe pmc-list [your name] 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 HOW TO GET PMC BY 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 jefferson.village.virginia.edu 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/pubs/pmc/issue.996 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.996 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 January, 1996 issue of PMC--type: prompt mget *.996 When you're done with your file tranfer, type "quit" to return to your own command prompt. HOW TO GET PMC BY GOPHER: If you have access to a gopher client, you will find PMC's gopher server at: jefferson.village.virginia.edu Once you've connected, choose "Publications of the Institute" and then choose "Postmodern Culture": you will find a menu listing all published issues of the journal, and within each issue, full text of all the issue's contents. HOW TO GET PMC BY WORLD-WIDE WEB: If you have access to a World-Wide Web client, you will find the hypermedia version of PMC at: http://jefferson.village.virginia.edu/pmc/contents.all.html Once you've connected, you will find all back issues arranged by volume and issue, but also arranged by category (all the reviews, all the popular culture columns, all the creative works, etc.). Free clients for the Web are available from FTP.NCSA.UIUC.EDU, for Windows, Macintosh, and Unix platforms. To use Mosaic, you will need a direct (ethernet-type) connection to the internet (or SLIP--Serial Line Internet Protocol--software and a lot of patience). If you would like to see a text-only version of the Web PMC, connect to the gopher server and choose "Lynx session" from the main menu: you'll find PMC under "Publications of the Institute." IF NONE OF THE ABOVE WORKS FOR YOU, CONTACT THE EDITORS AT pmc@jefferson.village.virginia.edu --------------------------------------------------------------- FORMAT: The E-Mail version of _Postmodern Culture_ uses only ASCII text (the character-code common to all personal computers). Journal text is formatted with a 65-character line, and you will get best results by setting one-inch margins and selecting font Courier 10 before importing journal files into a word-processing program. The World-Wide Web version of _Postmodern Culture_ is marked up using HTML (hypertext markup language), a DTD (document-type definition) of SGML (Standard Generalized Markup Language). ----------------------------------------------------------------- SUBSCRIPTION to the journal in its electronic-mail form is free. Postal correspondence and books for review should be sent to: Postmodern Culture Box 8105 NCSU Raleigh, NC 27695-8105 Electronic-text submissions and requests for free e-mail subscription can be sent to the journal's editorial address (pmc@jefferson.village.virginia.edu). SUBMISSIONS to the journal can be made by electronic mail, on disk, or in hard copy; disk submissions should be in WordPerfect or ASCII format, but if this is not possible please indicate the program and operating system used. The current MLA format is recommended for documentation in essays; a list of the text- formatting conventions used by Postmodern Culture for ASCII text is available on request. _________________________________________________________________ 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. --------------END OF CONTENTS.996 for PMC 7.1--------------------