30-Sep-90 23:38:55-GMT,7790;000000000001 Received: from aramis.rutgers.edu by klinzhai.rutgers.edu (5.59/SMI4.0/RU1.4/3.08) id AA26416; Sun, 30 Sep 90 19:38:54 EDT Received: by aramis.rutgers.edu (5.59/SMI4.0/RU1.4/3.08) id AA08300; Sun, 30 Sep 90 19:38:52 EDT Resent-Message-Id: <9009302338.AA08300@aramis.rutgers.edu> Received: from ncsuvm.ncsu.edu by aramis.rutgers.edu (5.59/SMI4.0/RU1.4/3.08) id AA17769; Sun, 30 Sep 90 05:04:11 EDT Message-Id: <9009300904.AA17769@aramis.rutgers.edu> Received: from ncsuvm.ncsu.edu by ncsuvm.ncsu.edu (IBM VM SMTP R1.2.2MX) with BSMTP id 7429; Sun, 30 Sep 90 05:02:51 EDT Received: from NCSUVM.BITNET by ncsuvm.ncsu.edu (Mailer R2.07) with BSMTP id 7427; Sun, 30 Sep 90 05:02:47 EDT Date: Sun, 30 Sep 90 05:00:03 EDT Reply-To: " Editors" Sender: "" From: " Editors" Subject: CONTENTS 990 To: Multiple recipients of list PMC-LIST Resent-To: mcgrew@darkstar.rutgers.edu Resent-Date: Sun, 30 Sep 90 19:38:51 EDT Resent-From: Charles Mcgrew #################################### ## #### #### #### ## P O S T M O D E R N ## #### #### # ## # #### #### ## C U L T U R E ## #### ## ## #### ####### ## ######### ###### #### #### ## an electronic journal ## ######### ###### #### ## of interdisciplinary #################################### criticism ------------------------------------------------------------ Volume 1, Number 1 Fall, 1990 ------------------------------------------------------------ Editors: Eyal Amiran Elaine Orr John Unsworth, Issue Editor Editorial Assistant: Gloria Maxwell Editorial Board: Kathy Acker Chimalum Nwankwo Sharon Bassett Phil Novak Michael Berube Patrick O'Donnell Marc Chenetier Susan Ohmer Greg Dawes John Paine R. Serge Denisoff Marjorie Perloff Robert Detweiler Mark Poster Jim English Carl Rauschke Henry Louis Gates, Jr. Mike Reynolds Joe Gomez Avital Ronell Robert Hodge Andrew Ross bell hooks Jorge Ruffinelli Susan Howe Susan M. Schultz E. Ann Kaplan William Spanos Neil Larsen Tony Stewart Jerome J. McGann Chris Straayer Larysa Mykyta Greg Ulmer ------------------------------------------------------------ CONTENTS Masthead & Table of Contents CONTENTS 990 Preface PREFACE 990 Andrew Ross, "Hacking Away at the Counter-culture" ROSS 990 bell hooks, "Postmodern Blackness" HOOKS 990 Laura Kipnis, "Marx: The Video (A Politics of Revolting Bodies)" KIPNIS 990 George Yudice, "Feeding the Transcendent Body" YUDICE 990 Kathy Acker, "Dead Doll Humility" ACKER 990 John Beverley, "The ideology of postmodern music and left politics" BEVERLEY 990 Neil Larsen, "Postmodernism and Imperialism: Theory and Politics in Latin America" LARSEN 990 Features: Susan M. Schultz, "Voicing the Neonew" [a review of "Postmodern Poetries: Jerome J. McGann Guest-Edits an Anthology of Language Poets From North America and the United Kingdom," _Verse_ 7.1 (Spring, 1990): 6-73.] REVIEWS 990 Jim English, "Vacation Notes: Haute-Tech in the Haute-Montagnes" [Popular Culture Column] POP-CULT 990 The Editors, "Postface: Positions on Postmodernism" POSTFACE 990 Announcements & Advertisements NOTICES 990 ------------------------------------------------------------ Special thanks to Greg Dawes for his assistance in starting the journal and preparing the first issue, and to Chuck Kesler, systems programmer at NCSU, for technical support. We would also like to thank the NCSU Humanities Computing Lab, the NCSU Social Sciences Computing Lab, and the Connecticut College Computing Center. _Postmodern Culture_ is published three times a year (Winter, Spring and Fall) using the Revised LISTSERV program ((c) Eric Thomas 1986, Ecole Centrale de Paris). It is distributed from an IBM mainframe at North Carolina State University, and is published with support from the NCSU Libraries, the NCSU College of Humanities and Social Sciences, the NCSU Computing Center, the NCSU Office of Research Administration, and the NCSU Department of English. _Postmodern Culture_ operates under the auspices of the NCSU Research Corporation, 501(c). ----------------------------------------------------------- Subscription to the journal in its electronic-mail form is free. The contents of each issue, without reader comments, are available on disk and microfiche as well. Disk rates are $15 for an individual and $30 for an institution. For disks or fiche mailed to Canada add $3 postage; outside North America, add $7. Any postal correspondence, including payment for subscription and books for review, should be sent to: Postmodern Culture Box 5657 Raleigh, NC 27650 Electronic-mail submissions and requests for electronic- mail subscription can be sent to the journal's editorial address (Bitnet: pmc@ncsuvm Internet: pmc@ncsuvm.ncsu.edu). Requests for electronic-mail subscription can also be mailed directly to the Listserv program itself (Internet: listserv@ncsuvm.ncsu.edu Bitnet: listserv@ncsuvm); this mail should contain only the one-line command "subscribe pmc-list [your_first_name your_last_name]" (without quotation marks or brackets). Using the same addresses, readers may also subscribe free of charge to PMC-Talk, an open discussion group for issues relating to the journal's contents, and to postmodernism in general. [Note: to request subscription to PMC-Talk directly from the Listserv program, substitute "pmc-talk" for "pmc-list" in the listserv command given above.] 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. Documentation for critical essays should follow the current MLA format; a list of the text-formatting conventions used by _Postmodern Culture_ for ASCII text is available on request. ____________________________________________________________ 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) 1990 by _Postmodern Culture_, all rights reserved. ____________________________________________________________ 30-Sep-90 23:39:11-GMT,3730;000000000000 Received: from aramis.rutgers.edu by klinzhai.rutgers.edu (5.59/SMI4.0/RU1.4/3.08) id AA26424; Sun, 30 Sep 90 19:39:09 EDT Received: by aramis.rutgers.edu (5.59/SMI4.0/RU1.4/3.08) id AA08308; Sun, 30 Sep 90 19:39:08 EDT Resent-Message-Id: <9009302339.AA08308@aramis.rutgers.edu> Received: from ncsuvm.ncsu.edu by aramis.rutgers.edu (5.59/SMI4.0/RU1.4/3.08) id AA18002; Sun, 30 Sep 90 05:06:51 EDT Message-Id: <9009300906.AA18002@aramis.rutgers.edu> Received: from ncsuvm.ncsu.edu by ncsuvm.ncsu.edu (IBM VM SMTP R1.2.2MX) with BSMTP id 7490; Sun, 30 Sep 90 05:05:27 EDT Received: from NCSUVM.BITNET by ncsuvm.ncsu.edu (Mailer R2.07) with BSMTP id 7489; Sun, 30 Sep 90 05:04:10 EDT Date: Sun, 30 Sep 90 05:01:03 EDT Reply-To: " Editors" Sender: "" From: " Editors" Subject: PREFACE 990 To: Multiple recipients of list PMC-LIST Resent-To: mcgrew@darkstar.rutgers.edu Resent-Date: Sun, 30 Sep 90 19:39:07 EDT Resent-From: Charles Mcgrew PREFACE _Postmodern Culture_ is an electronic journal of interdisciplinary studies. We hope to open the discussion of postmodernism to a wide audience, and to new and different participants. We feel that the electronic text is more amenable to revision, and that it fosters conversation more than printed publications can. _Postmodern Culture_ can accommodate, and will include, different kinds of writing, from traditional analytical essays and reviews to video scripts and other new literary forms. _Postmodern Culture_ is formatted as ASCII text (the character-code used by all personal computers): this permits the items in the journal to be sent as electronic mail, and it means that you can download the text of the journal from the mainframe (where you receive your mail) to a wide variety of computers, and import it into most word-processing programs, should you want to. If you do call up the journal's text in a word-processing program, make sure that line-spacing is set to single-space and that margins are set to accommodate a 65-character line (one-inch margins, in most cases). Back issues of _Postmodern Culture_, plus longer items distributed on PMC-Talk (the discussion group), are archived here at NC State; to see the contents of that archive, send the command INDex pmc-list to LISTSERV@NCSUVM (Bitnet) or LISTSERV@NCSUVM.NCSU.EDU (Internet). To retrieve any of the files listed in the index you receive, send the command GET [filename filetype] PMC-LIST Since individual mainframe operating systems vary, if you need information on how to store, download, or erase items received from the journal, you will probably need to get that information from your local computing consultants. Information on how to use the Listserv program (the program which distributes the journal to your mailbox) may also be available locally, but if it is not, you can request it from the Listserv program here at NC State. To do that, send a mail message to LISTSERV@NCSUVM (Bitnet) or LISTSERV@NCSUVM.NCSU.EDU (Internet), containing the commands Get Listserv Memo Get Listfile Memo These two files contain general information about using the Listserv program (Listserv Memo) and information about using the Filelist functions of the program (Listfile Memo). Finally, if you would like to discontinue your subscription to the journal, you can do so by sending the command signoff pmc-list to LISTSERV@NCSUVM (Bitnet) or LISTSERV@NCSUVM.NCSU.EDU (Internet). 30-Sep-90 23:39:26-GMT,26982;000000000000 Received: from aramis.rutgers.edu by klinzhai.rutgers.edu (5.59/SMI4.0/RU1.4/3.08) id AA26430; Sun, 30 Sep 90 19:39:23 EDT Received: by aramis.rutgers.edu (5.59/SMI4.0/RU1.4/3.08) id AA08328; Sun, 30 Sep 90 19:39:20 EDT Resent-Message-Id: <9009302339.AA08328@aramis.rutgers.edu> Received: from ncsuvm.ncsu.edu by aramis.rutgers.edu (5.59/SMI4.0/RU1.4/3.08) id AA18119; Sun, 30 Sep 90 05:11:09 EDT Message-Id: <9009300911.AA18119@aramis.rutgers.edu> Received: from ncsuvm.ncsu.edu by ncsuvm.ncsu.edu (IBM VM SMTP R1.2.2MX) with BSMTP id 7566; Sun, 30 Sep 90 05:08:57 EDT Received: from NCSUVM.BITNET by ncsuvm.ncsu.edu (Mailer R2.07) with BSMTP id 7558; Sun, 30 Sep 90 05:05:56 EDT Date: Sun, 30 Sep 90 05:02:41 EDT Reply-To: " Editors" Sender: "" From: " Editors" Subject: HOOKS 990 To: Multiple recipients of list PMC-LIST Resent-To: mcgrew@darkstar.rutgers.edu Resent-Date: Sun, 30 Sep 90 19:39:18 EDT Resent-From: Charles Mcgrew POSTMODERN BLACKNESS by BELL HOOKS Oberlin College Copyright (c) 1990 by bell hooks, all rights reserved [1] Postmodernist discourses are often exclusionary even when, having been accused of lacking concrete relevance, they call attention to and appropriate the experience of "difference" and "otherness" in order to provide themselves with oppositional political meaning, legitimacy, and immediacy. Very few African-American intellectuals have talked or written about postmodernism. Recently at a dinner party, I talked about trying to grapple with the significance of postmodernism for contemporary black experience. It was one of those social gatherings where only one other black person was present. The setting quickly became a field of contestation. I was told by the other black person that I was wasting my time, that "this stuff does not relate in any way to what's happening with black people." Speaking in the presence of a group of white onlookers, staring at us as though this encounter was staged for their benefit, we engaged in a passionate discussion about black experience. Apparently, no one sympathized with my insistence that racism is perpetuated when blackness is associated solely with concrete gut level experience conceived either as opposing or having no connection to abstract thinking and the production of critical theory. The idea that there is no meaningful connection between black experience and critical thinking about aesthetics or culture must be continually interrogated. [2] My defense of postmodernism and its relevance to black folks sounded good but I worried that I lacked conviction, largely because I approach the subject cautiously and with suspicion. Disturbed not so much by the "sense" of postmodernism but by the conventional language used when it is written or talked about and by those who speak it, I find myself on the outside of the discourse looking in. As a discursive practice it is dominated primarily by the voices of white male intellectuals and/or academic elites who speak to and about one another with coded familiarity. Reading and studying their writing to understand postmodernism in its multiple manifestations, I appreciate it but feel little inclination to ally myself with the academic hierarchy and exclusivity pervasive in the movement today. [3] Critical of most writing on postmodernism, I perhaps am more conscious of the way in which the focus on "otherness and difference" that is often alluded to in these works seems to have little concrete impact as an analysis or standpoint that might change the nature and direction of postmodernist theory. Since much of this theory has been constructed in reaction to and against high modernism, there is seldom any mention of black experience or writings by black people in this work, specifically black women (though in more recent work one may see reference to Cornel West, the black male scholar who has most engaged postmodernist discourse). Even if an aspect of black culture is the subject of postmodern critical writing the works cited will usually be those of black men. A work that comes immediately to mind is Andrew Ross' chapter "Hip, and the Long Front of Color" in _No Respect: Intellectuals and Popular Culture_; though an interesting reading, it constructs black culture as though black women have had no role in black cultural production. At the end of Meaghan Morris' discussion of postmodernism included in her collection of essays _The Pirate's Fiance: Feminism and Postmodernism_, she provides a bibliography of works by women, identifying them as important contributions to a discourse on postmodernism that offers new insight as well as challenging male theoretical hegemony. Even though many of the works do not directly address postmodernism, they address similar concerns. There are no references to work by black women. [4] The failure to recognize a critical black presence in the culture and in most scholarship and writing on postmodernism compels a black reader, particularly a black female reader, to interrogate her interest in a subject where those who discuss and write about it seem not to know black women exist or to even consider the possibility that we might be somewhere writing or saying something that should be listened to, or producing art that should be seen, heard, approached with intellectual seriousness. This is especially the case with works that go on and on about the way in which postmodernist discourse has opened up a theoretical terrain where "difference and otherness" can be considered legitimate issues in the academy. Confronting both the lack of recognition of black female presence that much postmodernist theory reinscribes and the resistance on the part of most black folks to hearing about real connections between postmodernism and black experience, I enter a discourse, a practice, where there may be no ready audience for my words, no clear listener, uncertain, then, that my voice can or will be heard. [5] During the Sixties, black power movements were influenced by perspectives that could be easily labeled modernist. Certainly many of the ways black folks addressed issues of identity conformed to a modernist universalizing agenda. There was little critique among black militants of patriarchy as a master narrative. Despite the fact that black power ideology reflected a modernist sensibility, these elements were soon rendered irrelevant as militant protest was stifled by a powerful repressive *postmodern* state. The period directly after the black power movement was a time when major news magazines carried articles with cocky headlines like "what ever happened to Black America?" This was an ironic reply to the aggressive unmet demand by decentered, marginalized black subjects who had at least for the moment successfully demanded a hearing, who had made it possible for black liberation to be a national political agenda. In the wake of the black power movement, after so many rebels were slaughtered and lost, many of these voices were silenced by a repressive state and others became inarticulate; it has become necessary to find new avenues for transmitting the messages of black liberation struggle, new ways to talk about racism and other politics of domination. Radical postmodernist practice, most powerfully conceptualized as a "politics of difference," should incorporate the voices of displaced, marginalized, exploited, and oppressed black people. [6] It is sadly ironic that the contemporary discourse which talks the most about heterogeneity, the decentered subject, declaring breakthroughs that allow recognition of otherness, still directs its critical voice primarily to a specialized audience, one that shares a common language rooted in the very master narratives it claims to challenge. If radical postmodernist thinking is to have a transformative impact then a critical break with the notion of "authority" as "mastery over" must not simply be a rhetorical device, it must be reflected in habits of being, including styles of writing as well as chosen subject matter. Third-world scholars, especially elites, and white critics who passively absorb white supremacist thinking, and therefore never notice or look at black people on the streets, at their jobs, who render us invisible with their gaze in all areas of daily life, are not likely to produce liberatory theory that will challenge racist domination, or to promote a breakdown in traditional ways of seeing and thinking about reality, ways of constructing aesthetic theory and practice. From a different standpoint Robert Storr makes a similar critique in the global issue of _Art in America_ when he asserts: To be sure, much postmodernist critical inquiry has centered precisely on the issues of "difference" and "otherness." On the purely theoretical plane the exploration of these concepts has produced some important results, but in the absence of any sustained research into what artists of color and others outside the mainstream might be up to, such discussions become rootless instead of radical. Endless second guessing about the latent imperialism of intruding upon other cultures only compounded matters, preventing or excusing these theorists from investigating what black, Hispanic, Asian and Native American artists were actually doing. Without adequate concrete knowledge of and contact with the non-white "other," white theorists may move in discursive theoretical directions that are threatening to and potentially disruptive of that critical practice which would support radical liberation struggle. [7] The postmodern critique of "identity," though relevant for renewed black liberation struggle, is often posed in ways that are problematic. Given a pervasive politic of white supremacy which seeks to prevent the formation of radical black subjectivity, we cannot cavalierly dismiss a concern with identity politics. Any critic exploring the radical potential of postmodernism as it relates to racial difference and racial domination would need to consider the implications of a critique of identity for oppressed groups. Many of us are struggling to find new strategies of resistance. We must engage decolonization as a critical practice if we are to have meaningful chances of survival even as we must simultaneously cope with the loss of political grounding which made radical activism more possible. I am thinking here about the postmodernist critique of essentialism as it pertains to the construction of "identity" as one example. [8] Postmodern theory that is not seeking to simply appropriate the experience of "otherness" in order to enhance its discourse or to be radically chic should not separate the "politics of difference" from the politics of racism. To take racism seriously one must consider the plight of underclass people of color, a vast majority of whom are black. For African-Americans our collective condition prior to the advent of postmodernism and perhaps more tragically expressed under current postmodern conditions has been and is characterized by continued displacement, profound alienation and despair. Writing about blacks and postmodernism, Cornel West describes our collective plight: There is increasing class division and differentiation, creating on the one hand a significant black middle-class, highly anxiety- ridden, insecure, willing to be co-opted and incorporated into the powers that be, concerned with racism to the degree that it poses constraints on upward social mobility; and, on the other, a vast and growing black underclass, an underclass that embodies a kind of walking nihilism of pervasive drug addiction, pervasive alcoholism, pervasive homicide, and an exponential rise in suicide. Now because of the deindustrialization, we also have a devastated black industrial working class. We are talking here about tremendous hopelessness. This hopelessness creates longing for insight and strategies for change that can renew spirits and reconstruct grounds for collective black liberation struggle. The overall impact of the postmodern condition is that many other groups now share with black folks a sense of deep alienation, despair, uncertainty, loss of a sense of grounding, even if it is not informed by shared circumstance. Radical postmodernism calls attention to those sensibilities which are shared across the boundaries of class, gender, and race, and which could be fertile ground for the construction of empathy--ties that would promote recognition of common commitments and serve as a base for solidarity and coalition. [9] "Yearning" is the word that best describes a common psychological state shared by many of us, cutting across boundaries of race, class, gender, and sexual practice. Specifically in relation to the postmodernist deconstruction of "master" narratives, the yearning that wells in the hearts and minds of those whom such narratives have silenced is the longing for critical voice. It is no accident that "rap" has usurped the primary position of R&B music among young black folks as the most desired sound, or that it began as a form of "testimony" for the underclass. It has enabled underclass black youth to develop a critical voice, as a group of young black men told me, a "common literacy." Rap projects a critical voice, explaining, demanding, urging. Working with this insight in his essay "Putting the Pop Back into Postmodernism," Lawrence Grossberg comments: The postmodern sensibility appropriates practices as boasts that announce their own--and consequently our own--existence, like a rap song boasting of the imaginary (or real--it makes no difference) accomplishments of the rapper. They offer forms of empowerment not only in the face of nihilism but precisely through the forms of nihilism itself: an empowering nihilism, a moment of positivity through the production and structuring of affective relations. Considering that it is as a subject that one comes to voice, then the postmodernist focus on the critique of identity appears, at first glance, to threaten and close down the possibility that this discourse and practice will allow those who have suffered the crippling effects of colonization and domination to gain or regain a hearing. Even if this sense of threat and the fear it evokes are based on a misunderstanding of the postmodernist political project, they nevertheless shape responses. It never surprises me when black folk respond to the critique of essentialism, especially when it denies the validity of identity politics, by saying "yeah, it's easy to give up identity, when you got one." Though an apt and oftentimes appropriate comeback, this does not really intervene in the discourse in a way that alters and transforms. We should indeed suspicious of postmodern critiques of the "subject" when they surface at a historical moment when many subjugated people feel themselves coming to voice for the first time. [10] Criticisms of directions in postmodern thinking should not obscure insights it may offer that open up our understanding of African-American experience. The critique of essentialism encouraged by postmodernist thought is useful for African-Americans concerned with reformulating outmoded notions of identity. We have too long had imposed upon us, both from the outside and the inside, a narrow constricting notion of blackness. Postmodern critiques of essentialism which challenge notions of universality and static over-determined identity within mass culture and mass consciousness can open up new possibilities for the construction of the self and the assertion of agency. [11] Employing a critique of essentialism allows African-Americans to acknowledge the way in which class mobility has altered collective black experience so that racism does not necessarily have the same impact on our lives. Such a critique allows us to affirm multiple black identities, varied black experience. It also challenges colonial imperialist paradigms of black identity which represent blackness one-dimensionally in ways that reinforce and sustain white supremacy. This discourse created the idea of the "primitive" and promoted the notion of an "authentic" experience, seeing as "natural" those expressions of black life which conformed to a pre-existing pattern or stereotype. Abandoning essentialist notions would be a serious challenge to racism. Contemporary African- American resistance struggle must be rooted in a process of decolonization that continually opposes reinscribing notions of "authentic" black identity. This critique should not be made synonymous with the dismissal of the struggle of oppressed and exploited peoples to make ourselves subjects. Nor should it deny that in certain circumstances that experience affords us a privileged critical location from which to speak. This is not a reinscription of modernist master narratives of authority which privilege some voices by denying voice to others. Part of our struggle for radical black subjectivity is the quest to find ways to construct self and identity that are oppositional and liberatory. The unwillingness to critique essentialism on the part of many African-Americans is rooted in the fear that it will cause folks to lose sight of the specific history and experience of African-Americans and the unique sensibilities and culture that arise from that experience. An adequate response to this concern is to critique essentialism while emphasizing the significance of "the authority of experience." There is a radical difference between a repudiation of the idea that there is a black "essence" and recognition of the way black identity has been specifically constituted in the experience of exile and struggle. [12] When black folks critique essentialism, we are empowered to recognize multiple experiences of black identity that are the lived conditions which make diverse cultural productions possible. When this diversity is ignored, it is easy to see black folks as falling into two categories--nationalist or assimilationist, black-identified or white-identified. Coming to terms with the impact of postmodernism for black experience, particularly as it changes our sense of identity, means that we must and can rearticulate the basis for collective bonding. Given the various crises facing African-Americans (economic, spiritual, escalating racial violence, etc.) we are compelled by circumstance to reassess our relationship to popular culture and resistance struggle. Many of us are as reluctant to face this task as many non-black postmodern thinkers who focus theoretically on the issue of "difference" are to confront the issue of race and racism. [13] Music is the cultural product created by African- Americans that has most attracted postmodern theorists. It is rarely acknowledged that there is far greater censorship and restriction of other forms of cultural production by black folks--beginning with literary and critical writing. Attempts on the part of editors and publishing houses to control and manipulate the representation of black culture, as well as their desire to promote the creation of products which will attract the widest audience, limit in a crippling and stifling way the kind of work many black folks feel we can do and still receive recognition. Using myself as an example, that creative writing I do which I consider to be most reflective of a postmodern oppositional sensibility--work that is abstract, fragmented, non-linear narrative--is constantly rejected by editors and publishers who tell me it does not conform to the type of writing they think black women should be doing or the type of writing they believe will sell. Certainly I do not think I am the only black person engaged in forms of cultural production, especially experimental ones, who is constrained by the lack of an audience for certain kinds of work. It is important for postmodern thinkers and theorists to constitute themselves as an audience for such work. To do this they must assert power and privilege within the space of critical writing to open up the field so that it will be more inclusive. To change the exclusionary practice of postmodern critical discourse is to enact a postmodernism of resistance. Part of this intervention entails black intellectual participation in the discourse. [14] In his essay "Postmodernism and Black America," Cornel West suggests that black intellectuals "are marginal--usually languishing at the interface of Black and white cultures or thoroughly ensconced in Euro- American settings" and he cannot see this group as potential producers of radical postmodernist thought. While I generally agree with this assessment, black intellectuals must proceed with the understanding that we are not condemned to the margins. The way we work and what we do can determine whether or not what we produce will be meaningful to a wider audience, one that includes all classes of black people. West suggests that black intellectuals lack "any organic link with most of Black life" and that this "diminishes their value to Black resistance." This statement bears traces of essentialism. Perhaps we need to focus more on those black intellectuals, however rare our presence, who do not feel this lack and whose work is primarily directed towards the enhancement of black critical consciousness and the strengthening of our collective capacity to engage in meaningful resistance struggle. Theoretical ideas and critical thinking need not be transmitted solely in the academy. While I work in a predominantly white institution, I remain intimately and passionately engaged with black communities. It's not like I'm going to talk about writing and thinking about postmodernism with other academics and/or intellectuals and not discuss these ideas with underclass non-academic black folks who are family, friends, and comrades. Since I have not broken the ties that bind me to underclass poor black community, I have seen that knowledge, especially that which enhances daily life and strengthens our capacity to survive, can be shared. It means that critics, writers, academics have to give the same critical attention to nurturing and cultivating our ties to black communities that we give to writing articles, teaching, and lecturing. Here again I am really talking about cultivating habits of being that reinforce awareness that knowledge can be disseminated and shared on a number of fronts, and the extent to which it is made available and accessible depends on the nature of one's political commitments. [15] Postmodern culture with its decentered subject can be the space where ties are severed or it can provide the occasion for new and varied forms of bonding. To some extent ruptures, surfaces, contextuality and a host of other happenings create gaps that make space for oppositional practices which no longer require intellectuals to be confined to narrow, separate spheres with no meaningful connection to the world of every day. Much postmodern engagement with culture emerges from the yearning to do intellectual work that connects with habits of being, forms of artistic expression and aesthetics, that inform the daily life of a mass population as well as writers and scholars. On the terrain of culture, one can participate in critical dialogue with the uneducated poor, the black underclass who are thinking about aesthetics. One can talk about what we are seeing, thinking, or listening to; a space is there for critical exchange. It's exciting to think, write, talk about, and create art that reflects passionate engagement with popular culture, because this may very well be "the" central future location of resistance struggle, a meeting place where new and radical happenings can occur. 30-Sep-90 23:39:40-GMT,62229;000000000000 Received: from aramis.rutgers.edu by klinzhai.rutgers.edu (5.59/SMI4.0/RU1.4/3.08) id AA26436; Sun, 30 Sep 90 19:39:36 EDT Received: by aramis.rutgers.edu (5.59/SMI4.0/RU1.4/3.08) id AA08350; Sun, 30 Sep 90 19:39:34 EDT Resent-Message-Id: <9009302339.AA08350@aramis.rutgers.edu> Received: from ncsuvm.ncsu.edu by aramis.rutgers.edu (5.59/SMI4.0/RU1.4/3.08) id AA18260; Sun, 30 Sep 90 05:17:12 EDT Message-Id: <9009300917.AA18260@aramis.rutgers.edu> Received: from ncsuvm.ncsu.edu by ncsuvm.ncsu.edu (IBM VM SMTP R1.2.2MX) with BSMTP id 7638; Sun, 30 Sep 90 05:13:40 EDT Received: from NCSUVM.BITNET by ncsuvm.ncsu.edu (Mailer R2.07) with BSMTP id 7616; Sun, 30 Sep 90 05:08:49 EDT Date: Sun, 30 Sep 90 05:04:12 EDT Reply-To: " Editors" Sender: "" From: " Editors" Subject: KIPNIS 990 To: Multiple recipients of list PMC-LIST Resent-To: mcgrew@darkstar.rutgers.edu Resent-Date: Sun, 30 Sep 90 19:39:33 EDT Resent-From: Charles Mcgrew MARX: THE VIDEO (A POLITICS OF REVOLTING BODIES) by LAURA KIPNIS University of Wisconsin, Madison Copyright (c) 1990 by Laura Kipnis, all rights reserved. ------------------------------------------------------- A note on the mise-en-scene: There are large projections --stills, film clips, etc.--behind the action (referred to in the text as KEYS) in many scenes. There is also a Greek chorus of DRAG QUEENS (or DQs) who pop in and out of the action (or are KEYED over the action) in other scenes. ------------------------------------------------------- FADE UP ON: 1. MARX'S ROOM, he is lying in bed, carbuncular, in pain. ROLLING TEXT OVER: Karl Marx was born in Germany in 1818, and died in London in 1883, having been deported from numerous European countries for revolutionary activity. Throughout his life he suffered from chronic and painful outbreaks of carbuncles--agonizing skin eruptions--particularly during the years he was at work on his magnum opus, _Capital_. His 30-year correspondence with Frederick Engels, his friend and collaborator, deals regularly and in great detail with the state of his own body. DISSOLVE TO: 2. CLIP _La Marseillaise_ King: What is it? SUPER TITLE: 1789 Minister: Sire, the Parisians have taken the Bastille. King: So, is it a revolt? Minister: No sire, it is revolution. FREEZE on king V/O: Once power resided in the person of the King. The people's task was clear. Get rid of the king. 3. CLIP: Berlin wall V/O: Once power resided going down. in repressive state bureaucracies. The people's task was clear. SUPER TITLE: 1989 Smash the state. 4. STILL dead Ceausescu V/O: At certain moments in history power is centralized and visible, the sites of repression are clear and identifiable; resistance movements arise out of those relations of subordination and antagonism. 5. STILL Postmodern V/O: At other moments the urban landscapes task is less clear. Power is entrenched, but dispersed. Where does power reside? Who are the agents of change? TRANSITION EFFECT going back in time 6. STILLS: 1848 V/O: In 1848, Toqueville uprising warned: "We are sleeping on a volcano. A wind of TITLE: 1848 revolution blows, the storm is on the horizon." That year Marx and Engels completed The Communist Manifesto. Jean Martin Charcot, who would later devote himself to the study of hysteria, enters medical school. The same year, revolution swept Europe. Students and workers united, but three years later the revolution was toppled. Time passing TRANSITION 7. STILLS Paris, May 68 V/O: France, May '68. Students and workers united in a three week general strike, demanding radical democratic reforms. Momentarily, revolution seemed possible, but once again that possibility was soon dispelled. In the decades following '68, like the aftermath of 1848--the defeat of forces of change left traces, absences, an unfilled place where something is wanting. Where is the repository of those absences--where are they buried, embodied, misrecognized? TITLE: MARX: THE VIDEO A Politics of Erupting Bodies 1848-1990 ------------------------------------------------------- 8. SUPER: 1863 V/O BIOGRAPHER: Looking over first image of back, fifteen years later, MARX; he lies in bed to the failed revolution. MARX: Dear Engels: One thing is sure, the era of revolution is now once more fairly opened in Europe. And the general state of things is good. But the comfortable delusions and the almost childish enthusiasms with which we greeted the era of revolution before SUPER: Trotsky waving February 1848 are gone to from a train the devil. Old comrades are gone, others have fallen away or decayed, and a new generation is not yet in sight. In looming supers of addition, we now know what Stalin, Lenin role stupidity plays in revolutions and how they are exploited by Stalin looms over body scoundrels...Let us hope that this time the lava Mao looms over body pours from East to West and not vice versa. V/O BIOGRAPHER: He writes with nostalgia and longing for something thwarted, for something that didn't happen. ------------------------------------------------------- 9. DOCTOR KEYED over DOCTOR: His body just examining room STILL. erupted...It became Addresses camera like a battleground. The only cure at the time was arsenic. Terribly painful, like a body trying to turn itself into another body. I think it started shortly after his mother died. It continued throughout his life. ------------------------------------------------------- 10. STILLS, 19c. V/O NARRATOR: Marx took up industrialization the task of exhaustively superimposed on analyzing the historical Marx's body moment in which he found himself: the rise of industrialization and the inception of the working class movement. He stripped the facade off Poster International capital to reveal what was workingmens assoc. concealed: the labor in STILL the commodity, the alienation of the worker, naked exploitation by the capitalist. He looked to the material foundations zoom on worker body of the moment, he looked worker injury photo to the body. His analysis of capital relies on a language of the body: "production" "consumption" "reproduction" and "circulation." For Marx, the collective wealth of the state is the body--the labor--of the workers. worker injuries Capital amputates the worker from his own body; he has phantom pain for his missing limbs. But for Marx, which bodies were absent, unspoken, unacknowledged? ------------------------------------------------------- 11. DRAG QUEEN 1: What's a real body, a natural body? It doesn't exist, there's only a social body, the body as theater, the body that speaks, unbidden. But in whose language? ------------------------------------------------------- 12. MARX'S ROOM MARX: Dear Frederick: Two Fade up on MARX, in hours ago I received a foreground, writing. telegram that my mother is In suit, suitcase at dead. Fate claimed one of feet my family. I must go to Trier to settle my inheritance. I myself stood with one foot in the grave... DRAG QUEEN CHORUS supered over MARX, DQ CHORUS: His body just all dressed as nurses erupted. ------------------------------------------------------- 13. DQ2: What a problem the body is. Keeping it confined to its boundaries (like the lower classes). Concealing anything that BACKGROUND: comes out of it, or CLIPS porn, slo-mo protrudes from it. Certainly not speaking of such things. The creation of a meek, submissive hygienic public body. DQ2: His body just erupted. ------------------------------------------------------- 14. Hygiene products, V/O NARRATOR: Capital douche, dolls, float produces a disgusting through blue sky body, so it can create new regimes, new products, to police it and make it acceptable. Capital has achieved historical advances in the threshold of delicacy, it produces new varieties of bourgeois disgust, then markets a new and improved body without byproducts, without smells, to exist in a public sphere that is increasingly phobic about the collective body, the lower class body--the mob--a body that might not mind its manners. ------------------------------------------------------- 15. MARX'S ROOM, he MARX: Dear Fred: It is writes in bed. clear that on the whole I Dolly in know more about the carbuncle disease than most doctors...Here and there I have the beginnings of new carbuncles, which keep on disappearing, but they force me to keep my working hours within limits...I consider it my vocation to remain in Europe to complete the work in which I have been engaged for so many years but I cannot work productively more than a very few hours daily without feeling the effect physically...I think this work I am doing is much more important for the working class than anything I could do personally at a Congress of any kind...I would consider myself impractical if I had dropped dead without having finished my book, at least in manuscript. Cut to second angle V/O BIOGRAPHER: Writing on MARX with smoking Capital, his narrative of factory, keyed in the conditions of the background English proletariat, his body broke out with "a proletarian disease." Marx was desperate to finish his work, but unable to. Instead of writing, he was being written. The revolution he anticipated, the thwarted revolution, was displaced onto his own skin. ------------------------------------------------------- 16. MARX'S ROOM: high MARX: Dear Frederick: You angle down on bed see I am still here and I will tell you more, I am incapable of moving about. This is a perfidious Christian illness. In the meantime, I can neither walk, nor stand, nor sit, and even lying down is damned hard. You see how the wisdom of nature has afflicted me. Would it not have been more sensible if instead of me it had been consigned to try the patience of a good Christian? Like a true Lazarus, I am scourged on all sides. DRAG QUEEN 3: His body became sarcastic, taunting the tasteful, discreet body, the one that stays politely behind the scenes, the one that knows its place like the servant serving the master, like the subject serving the state. This wasn't a body you could take into the drawing room. This was an ill-mannered body. ------------------------------------------------------- 17. MARX writing Dear Kugelmann: Cut, at desk, bandaged lanced, etc, in REAR SCREEN CLIPS short treated in every Russian Revolution respect. In spite of this the thing is continually breaking out anew...I hope it will end this week, but who can guarantee me against another eruption? DRAG QUEEN CHORUS V/O: Marx, writing POPS ON Capital, imagining Capital's overthrow. His body living out his split identifications-- DQ1: (the bourgeois who champions the overthrow of the bourgeoisie) DQ3...the body begins to embody another kind of psyche, another sociality. It desired transformation. DQ2: He swathed his carbuncles behind bandages and focused his attention on the working class. CU Marx at BIOG V/O: As he nears desk, bandaged completion of the first volume, his carbuncles, mobile, sardonic, and insistent, break out in ever new vicinities. Seizing the flesh, sculpting it into a body bulging, protuberant, not closed and finished, not refined. MARX: You have too low an opinion of the English doctors if you think that they cannot diagnose carbuncles, particularly here in England--the land of carbuncles, which is actually a proletarian illness. It is only in the last few years that I have been persecuted by the thing. Before that, it was entirely unknown to me. ------------------------------------------------------- 18. CLIP riot footage V/O BIOGRAPHER: Marx--who KEYED onto his body would disavow the high overhead onto opposition between the body lying in bed social and the psychic as mere bourgeois psychology --was possessed of a body whose symptoms mocked the social order; it had become grotesque: open, protruding, extended, secreting: in process, taking on new forms, shapes; his body the figure of the new society that had failed to emerge. He was producing more and more body--too much body for a social order dedicated to its concealment. ------------------------------------------------------- 19. MARX'S ROOM Dear Engels: It was good he writes on couch you did not come on Saturday. My story--now fourteen days old--had reached the crisis point. I could talk a little, and it hurt even to laugh on account of the big abscess between nose and mouth, which this morning has been reduced at least to reasonable proportions. Also the violently swollen lips are becoming reduced closer to their previous dimensions. May the head of the devil go through such fourteen days. All this stops being a joke. ------------------------------------------------------- TITLE: ELIMINATING THE BODY. 20. TEENAGE GIRL'S ROOM, I hate my body, god, it's a number of TEENAGE so gross, look at these GIRLS gabbing, shot thighs...It's disgusting, documentary style I'm so fat... ------------------------------------------------------- 21. DISSOLVE TO: BATHROOM, high shot toilet, GIRL retching ------------------------------------------------------- SUPER TITLE: THE AGE OF CONSUMPTION ------------------------------------------------------- 22. Map of the U.S. V/O: Anorexia, bulimia little inserts of --epidemic in abundant girls retching into western societies, post toilets keyed over 1968. 10 to 20 percent U.S. capitals of American women now have eating disorders. A symptomatic eruption of the body. Let's wrest this out of secrecy, out of the private sphere and view it for a moment as the social collective act that it is. TITLE: THINKING THROUGH THE BODY ------------------------------------------------------- 23. DRAG QUEEN 3: Like a body trying to turn itself into another body, like a body trying to invent another kind of social existence. DRAG QUEEN 2: Women's bodies as tablets of social meaning, as sites of regulation... ------------------------------------------------------- 24. Pills, laxatives, V/O: With our increasingly diet products float phobic relation to the through blue sky collective body, the working class body, with our creation of an ideal public body without fat, without snot or BO, with a yearning for refinement, we will the disappearance of the body, the containment of the mass, the body politic, the threat. ------------------------------------------------------- 25. Worker STILLS BIOGRAPHER V/O: Marx, dissolve to writing history from MARX body/ below: a history of wealth dissolve to as labor, a history of the riots body, a history of the mass, his own body acting out... V/O: Stories told by the SUPER: body--after the failed STILLS hysterics revolutions of 1848 this comes to be known as "hysteria" and sweeps Europe. ------------------------------------------------------- TITLE: THE HYSTERIC IS SUBJECT TO MULTIPLE IDENTIFICATIONS ------------------------------------------------------- 26. MARX ROOM, he is Dear Frederick: I would writing at desk. REAR have written you sooner, SCREEN workers but for approximately the last twelve days all reading writing and smoking have been strictly forbidden. I had a sort of eye inflammation tied up with very unpleasant effects on the nervous system. The thing is now so far under control that I can again dare to write. In the meantime I had all kinds of psychological reveries, like a person going blind or crazy. ------------------------------------------------------- 27. STILL: V/O: Marx's symptoms make "Lecon clinique their appearance around de Charcot" the time that Freud's future teacher, Charcot, is beginning to recognize and treat a new disease, "traumatic hysteria." Before hysteria was relegated to a female disorder, it afflicted many men as well: Charcot began to recognize that what is novel about traumatic hysteria is that in these cases what lay behind the symptoms were not physical disorders, and not just nerves, but ideas. ------------------------------------------------------- 28. CHARCOT speaks "Male hysteria is not all that rare, and just among us, gentlemen, if I can judge from what I see each day, these cases are often unrecognized even by distinguished doctors. One will concede that a young and effeminate man might develop hysterical findings after experiencing significant stress, sorrow or deep emotions. But that a strong and vital worker, for instance, a railway engineer never prone to emotional instability before, should become hysteric--just as a woman might--this seems to us beyond imagination. And yet it is a fact--one which we must get used to." DRAG QUEEN 1: Hysteria which entraps and speaks the patient. ------------------------------------------------------- 29. FILM: BRITISH Dear Fred: I wanted to MUSEUM LOCATION write you yesterday from Marx, ill, stumbling, the British Museum, but drops a book, camera I suddenly became so zoom in on copy of unwell that I had to close "Vindication of the the very interesting book Rights of Women" that I held in my hand. A dark veil fell over my eyes. Then a frightful headache and a pain in the chest. I strolled home. Air and light helped and when I got home I slept for some time. My condition is such that I really should give up all working and thinking for some time to come; but that would be difficult, even if I could afford it. -------------------------------------------------------- 30. STILL, male V/O: Freud recounted how hysterics disturbed Charcot became when the German school of neurology resisted the idea of male hysteria and suggested pejoratively that if it occurred in males, it occurred only in French males. -------------------------------------------------------- 31. MARX'S ROOM, he Dear Frederick: In recent paces in the set weeks it has been positively impossible for me to write even two hours a day. Apart from pressure from without, there are the household headaches which always affect my liver. I have become sleepless again, and have had the pleasure of seeing two carbuncles bloom near the penis. Fortunately they faded away. My illness always comes from the head. ------------------------------------------------------- 32. STILL another V/O: Charcot related male male hysteric hysteria to trauma. As the industrial era progressed, the number of unexplained work related illnesses increased enormously; Charcot worked to demonstrate how these could be understood as hysterical. ------------------------------------------------------- 33. DRAG QUEEN 2: There were many who thought that the commotion of the French DRAG QUEEN CHORUS Revolution may have supered over affected the nervous system Delacroix's "Libertie of Frenchmen and Europeans Leading the Masses" adversely. DRAG QUEEN 1: It was an infection by ideas, the spread of violent influences displaced from social and class upheaval, fearful ideas about progress, new technologies, social transformations. ------------------------------------------------------- 34. REARSCREEN: Capital Dear Frederick: The dr. is MARX at desk, single quite right: the excessive lamp burning, fullscreen nightwork was the main behind of "workday" text, cause of the relapse. The violently moving camera most disgusting thing for me was the interruption of my work. But I have drudged on, lying down, even if only at short intervals during the day. I could not proceed with the purely theoretical part, the brain was too weak for that. Hence I have enlarged the historical part on the workday, which lay outside the original plan. ------------------------------------------------------- 35. Keyed over Marx DRAG QUEEN 3 (as Nurse) Like other symptomatics of the day, he took the cure. MARX in wheelchair, spa backdrop BIOGRAPHER V/O: The medical world had devised various techniques for palliating an irritated and erupting human nervous system. Popular techniques included warm milk and bed rest, hydrotherapy and sojourns at peaceful pastoral spas. Doctors intuitively offered patients physical and psychological means to flee psycho-cultural stress--sending patients to the country, the sea, the mountains. Marx tried all of these. On doctor's orders, he fled his work. ------------------------------------------------------- 36. MARX writing from Dear Frederick: So far I lounge chair, spa have had two sulfur baths, background, rushing tomorrow the third. water noise From the bath one steps on a raised board, in the altogether; the bath In bathing costume attendant uses the hose (the size of a firehose) the way a virtuoso does his instrument; he commands the movement of the body and alternately bombards all parts of the corpus except the head for three minutes, first strongly, then weakly, up to the legs and feet, an always advancing crescendo. You can see how little desire a man has to write here. DRAG QUEEN KEYED OVER DRAG QUEEN 2 (as nurse): as nurse Removing himself from his work brought some relief. ------------------------------------------------------- 37. MARX at the spa Dear Frederick: From the walking around, in delayed appearance of this suit, cane letter you can see how professionally I use my time here. I read nothing, write nothing. Because of the arsenic three times daily, one has time only for meals and strolling along the coast and the neighboring hills, there is no time left for other things. Evenings one is too tired to do anything but sleep. DRAG QUEEN KEYED OVER DRAG QUEEN 1: His symptoms began to speak him. ------------------------------------------------------- 38. MARX, spa My dear daughter: I run walking about the greatest part of the day, airing myself, going to bed at ten, reading nothing, writing less, and altogether working up my mind to that state of nothingness which Buddhism considers the climax of human bliss...I am afflicted with an inflammation of the eye, not that there is much to be seen of it...the eye has taken to the vicious habit of shedding tears on its own account, without the least regard to the feelings of his master. ------------------------------------------------------- 39. MARX'S ROOM; he V/O BIOGRAPHER: The writhes in bed carbuncles continued to erupt, stalling the writing of Capital, inscribing themselves into the text. Marx focused doggedly on the laboring body (while his own body exploded into new and ever changing configurations) Pan to STILL of as if fearful of the "Libertie Leading the effect of introducing the Masses" over desk unregimented body into the realm of the political. DRAG QUEEN 2: But then, dressed as Marianne, this brings other bodies one "breast" bare into the picture--the desiring body, the woman's body, the undisciplined body. ------------------------------------------------------- TITLE: WOMEN'S BODIES ------------------------------------------------------- 40. HELENE V/O: For the 19th century bourgeois male, the servant provokes social anxiety: she is the conduit through which the working class infiltrates the middle class home. Introducing the maid and her sexuality into the bourgeois household is threatening in a period in which both were linked in the bourgeois imagination to the discontent of a dissatisfied working class. But then what is excluded socially is desired, eroticized--the maid becomes a figure of transgressive desire for the bourgeois male, a desire produced by the very categories that rule the bourgeois body. Marx, in the Communist Manifesto mocks the bourgeois male, with an array of women at his disposal, not only proletarian wives and daughters but prostitutes to pick up the slack. This was written two years before he conceived a son with the family maid. ------------------------------------------------------- 41. 19c porn STILLS of V/O: Women in the public maids sphere were tantamount to prostitutes: they bring the filth and corruption of the market, of wage labor, into the middle class home. ------------------------------------------------------- TITLE: HELENE ------------------------------------------------------- 42. MARX'S ROOM, he V/O BIOGRAPHER: Marx, even writes, HELENE enters, in the most dire poverty, serves tea did what he could to maintain a bourgeois household. It was Helene Demuth, the servant, who marked his own separation from the working class. She, more than Marx, straddles two worlds, belonging to both the bourgeois family and the working class: she was the certainly the member of that world that Marx knew best. "pregnant" DRAG QUEEN DRAG QUEEN 3: The hysteric KEYED OVER is subject to multiple identifications. ------------------------------------------------------- 43. MARX'S ROOM, writing. Dear Laura, Some recent PROJECTION from October, Russian publications, on rearscreen as HELENE printed in Holy Russia, serves tea not abroad, show the great run of my theories in that country. Nowhere is my success more delightful to me, it gives me the satisfaction that I damage a power, which besides England, is the true bulwark of the old society. ------------------------------------------------------- 44. Looking down on tile HELENE V/O: She was ten floor, HELENE scrubbing, years younger than Marx's as MARX walks across wife Jenny. Lenchen, as frame she was called, ran the Marx household. Often Marx was too poor to pay her but she cast her lot with the Marx family. She did the cooking, housecleaning, laundering, dressmaking, nursing, and everything else, including taking the bedsheets to the pawn shop when eviction was threatened. In 1851, at age 28, she gave birth to Marx's son, secretly. ------------------------------------------------------- 45. HELENE appears very BIOGRAPHER V/O: Marx wrote pregnant, serving tea to Engels of a "very tangled family situation," hinting at a "mystery," a "tragicomic" mystery, in which he, Engels, also played a role. Marx traveled to Manchester, to see Engels, where the two negotiated Lenchen's fate. DRAG QUEEN KEYED OVER DRAG QUEEN 1: As men are accustomed to negotiating the fate of women's bodies. ------------------------------------------------------- 46. CLIP: beauty HELENE V/O: Did contest introducing a woman into their collaborative association disrupt it? This triangle--did it trouble a theory that saw the role of women strictly in economic terms? What bodies aren't acknowledged? clip: Stalin kissing BIOGRAPHER V/O: Marx woman; footage keyed persuaded Engels to accept onto Helene's pregnant paternity for Lenchen's stomach child, who was named Frederick, after him, in the custom of patrilineage. Engels accepted responsibility for the child, binding the two men together over Helene's mute body, over the body of the working class woman. DRAG QUEEN KEYED OVER DRAG QUEEN 3: Jenny, the wife, was easily persuaded that Engels was the father as she never really approved of his morals. ------------------------------------------------------- TITLE: THE SECRET ------------------------------------------------------- 47. HELENE speaks I never betrayed the directly to camera secret; I let my baby be brought up by a working class family. Engels occasionally sent money. Marx never acknowledged Freddy as his son. He chose not to acknowledge paternity. After Marx's death, I moved into Engel's home as his housekeeper. My son Freddy visited regularly once a week: however, as an ordinary working- man, he entered through the kitchen. He was Marx's only living son. He had grown up to be a poorly educated proletarian, his wife had left him and run away with his few possessions. His life was one of trouble, worry and hardship. ------------------------------------------------------- 48. V/O BIOGRAPHER: "We should, none of us, want to meet our pasts in flesh and blood," wrote Marx's daughter after his death, after discovering that Freddy Demuth was her father's son. These strategies of concealment are central to bourgeois identity, which wishes most of all to conceal the crucial place of the woman in its network of exploitation, which wishes most of all to conceal the symptomatic and erupting body and the tales it tells. ------------------------------------------------------- 49. DRAG QUEEN CHORUS DQ 1: The pregnant body, the unruly female body, swollen, grotesque, must be regulated, particularly its appearances in the public sphere. DQ 3: As men are accustomed to negotiating the fate of women's bodies. ------------------------------------------------------- 50. COURTROOM LOCATION NEWSCASTER: "COURT REJECTS PLEA FOR ABORTION BEFORE JAIL" Oct 26, 1989 A Florida county judge has refused a woman's request to postpone her 60 day jail sentence so she can have an abortion first. You want a continuance so you can murder your baby, is that it?" Judge Rasmussen of Pasco County Court asked the 26 year old defendant before sending her to jail. While the prosecutor agreed that Ms. Forney whose third month of pregnancy began today, could postpone her sentence by 10 days before serving her term for violating probation for driving under the influence of alcohol. The violation was that she paid only $100 of the $500 fine assessed against her. Ms. Forney, a part time bartender who is not married, asked for the additional time because, she said, she was afraid it might be to late for a safe abortion when she got out of jail. She pleaded that she was financially unable to care for a baby. Judge Rasmussen suggested that she carry the baby to full term and then give it up for adoption. In a jail interview Tuesday Ms. Forney said: I thought it was my choice. He's telling me I don't have a choice. It's not right that he can choose for me." ------------------------------------------------------ SCENES 51-60 QUICK MONTAGE: 51. HELENE addresses He simply chose not to camera acknowledge paternity. I hadn't that choice. 52. Abortion rally "Get your laws off my FOOTAGE body. Get your laws off my body." 53. Background: DRAG QUEEN 1: Get your Bondage STILLS laws off my body. 54. COURTROOM JUDGE: I can't define it but I know it when I see it. 55. Background: DRAG QUEEN 2: They want to Bondage STILLS ban pornography because it tells the truth. 56. TITLE: THE LINKING OF WHAT IS POLITICALLY DANGEROUS TO FEELINGS OF SEXUAL HORROR AND FASCINATION. 57. Abortion rally "Get your laws off my FOOTAGE body..." 58. WOMAN bent over DQ3: Desiring a body that toilet, bathroom doesn't speak, desiring a body that has the right DRAG QUEEN keyed over desires, desiring a different social being, a different social body... 59. WOMAN bent over WOMAN: How can I live in toilet my body? Where could I live in my body? ------------------------------------------------------- 60. MARX'S ROOM, Marx How can I live in my body? in bed, writhing (FIRST Where can I live in my SYNC SOUND ON MARX) body? ------------------------------------------------------- 61. KEY text of Capital Dear Engels: I had decided over MARX body so not to write you until I that one seems to be could announce the emerging from the other completion of the book which is now the case. Also I did not want to bore you with the reasons for the frequent delays, namely carbuncles on my posterior and in the vicinity of the penis, the remains of which are now fading and which permit me to assume a sitting (that is, writing) position only at great pain. I do not take arsenic, because it makes me too stupid and at least for the little time that I have when writing is possible, I want to have a clear head. V/O BIOGRAPHER: Finishing the book left his body racked and scarred. He was subject to increasing outbursts with each new translation of the book. He continued to search for a cure. ------------------------------------------------------- 62. MARX writing, My dear Jenny: I am HELENE cleaning sending you today the proofs of the French translation of Das Kapital. Today is the first day that I have been able to do anything at all. Until now despite baths, walking, splendid air, careful diet, etc. my condition has been worse than in London. That is also the reason why I am postponing my return, because it is absolutely necessary to return in a condition for work. BIOGRAPHER V/O: The eruptions of his body weren't matched by the social eruptions he anticipated. ------------------------------------------------------- 63. MARX'S ROOM Dear Sorge: How did it REARSCREEN civil happen that in the US rights riots where relatively that is, compared to civilized Europe, land was accessible to the great masses of the people and to a certain degree (again relatively) still is, the capitalist economy and the Text emerging corresponding enslavement from carbuncles of the working class have developed more rapidly and more shamelessly than in any country? DRAG QUEEN KEYED OVER DQ 2: His body continued its parody. Marx came to regard the carbuncles as having a life of their own, his affliction had a theory and a practice. ------------------------------------------------------- 64. MARX'S ROOM, bed. Dear Kugelmann: After my Riot FOOTAGE KEYED onto return, a carbuncle broke bandages out on my right cheek which had to be operated on, then it had several smaller successors, and I think that at the present moment I am suffering from the last of them. For the rest don't worry at all about newspaper gossip; still less answer it. I myself allow the English papers to announce my death from time to time, without giving a sign of life. DRAG QUEEEN KEYED OVER DQ 3: Like the revolutionary, the erupting, symptomatic body displays monstrous and unreadable forms to a horrified society. ------------------------------------------------------- 65. HELENE clears the Dear Frederick: The doctor table as MARX writes has opened up the pleasant in bed prospect that I will have to deal with this loathsome disease until late in January. Still this second Frankenstein on my hump is by far not so fierce as was the first in London. You can see this from the fact that I am able to write. If one wants to vomit politics out of nausea, one must take it daily in the form of telegraphic pills, such as are delivered by the newspapers. ------------------------------------------------------- TITLE: IF ONE WANTS TO VOMIT POLITICS OUT OF NAUSEA... ------------------------------------------------------- 66. STUDIO high shot WOMAN: How can I live in toilet, WOMAN bending my body? where can I live over in black space in my body? Pan to drag queen DQ1: Where is the history riot FOOTAGE of the body written? In KEYED behind toilet your politeness, in your deodorant and douche, behind the bathroom door, in your shame and revulsion. Pan to next drag queen DQ2: In your symptoms. ------------------------------------------------------- 67. MARX'S ROOM Dear Frederick: I hope in bed. Zoom into that with this, I will bandaged carbuncle have paid my debt to nature. In my state of ill health, I can do little writing, and then only by revolutions fits and starts. At any emerging out of rate, I hope the carbuncles bourgeoisie will remember my carbuncles all the rest of their lives. Zoom into, then CREDITS 30-Sep-90 23:39:51-GMT,62219;000000000000 Received: from aramis.rutgers.edu by klinzhai.rutgers.edu (5.59/SMI4.0/RU1.4/3.08) id AA26442; Sun, 30 Sep 90 19:39:47 EDT Received: by aramis.rutgers.edu (5.59/SMI4.0/RU1.4/3.08) id AA08358; Sun, 30 Sep 90 19:39:44 EDT Resent-Message-Id: <9009302339.AA08358@aramis.rutgers.edu> Received: from ncsuvm.ncsu.edu by aramis.rutgers.edu (5.59/SMI4.0/RU1.4/3.08) id AA18419; Sun, 30 Sep 90 05:25:57 EDT Message-Id: <9009300925.AA18419@aramis.rutgers.edu> Received: from ncsuvm.ncsu.edu by ncsuvm.ncsu.edu (IBM VM SMTP R1.2.2MX) with BSMTP id 7732; Sun, 30 Sep 90 05:21:08 EDT Received: from NCSUVM.BITNET by ncsuvm.ncsu.edu (Mailer R2.07) with BSMTP id 7679; Sun, 30 Sep 90 05:13:47 EDT Date: Sun, 30 Sep 90 05:05:05 EDT Reply-To: " Editors" Sender: "" From: " Editors" Subject: YUDICE 990 To: Multiple recipients of list PMC-LIST Resent-To: mcgrew@darkstar.rutgers.edu Resent-Date: Sun, 30 Sep 90 19:39:43 EDT Resent-From: Charles Mcgrew FEEDING THE TRANSCENDENT BODY by GEORGE YUDICE CUNY, Hunter College Copyright (c) 1990 by George Yudice, all rights reserved. To eat is to appropriate by destruction; it is at the same time to be filled up with a certain being.... When we eat we do not limit ourselves to *knowing* certain qualities of this being through taste; by tasting them we appropriate them. Taste is assimilation.... The synthetic intuition of food is in itself an assimilative destruction. It reveals to me the being which I am going to make my flesh. Henceforth, what I accept or what I reject with disgust is the very being of that existent.... It is not a matter of indifference whether we like oysters or clams, snails or shrimp, if only we know how to unravel the existential signification of these foods. Generally speaking there is no irreducible taste or inclination. They all represent a certain appropriate choice of being. Jean-Paul Sartre^1^ [1] At first glance, it seems unlikely that contemporary U.S. culture can offer a gastrosophy to match that of other civilizations. Brillat-Savarin's (and Feuerbach's) adage, "You are what you eat," does not throb today with metaphysical significance as it did scarcely two generations ago for Sartre. In the United States, it is indeed a matter of indifference "whether we like oysters or clams, snails or shrimp"; much of the lower priced seafood today is made from other processed fish. Consequently, the differences between particular foods are less important; what really matters is taste itself, laboratory produced %flavor%. Food as substance gives way to the simulacrum of flavor, which is something that "science" recombines in ever new ways to seduce us to this or that convenience food. As synthetic food replaces Sartre's "synthetic intuition of food," we find it impossible to transcend the brute "facticity" of eating, which is ironically as fake as it is real. We eat substances (the "real") yet we do not %know% them as such but as simulations (the "fake"). [2] The portrait I've drawn here obviously calls for a reference to Baudrillard, which will come in due time. First, however, it is necessary to reflect a bit more on the changes wrought by the transition to simulation in our (seemingly) most immediate experience: eating. Anthropologists have explained in great detail how entire civilizations defined themselves allegorically through their eating practices. Inclusion or exclusion, symbolic and material exchange, body boundaries, gender, and other identity factors are systematically and most deeply inscribed in the members of a given group through eating practices. Consequently, the metaphysics of most groups is conveyed by these practices. This inscription conditions, for example, how people understand divinity. For the Greeks of Hesiod's %Theogony%, the rituals of sacrificial cooking and eating, paralleled in agricultural, funereal and nuptial practices, establish a communication between mortals and immortals which paradoxically expresses their incommensurability. In contrast, the Orphic anthropogony makes possible the mystical transcendence of the barrier between gods and humans by rejecting the sacrifice of the official religion. By refusing this sacrifice, by forbidding the bloodshed of any animal, by turning away from fleshy food to dedicate themselves to a totally "pure" ascetic life--a life also completely alien to the social and religious norms of the city--men would shed all the Titanic elements of their nature. In Dionysus they would be able to restore that part of themselves that is divine.^2^ [3] Since mystical transcendence usually involves some relation to eating--or not eating, as in the Orphic cult--it is interesting to ask what are the possibilities of such transcendence in an age of fake fat and microwavable synthetic meals. The mystic engages in a struggle whose reward is nourishing grace. As Saint Teresa says, the soul "finds everything cooked and eaten for it; it has only to enjoy its nourishment."^3^ In our consumer culture, however, such convenience food comes to most of us without the struggle. Unlike the mystic--who is "like a man who has had no schooling...and [yet] finds himself, without any study, in possession of all living knowledge"--we are not graced by any special knowledge. Without negativity--Sartre's "appropria[tion] by destruction"-- there is no transcendence. And negativity is precisely what gives the Orphics and mystics like Saint Teresa-- often taken as heretics by orthodoxy--a feeling of *power* which makes them "master of all the elements and of the whole world."^4^ Transcendence, in these cases, is closely related to contestatory social movements which attempted to invert the power differential between the dominant and the subaltern. [4] The experiences of people (mostly women) with eating disorders today seems to contradict the argument that there are no longer any practices of negativity. In fact, on the basis of power reversals similar to the ones claimed by mystics, contemporary theorists/practictioners of %ecriture% have rediscovered--and extended to the anorectic--the prototype of an "herethics" beyond the dominant order of things,^5^ or a "mysterique" (fusion of mystic and hysteric) who carves out her own space of enunciation within Western discourse.^6^ Following this latter analogy, the mystic's relationship to the inquisitor would be like that of the hysteric before the psychoanalyst who seeks to extract her secrets for the benefit of his doctrine.^7^ [5] The correlation of mystic/heretic, hysteric and anorectic, however, encounters a serious problem: against what or whom is the anorectic wielding her negativity? Endocrinological and other biomedical factors aside, anorexia and other eating disorders are, of course, an expression of gender struggle in our society.^8^ But that does not explain everything; if that were the case, we could expect all the victims of patriarchy to suffer from eating disorders. It seems to me that the issue of control is a necessary but not sufficient condition for the negativity of the anorectic (or the bulimic or the obese woman). Class and/or gender analysis is not enough to account for all questions of subjectivity and desire. We are all constrained but some of us go on to become mystics or anorectics. Why? In the most suggestive essay I have read on the topic, Sohnya Sayres argues that some of us are more sensitive to the limitless loss brought on by the shrinking of experience. As in mystical experience, the loss becomes the point of departure for the will to greatness and glory, to empowerment: It is glory that these body-loss-obsessed men and women seek, in making themselves "lost," rapacious glory in society constraining them in rituals around limitless loss. They externalize the return of the repressed in this society which, more than others, is rationalized around the ledger sheets and the accountants of gain, whose most serious intonations are about the "bottom line"--which has remade the "full plate" into the latest idiom for dealing with bad news. One wonders, now, whether the ultimate loss that young people say they are almost sure will be their not too distant future--millennialist, cataclysmic loss--hasn't excited, but sent deeper, those fantasies of messianic rescue lying choked beneath weeds the body imperatives plant in the spirit. Fat and anorectic women and men want to be great, in ways unaccountable...unless we accept the enormity of the unaccountable in this society. Then, perhaps, the drama of food and the body can be given a storyteller's innovations, that is, when it is released from explanation and accommodation, all that quantifying, into flights of wit and provocation--released, in other words, from a singular, petty, tale of compulsion into one of sacrifice, mortification, and redemption-- into a grander delusion, worthy of the person, worthy of hearing about, worthy of transforming.^9^ [6] I have quoted Sayres at length because she expresses so well the dialectic of loss and transcendence which Baudrillard, in turn, will transform into a paean to banality. Baudrillard's hyperreality has no place in it for delusions of grandeur and redemption. Or it may be more exact to say that he does acknowledge grandeur, but it is the grandeur of limitless banality. There is no sense, however, of how people suffer and struggle against that banality. In fact, he has taken the figure of the obese/anorectic, in which some feminists situate a radical negation of patriarchy, and cast it as the emblem of a society in which there is no longer any possibility of opposition because everything has been "digest[ed into] its own appearance": This strange obesity is no longer that of a protective layer of fat nor the neurotic one of depression. It is neither the compensatory obesity of the underdeveloped nor the alimentary one of the overnourished. Paradoxically, it is a mode of disappearance for the body. The secret rule that delimits the sphere of the body has disappeared. The secret form of the mirror, by which the body watches over itself and its image, is abolished, yielding to the unrestrained redundancy of a living organism. No more limits, no more transcendence: it is as if the body was no longer opposed to an external world, but sought to digest space in its own appearance.^10^ [7] Like the social systems in which we live, which are "bloated with information" and deprived of significance, Baudrillard's obscene obese/anorectic body has lost the "principle of law or measure" that once supported it. Its meanings and representations have also transmuted into metastatic self-replication. History is now seen as a succession of devourments which, along with ideology and politics, reach a saturation point that knows no limits; metastasis encompasses everything, nothing is at odds with it, nothing can transcend it. And as every condition has its symptomatic figuration, Baudrillard's obscene hyperreality finds its "perfect confirmation and ecstatic truth" in the obscene body, which "instead of being reflected, captures itself in its own magnifying mirror."^11^ [8] Europe has long served as the proscenium for the death of the subject and history; the allegory of the death of life could have no other setting, of course, than the United States, home of those exemplary killers of experience: fast food, safe sex and genetic engineering. I would like to talk about an anomaly--that fascinating obesity, such as you find all over the U.S., that kind of monstrous conformity to empty space, of deformity by excess of conformity that translates the hyperdimension of a sociality at once saturated and empty, where the scene of the social as well as that of the body are left behind.^12^ [9] In the grand allegorical tradition, Baudrillard offers us a new reading of the body-as-microcosm-of- the-world. This body is not a temple, nor a machine, nor a holistic organism. It is the obscene body without order, whose cells have gone rampant in "cancerous metasteses" that parallel the useless flow of information in the postmodern world. If disease was once interpreted as *lesion* (the body as machine model) or as *adaptive response to stress* (the organic model),^13^ Baudrillard's *viral* analogy construes it as coextensive with "life." It is, however, a life with no rhyme or reason other than the momentum/inertia of self-replication: "Quite simply, there is no life any longer [...] but the information and the vital functions continue."^14^ [10] The body registers the "useless and wasteful exhaustion" of all systems in the figure of the obese (satiation) and/or the anorectic (inertia). On this view, the obese and the anorectic are neither the victims of some accident whose results can be reversed by altering a body part ("removing portions of the stomach or intestine so that only small amounts of food could be eaten or digested") nor the adaptation to stressful "environmental factors (exercise habits, self-image, personal relationships, work pressures, etc.)."^15^ They are, rather, the embodiment of permanent crisis: inflation, overproduction, unemployment, nuclear threat, %anomaly%, to sum up. [11] Yes. At first sight, the example seems irrefutable. What better emblem of the empire of the senseless, useless waste of resources than the insatiable obese and anorectics of (North) America, driven to passivity, apathy and indifference by the infinite choice of consummables?^16^ In a very insightful essay in which he mines the contradictions between capitalism and transgression, Octavio Paz notes that by rigorously applying the norm of the "limitless production of the same," North American society succeeded in coopting the erotic and gastronomic rebellions of the 60s into slogans for the media:^17^ The popular character of the erotic revolt was immediately appreciated by the mass media, by the entertainment and fashion industries. For it is not the churches nor the political parties, but the great industrial monopolies that have taken control of the powers of fascination that eroticism exerts over men. [...] What began as a[n erotic] liberation has become a business. The same has happened in the realm of gastronomy; the erotic industry is the younger sister of the food industry. [...] Private business expropriates utopia. During its ascendancy capitalism exploited the body; now it has turned it into an object of advertising. We have gone from prohibition to humiliation.^18^ [12] Paz did not fathom the extent to which gastronomy was being appropriated by industry. Today it no longer takes a major intellectual to understand that food is subject to the same %image manipulation% as all other commodities. Flavor, color, consistency, texture, smell, caloric and nutritional value, even genetic composition are all engineered to seduce each and every consumer. Food has, in effect, become a simulacrum which the omnivorous psyche of North America cannot get enough of even at the ever quicker pace of production, preparation and consumption With the ever-accelerating pace of life, the act of eating--once a leisurely undertaking synonymous with pleasure and social interaction--has been reduced to a necessary function not unlike shaving or refueling the car, in the view of food manufacturers, social scientists and others.^19^ [13] The loss which Sayres refers to above, is not only the erosion of the supreme experience of transcendence; even the petty pleasure of eating a cheeseburger fades as the milk fat is replaced by vegetable oils (if not a cellulose-based fat substitute) and the grill gives way to the microwave. Even the singe marks are painted on the frozen patty. Increasingly, we consume in solitude; a recent Gallup poll found that only 1/3 of North American adults dine at home in the company of others.^20^ By 1992, cars will come equipped with microwaves so we can consume on our way to and from work.^21^ And moms are now %free% to stay at work as children from two years of age and older pop %My Own Meals% or %Kid Cuisine% in the microwave.^22^ [14] "Freedom" seems to come so easily, there is no struggle; there isn't even an "other" to struggle against; the values once instilled by preparing our own food and eating together as a family have given way to a new ethos: flip the switch. For Baudrillard, we become the simulacra we consume, hostages "of a fate that is fixed, and whose manipulators we can no longer see."^23^ We are thus levelled to a homogeneous status of victim and perpetrator. None of us and all of us are to blame. A very convenient fiction that furthers the hegemony of those whom he refuses to see. [15] It is hardly a secret that a handful of transnational corporations--General Foods, Nestle, Monsanto, R.J. Reynolds, etc.--control agribusiness, from production to shipping, processessing, distribution and marketing. It is no secret that this control puts those "disappeared" others who produce what we consume in the most onerous of conditions-- twelve hours of work for a couple of dollars in Central America--in a situation which has been getting worse under the Reagan and Bush administrations. Nor is it a secret that people here in the United States are also going hungry due to increases in prices and the erosion of welfare benefits by inflation and cutbacks.^24^ Add to these "secrets" the devastation of the world's natural resources for the ingredients and packaging of fast and convenience foods,^25^ and you get a good sense of the loss, the other side of the simulacrum. [16] Baudrillard's allegory is a rather simplistic correlation of digestion and information processing, which permits passing over the intense battles which are currently waged in the medium of the body. The body is not simply the screen on which the rampant exchange of information and images is captured; it is, rather, the battleground in which subjects are constituted, contradictorily desiring and rejecting prescribed representations. Baudrillard does not even recognize this struggle; in his hyperreal world there is only conformity, an unproblematic consensus in which not only consumers but even terrorists collaborate. [17] Since, for Baudrillard, experience has disappeared his allegorical viral body is raceless, classless, genderless, ageless; it has no identity factors. Consequently, and contrary to the reported experience of most people, it is not shaped by the ways particular social formations interpellate specific bodies through these factors. The struggle of women against what Kim Chernin has called the "tyranny of slenderness" is a good example of how some bodies and not others are made to incarnate certain social contradictions on the basis of gender.^26^ Obesity and anorexia, then, do not correlate so much with the self-replication of information but rather with the *control* of bodies. In the United States, control of the body by means of "idealizing" representations (consumerism and the media) and ever more frequently through outright coercion and the interdiction of counterrepresentations (the conservative offensive) have pretty much replaced prior forms of maintaining hegemony. For Susie Orbach, the anorectic's "hunger strike" is a metaphor for this struggle of representation.^27^ But this is a struggle to which Baudrillard seems quite indifferent; in his view, we have already lost and there is no way of transforming that loss into the "grander delusion" of something worthy (Sayres). Why play the deluded fool that resists the body snatchers; the sooner we yield the sooner we can all enjoy the obscenity. [18] Baudrillard bears a resemblance to the confessors of the mystics. They attempted to control the interpretation of the mystics' experiences, differentiating those inspired by God from those inspired by the devil, thus negotiating the mystics' relationship to the church. Baudrillard also differentiates between experiences of transcendence ("This is not Georges Bataille's excessive superfluity") and the %sublime banality% of the hyperreal and hypertelic, which know "no other end than limitless increase, without any consideration of limits."^28^ Baudrillard, of course, does not evaluate the experiences in terms of divine/demonic inspiration, but he does clearly valorize the banalization of life by capital-logic, with its concomitant emptying of moral value. As such he embodies Jameson's description of the sublime hysteric, hungering after figurations (simulacra) of the *other* of capitalism once Nature and Being have been eclipsed.^29^ Control and limits, nonetheless, continue to be important, even constitutive, for Baudrillard because his fascination with obscenity, like all appreciations of sublimity, plays off the point at which limits can no longer be controlled. Hence, the body, not figuratively but (hyper)really embodies the world. In becoming image, it matches the mediatedness that *is* the world. [19] In one respect I think that Baudrillard has chosen a very apt allegory of sublime banality in the obese/anorectic body. In some sense, women with eating disorders are today's mystics; the ethical substance of their search for transcendence may not be sublime in the conventional sense, but they occupy a privileged space in a world that has depleted its divine incommensurabilities. In other words, today's incommensurability is the representational space of their own bodies, which they struggle to control. Most %interpretive% (in contrast to %biomedical%) analyses of eating disorders take a psychoanalytic and/or feminist stance according to which the obese or the anorectic woman strives to manage the double binds of prescriptions of slenderness and consumption, will and abandon to instant gratification. Whether these analyses take an essentialist (e.g., Kim Chernin) or a social constructionist (e.g., Susie Orbach) approach, they almost exclusively emphasize repression and control. [20] Susan Bordo summarizes very well the "deeper psycho-cultural anxieties...about internal processes out of control--uncontained desire, unrestrained hunger, uncontrolled impulse." Bordo posits the bulimic as the embodiment of the "contradictions that make self-management a continual and virtually impossible task in our culture."^30^ The bulimic, she argues, plays out on her body the "incompatible directions" of consumerist temptations and the freedom implied in the virile image of a well-muscled slender body. If consumerism makes the feminine image central to our culture (because of its seductive power, Baudrillard would argue),^31^ such that even literary theorists can claim that writing is a subversive feminine activity, it nevertheless requires repressing the very materiality or *essential nature*, as Kim Chernin puts it, of women's bodies.^32^ For Chernin it is repression that transforms the body into an "alien" that may in momentary lapses of control rear its head and return with a vengeance. [21] But clearly it is also the relatively non- repressive introjection of images that produces this alienation. In contrast to Chernin, I would argue that alienation is not the loss of an essential nature; in an age in which people believe and practice %making themselves over%, the traditional notion of essence becomes absurd. %*It is, rather, a question of remaking not only oneself but even more importantly the social formation that attributes value to the "nature" that we embody*%.^33^ It is this capacity which so many people experience as having been *lost*. Sociality can then be understood as the struggle for value, which entails the recognition of diverse "natures" and the social ministration to their needs. Elsewhere I have elaborated on how such ministration responds to the struggle over needs interpretation, which is basically a struggle over the representation of our "nature," be it in the form of gender, ethnicity, age, and so on.^34^ [22] On this view, the materiality that defines us need not be understood monolithically as the rejected archaic maternal body which according to Kristeva undergirds the radical limit-experience of abjection. It seems to me that the very notion of the archaic is remade in the image of the media. The current "fat taboo" may in fact hark back to the separation process performed by traditional dietary and other ritual prohibitions, although today fat food and fat image are hypostatized in our consciousness: [Such prohibitions] keep a being who speaks to his God separated from the fecund mother... [the] phantasmatic mother who also constitutes, in the specific history of each person, the abyss that must be established as an autonomous (and not encroaching) %place% and %distinct% object, meaning a signifiable one, so that such a person might learn to speak.^35^ [23] Dietary taboos, however, are increasingly becoming a matter of image manipulation. For example, you can still have your cake and eat it too if you're kosher and desire to eat a slice of (simulated) cheesecake after your pastrami on rye at Katz's Delicatessen, that exemplary custodian of Glatt kosher cuisine. Taboo only makes a difference if you can have your cake and *not* eat it. Does this mean, then, that in a culture of simulation there are no longer ways of distinguishing the abject from the proper object, thus making the will to transcendence irrelevant? Rather than accept this premise, it seems preferable to me to explore Mary Douglas's notion that anxiety around bodily boundaries signals significant social change or crisis. What and how we eat undergirds other kinds of social boundaries (marking off the difference between purity and pollution, inside and outside, etc.). As such, dietary practices function as a support for the cognitive systems by which cultures make sense of the world. They wire, so to speak, the way in which our bodies interface with the media of signification.^36^ This is what Kristeva means when she says, in the passage quoted above, that the maternal body archaically establishes radical negativity, which she then goes on to fetishize, in the metaphor of the abyss, as the very condition of speech. But this is to reduce speech to the verbal and practice to negativity, thus privileging avant-gardist practices in the registers of high aesthetics. The recognition of mediation as necessary for our survival does not have to lead, however, to a Baudrillardian celebration of the simulacrum: Seduction as an invention of stratagems, of the body, as a disguise for survival, as an infinite dispersion of lures, as an art of disappearance and absence, as a dissuasion which is stronger yet than that of the system.^37^ [24] The struggle over representation as I have briefly sketched it out does not fetishize the disguise nor lead one to confuse the high aesthetic appropriation of pop and mass culture with political effectivity. Its political value is more complex than the simple play of quotes or intertextuality. It challenges institutional control over images but not by remaining totally within the frame of the institution as, say, in the work of Cindy Sherman or Sarah Tuft. In a recent video, _Don't Make Me Up_ (1986),^38^ Tuft seeks to reframe commercial images of women's bodies variously eating, exercising, courting, etc. by overlaying them with critical comments (e.g., "I just won't buy this pack of lies") and by juxtaposing them with images that give a critical twist to the prescription of thinness, such as photographs of emaciated concentration camp prisoners. The images succeed each other rapidly to the beat of a rap song, a vehicle which should have helped give the video a more contestatory tone. However, due to the blandness of the voice (this is no Public Enemy) and the too rapid succession of images (which does not leave enough time to register that some of the images run counter to commercial idealizations), the video does not succeed in raising the consciousness of those who aren't already convinced. Even the convinced tend to enjoy it for its display of "idealized" bodies and its danceable rhythm. The overall effect is the very opposite of its punch line: "I must get free of the messages being fed to me." With a better sound track, it would not seem out of place on MTV. [25] David Cronenberg's _Videodrome_ (1983) also flirts with the possibility of resistance to the implosion of reality into media imagery. But the video images which the hero/victim Max Renn consumes end up consuming him, absorbing him into the image world of video. As head of a small TV station in search for seductive programming, he views a pirated snuff movie which, unbeknownst to him, inoculates him with electronic frequencies that produce a brain tumor that takes control of body and mind. A vagina-like VCR slot opens up in Max's abdomen in which video cassettes with behavioral programming are inserted by the agents of Videodrome, a transnational corporation engaged in a conspiracy to take control of North America in order to counter the debilitating effects of liberal ways of life. Through the video-mediated intervention of Professor Brian Oblivion, a thinly disguised combination of McLuhan and Baudrillard, Max turns the weapon of his "new flesh" against Videodrome. The film ends with Max killing off his old flesh and fusing with the "new flesh" of the video monitor, whose screen stretches out like a pregnant belly. Professor Oblivion's daughter and assistant Bianca tells Max that he has "become the video word made flesh." Mysticism and abjection thus collapse onto the flesh of mediation. [26] Despite the evident retaliation which the protagonist carries out, _Videodrome_ is less about resistance or rearticulation of society than a Baudrillardian celebration of the apocalyptic collapse--or implosion--onto the surface of the image. This implosion, however, does not collapse the conventions of capitalist, patriarchal culture. The hero is the proverbial white middle class male, female figures are portrayed as the usual stereotypes (whore or primal medium-mother), there is no solidary consciousness on the part of the very few racial minorities or otherwise marginal characters, like the homeless man whose begging is facilitated by the "dancing monkey" of a TV monitor on a leash. The closest to a political intervention is Professor Oblivion's video version of a soup kitchen: The Cathode Ray Mission, where patrons are given a diet of TV frequencies rather than food. They are being prepped, it is suggested, for taking on the "new flesh" of electronic mediation. [27] E. Ann Kaplan makes a half-hearted attempt to argue for some "progressive" content in _Videodrome_.^39^ It is not, for example, typical of mainstream media in presenting the abject in the form of a male body. Secondly, the body is made androgynous by the vagina-like slot that opens up in Max's belly and the placenta-like covered handgun that he sticks in and out of the slot. As a feminist, Kaplan interprets "postmodern discourse of this kind" as an implicit critique of the "horror of technology that deforms all bodies and blurs their gender distinction."^40^ I am not convinced of the contribution to feminism, however, of the positive conclusions which Kaplan draws from the androgynizing blurring of distinctions effected by _Videodrome_, rock videos and other forms of mass culture: Many rock videos have been seen as postmodern insofar as they abandon the usual binary oppositions on which dominant culture depends. That is, videos are said to forsake the usual oppositions between high and low culture; between masculine and feminine; between established literary and filmic genres; between past, present and future; between the private and the public sphere; between verbal and visual hierarchies; between realism and anti-realism, etc. This has important implications for the question of narrative as feminists have been theorizing it, in that these strategies violate the paradigm pitting a classical narrative against an avant-garde anti- narrative, the one supposedly embodying complicit, the other subversive, ideologies. The rock video reveals the error in trying to align an aesthetic strategy with any particular ideology, since all kinds of positions emerge from an astounding mixture of narrative/anti-narrative/non-narrative devices.^41^ [28] The hybridity, ambiguity and lack of a "fixed identity" which Kaplan and cultural historians of video like Roy Armes attribute to the medium,^42^ are also terms that Kristeva has used to describe the abject. They both are about "the breaking down of a world that has erased its borders."^43^ In this sense, Cronenberg's _Videodrome_ is not so much a metaphor or allegory of the abject but rather the cinematic demonstration that experience is the consumption of media, that the body of mediation is the body of the real ("whatever appears on the television screen emerges as raw experience for those who watch it," says Professor Oblivion). If the reality of mediation in _Videodrome_ is its embodiment in "uncontrollable flesh," for Kristeva the blurring of the corporeal limits established by food, waste, and signs of sexual differentiation produces "uncontrollable materiality." In both cases there is an avowal of the death drive ("To become the new flesh [of mediation] first you have to kill off the old [demarcated] flesh," Bianca says to Max) and a disruption of identity ("I don't know where I am now. I'm having trouble finding my way around," says Max). [29] This dissolution of identity, furthermore, takes place for Kristeva in relation to the mother's body, the "place of a splitting," "a threshold where `nature' confronts `culture'."^44^ In _Videodrome_, Max's dissolution (which is concomitant to the vaginal stigmata that opens up in his belly) and his transformation into the "new flesh" take place in the medium of video, a body on which viewers "gorge themselves" and with which Max fuses in an inverse birth (i.e., when he sticks his head into the "pregnant" TV monitor). In fact, both maternal body and mediation come together in Kristeva's positing of the mother as the agency that maps or formats the body and readies it for the mediation that is language. [Maternal authority] shapes the body into a %territory% having areas, orifices, points and lines, surfaces and hollows, where the archaic power of mastery and neglect, of the differentiation of proper-clean and improper- dirty, possible and impossible, is impressed and exerted. It is a `binary logic,' a primal mapping of the body that I call semiotic to say that, while being the precondition of language, it is dependent upon meaning, but in a way that is not that of *linguistic* signs nor of the *symbolic* order they found.^45^ [30] Can we call this experience a transcendence? And what does it achieve? If we consider mysticism, we readily see, as in Saint Teresa's writings, that transcendence is experienced as a freedom which empowers the subject through infinite expansion: When a soul sets out upon this earth, He does not reveal Himself to it, lest it should feel dismayed at seeing that its littleness can contain such a greatness; but gradually He enlarges it to the extent requisite for what He has set within it. It is for this reason that I say He has perfect freedom, since He has power to make the whole of this palace great.^46^ But the mystic's experience is not totally determined by a God from the outside. Self-mastery through prayer and meditation is the precondition for fashioning a space without which the divinity could have no presentation. Perhaps Saint Teresa's best known claim for the constitutive capacity of the mystic is the metaphor of the silkworm in _The Interior Castle_. Through speech-prayer (_oracion_), the nuns spin their interior dwellings, like the silkworm its cocoon. In language that recalls Heidegger's, Saint Teresa describes these dwellings as the resting place of the nuns, the space of their death. It is also the space of the Godhead, the "new [mystic] flesh." Saint Teresa would seem to be on the verge of heresy here for she claims that it is the nuns who can place or withdraw God at will since it is they who "fabricate the dwelling which is God so that they might live/die in it.^47^ "[The Lord] becomes subject to us and is pleased to let you be the mistress and to conform to your will."^48^ [31] I have brought up the case of Saint Teresa because, as in _Videodrome_, transcendence takes the form of the subject embodying the medium. For both the mystic (Saint Teresa) and the subject of the "new flesh" (Max Renn) phenomenality is overcome not by reaching beyond it but by collapsing what would otherwise be the "supersensible idea" of the sublime onto appearance or image itself. The "new flesh" is the collapse of idea and body as medium, a collapse which, in Saint Teresa's words, provides "free[dom] from earthly things...and master[y] of all the elements and of the whole world."^49^ In Saint Teresa's case it is not too difficult to understand how the dialectic of freedom and mastery enabled this marginal and subaltern person (woman, "new Christian," eccentric) to negotiate a measure of power in a hierarchical and patriarchal society overseen by the all-pervasive scrutiny of the Inquisition: You will not be surprised, then, sisters, at the way I have insisted in this book that you should strive to obtain this freedom. Is it not a funny thing that a poor little nun of St. Joseph's should attain mastery over the whole earth and all the elements?^50^ The influence of St. Catherine of Siena over popes and monarchs is also well known. Through radical fasting both of these saints brought their bodies to extreme states of abjection that resulted in death. But abjection gave them a power over and above representation that the authorities of the Inquisition felt obliged to recognize and to channel in ways that did not topple the institution, for both saints were also reformers. [32] Can the same be said for either Max Renn or the anorectics of today? What is their power, if any? Can they, like the mystics, transform their abjection into transformative power? I think not. The problem is that the thematics of abject rebellion have been conceived in relation to high art. Kristeva's examples--Dostoyevsky, Lautreamont, Proust, Artaud, Kafka, Celine--are not easily transferred to the mass mediated reality of today, say Roseanne Barr. Why is that? [33] In the first place, Kristeva's privileged abjects are all (male) avant-gardists and as we know the lynchpin of the avant-garde was to transform life by recourse to an aesthetic modality that had its %raison d'etre% in bourgeois modernity. Secondly, since aesthetics is thoroughly commodified as mass culture absorbs it, it can hardly be the means for a transformation of life in the service of emancipation. To collapse idea and body onto medium, then, implies a commodification which is not sufficiently thematized in _Videodrome_. Can the "new flesh" really be other than commodified flesh? The references to simulated foods in an earlier section of this essay only reinforce the idea that mass mediated simulation is in fact transforming us all into commodified media. The rebellion of the anorectic counters this but only at the cost of dysfunction or death, that is, disembodiment. [34] Is there, then, any other politics of representation that can prove more successful? One attempt is the acceptance of the premise that we too are simulations but that we can rearticulate the way we have been constituted. This takes at least two forms: one which continues to accept that an autonomous aesthetics can have an impact on the culture. For example the work of Cindy Sherman or the Sarah Tuft's video _Don't Make Me Up_. Ultimately, I think these are failed attempts not because they work with commodified images but rather because they still accept the confines of aesthetic institutionalization. On the other hand, the aesthetic practices involved in identity formation among ethnic groups and certain social movements like gays and lesbians do not distinguish between the market, the street, the university and the gallery. The work of such groups as ACT-UP and Guerrilla Girls as well as many other groups working in collaboration with particular constituencies stake out new public spaces for re-embodying media and struggle within and against the dominant media to reconfigure the institutional arrangements of our society. New "safe-sex" videos, for example, attempt to re-eroticize body in an age increasingly defined by a new puritan fundamentalism (which includes the anti- abortion movement, reinforced homophobia, and the War on Drugs). [35] It is not enough, in the face of this offensive, to reshuffle representations. If this were all to contemporary cultural politics, Baudrillard would indeed be correct in understanding any practice as the body "digest[ing] space in its own appearance."^51^ As regards the consumption of food, the age of the counterculture, which saw the emergence of the new social movements, also spawned contestatory movements like Fat Liberation and the politically motivated vegetarianism of _Diet for a Small Planet_.^52^ Warren Belasco's history of the Food Revolution in the past two and a half decades recognizes that the powerful food industry ultimately won, in part because of the counterculture's too diffuse means of implementing its utopian visions. As an individualistic politics, it gave way to its own commodification and presented no unified front against the social causes of obesity in the U.S. and exploitation of agricultural workers in the third world. A contestatory politics of food production and consumption would have to articulate more directly with other social movements and to take into account the ways in which myriad factors intersect in the constitution of subjectivity and identity. This means also taking into consideration ethical as well as aesthetic questions, even the experience of transcendence as I have been describing it here. [36] There are signs, however, that a coalitional politics is possible. An example is the Institute for Food and Development Policy, which Frances Moore Lappe founded with the profits from her countercultural _Diet for a Small Planet_. The most recent direction of the institute is to encourage the formation of new social values that, on the one hand, contest the conservative rapaciousness in industry and its attack on civil rights and, on the other, the redefinition of the individual, grounding his/her sense of value not in the isolated person, as proclaimed by Liberal ideology but, rather in the entirety of society. In _Rediscovering America's Values_, Lappe argues that the privatization of values in the Reagan 80s ("fidelity, chastity, saying no to drugs") have to be re-publicized.^53^ This entails examining how they have become embodied in us, what social and aesthetic practices have enabled us to become inured to widespread hunger and environmental devastation throughout the world. Lappe's strategy for recreating public values is of a piece with current progressive agendas: new ways of eroticizing, new ways of articulating needs in pursuit of recognition, valuation, and empowerment. In an age of simulation, these are worthy transformations. Perhaps if the will to transcendence were articulated along these lines, we would be able to find more socially responsible and convincing values than those advocated by the Right and by Liberals. The aesthetics accompanying current analyses of eating disorders tend to celebrate the individual body, thus not posing any challenge to the Right or to Liberalism. We need an aesthetics that instills the values of the social body. _______________________________________________________ NOTES 1. Jean-Paul Sartre, _Being and Nothingness_ (New York: Washington Square Press, 1966). 2. Jean-Pierre Vernant, "At Man's Table: Hesiod's Foundation Myth of Sacrifice," in Marcel Detienne and Jean-Pierre Vernant, _The Cuisine of Sacrifice among the Greeks_, trans. Paula Wissing (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989), 51. 3. Saint Teresa of Avila, _The Life of Saint Teresa of Avila By Herself_ (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1957), 190. 4. Saint Teresa of Avila, _Way of Perfection_, tr. E. Allison Peers (Garden City, NY: Image Books/Doubleday, 1964), 137. 5. Julia Kristeva, "Stabat Mater," in _The Female Body in Western Culture_, ed. Susan Rubin Suleiman (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1986), 99-118. 6. Luce Irigaray, _Speculum of the Other Woman_, trans. Gillian C. Gill (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1985), 191. 7. "It is easy to learn how to interpret dreams, to extract from the patient's associations his [sic] unconscious thoughts and memories, and to practise similar explanatory arts: for these the patient himself [sic] will always provide the text." Sigmund Freud, _Dora: An Analysis of a Case of Hysteria_ (New York: Collier, 1963), 138. Freud goes on to observe that the difficult part of interpretation is taking into account unavoidable transferences, "new editions" or replays of fantasies in which the analyst stands in for prior actors. This phenomenon must also be taken into consideration in the very production of the subaltern's text. In the mystic's case, an analysis of the role of confessors and inquisitors is crucial. The role of the mystic and the hysteric should also be considered transferentially in the production of current theories of gendered discourse or behavior (such as eating disorders). 8. Recognition of endocrinological and biomedical factors in the etiology of eating disorders does not diminish the relevance of an approach that focuses on the social interpretation and evaluation of thinness and obesity. Moreover, it is mistaken, in my view, to take biomedical factors as _real_ and social factors as epiphenomenal. On the contrary, the social may work in tandem with the biomedical in a synergistic way. In any case, how one interprets the relative importance of these factors depends on the models of biology, society and disease that frame one's discourse. This essay is part of a more general attempt on my part to discern the workings of the aesthetic as it interfaces bodily sensation and social valuation. 9. Sohnya Sayres, "Glory mongering: food and the agon of excess," _Social Text_, 16 (Winter 1986-87): 94. 10. Jean Baudrillard, "The Obese," in _Fatal Strategies_, trans. Philip Beitchman and W.G.J. Niesluchowski (New York: Semiotext(e)/Pluto, 1990), p. 27. 11. "The Obese," 34. 12. "The Obese," 27. 13. For an account of the "body as temple/machine/holistic organism/etc." cognitive schemas which underwrite these different accounts for disease, see Mark Johnson, _The Body in the Mind. The Bodily Basis of Meaning, Imagination and Reason_ (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987), 126-36. 14. Jean Baudrillard, "The Anorectic Ruins," in Jean Baudrillard, et al., _Looking Back at the End of the World_, eds. Dietmar Kamper and Christoph Wolf, trans. David Antal (New York: Semiotext(e) Foreign Agents Series, 1989), 39. 15. Johnson, _The Body in the Mind_. 16. Cf. Lena Williams, "Free Choice: When Too Much Is Too Much," _The New York Times_ (2/14/90): C1, C10. 17. For a recent account of the radical potential and eventual cooptation of the "gastronomic counterculture," see Warren Belasco, _Appetite for Change: How the Counterculture Took On the Food Industry, 1966-1988_ (New York: Pantheon, 1989). 18. Octavio Paz, "Eroticism and Gastrosophy," _Daedalus_, 101, 4 (1972): 81. 19. Dena Kleiman, "Fast Food? It Just Isn't Fast Enough Anymore," _The New York Times_ (12/6/89): A1, C12. 20. The September 1989 Gallup poll is cited in Kleiman, C12. 21. Kleiman, C12. 22. Denise Webb, "Eating Well," _The New York Times_ (2/14/90): C8. 23. "The Obese," 35. 24. Dr. DeHavenon, director of a private research committee on welfare benefits stated that the "basic welfare grant in New York had gone up only 28 percent since 1969, while prices have increased 180 percent, and that cutbacks in the foodstamp program have contributed to the problem." Richard Severo, "East Harlem Study Shows Hunger Worsens," _The New York Times_ (6/3/84): 46. 25. The literature on transnational control of agribusiness and destruction and contamination of resources is voluminous. It includes such books and essays as: Joseph N. Beldon, et al. _Dirt Rich, Dirt Poor. America's Food and Farm Crisis_ (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1986); James Danaher, "U.S. Food Power in the 1990s," _Race & Class_, 30, 3 (1989); Susan George, _How the Other Half Dies. The Real Reasons for World Hunger_ (Washington, DC: Institute for Policy Studies, 1977); Frances Moore Lappe and Joseph Collins, _World Hunger. Ten Myths_ (San Francisco: Food First, 1982); James O'Connor, "Uneven and Combined Development and Ecological Crisis: A Theoretical Introduction," _Race & Class_, 30, 3 (1989); N. Shanmugaratnam, "Development and Environment: A View From the South," _Race & Class_, 30, 3 (1989); Jill Torrie, _Banking on Poverty: The Impact of the IMF and World Bank_ (San Francisco: Food First, 1986). 26. Kim Chernin, _The Obsession. Reflections on the Tyranny of Slenderness_ (New York: Harper and Row, 1981). 27. Susie Orbach, _Hunger Strike: The Anorectic's Struggle as a Metaphor for our Age_ (New York: Norton, 1987). 28. "The Obese," 31. 29. Fredric Jameson, "Postmodernism, or The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism," _New Left Review_, 146 (July-August 1984): 77. 30. Susan Bordo, "Reading the Slender Body," in _Women, Science, and the Body Politic: Discourses and Representations_, eds. Mary Jacobus, Evelyn Fox Keller, and Sally Shuttleworth (New York: Methuen, 1989), 88. 31. Cf. Jean Baudrillard, _The Ecstasy of Communication_ (New York: Semiotexte, 1988). 32. Chernin, _The Obsession_, 45-55. 33. "Remaking the self" is part of the contemporary politics of representation, which is often understood in two different ways: as an expression of the collective identity of diverse social movements (feminists, gays and lesbians, racial and ethnic minorities, workers, and so on) or as the expression, in the language of liberal democracy, of *interests*. The difference is important because the latter understanding of representation does not take into consideration the ways in which particular identity factors traverse other collective identities. There is no general, uncontested *interest* for a particular group because it is not monolithic; certainly the participation of lesbians within AIDS activist groups like ACT UP, or the objections of women of color to "general" feminist interests bears this out. The politics of this "transversal" critique of interests is an ongoing will to *transform the institutions* that fix particular interests in place. Jane Jensen ("Representations of Difference: The Varieties of French Feminism," _New Left Review_, 180 (March/April 1990), 127-60) lays out this theoretical perspective and applies it in an historical analysis of French Feminism. This is also the direction that Frances Moore Lappe takes in her recent work (see below). 34. Juan Flores and George Yudice, "Living Borders/Buscando America. Languages of Latino Self- Formation," _Social Text_, 24 (1990). 35. Julia Kristeva, _Powers of Horror. An Essay on Abjection_ (New York: Columbia University Press, 1982), 100. 36. See Mary Douglas, _Purity and Danger. An Analysis of Concepts of Pollution and Taboo_ (London/Boston/Henley: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1969), 121. See also Kristeva, 69. 37. Baudrillard, _The Ecstasy of Communication_, 75. 38. This video was included in "Unacceptable Appetites," a video program at Artists Space (2/25- 4/2/88) curated by Micki McGee. McGee's catalogue essay is an invaluable resource for the interpretation of interrelations of images of food and eating, feminine identity and the dialectic of control and self-determination. 39. E. Ann Kaplan, "Feminism/Oedipus/Postmodern- ism: The Case of MTV," in _Postmodernism and its Discontents. Theories, Practices_, ed. E. Ann Kaplan (London/New York: Verso, 1988). 40. Kaplan, 40. 41. Kaplan, 36. 42. "[It] is a form which is both fascinating and self-contradictory: distributed in video format but shot on film, free-wheeling yet constrained by its advertising function, visually innovative yet subordinated to its sound track, an individual artefact which is parasitic on a separate and commercially more important object (the record or the cassette), a part of the distinctive youth culture that needs to be played through the equipment forming the focus of family life. Despite--or perhaps because of--these contradictions, the pop video points to the new potential of video as a medium in its own right." Roy Armes, _On Video_ (London/New York: Routledge, 1988), 158. 43. Kristeva, 4. 44. Julia Kristeva, "Motherhood According to Giovanni Bellini," in _Desire in Language. A Semiotic Approach to Literature and Art_ (New York: Columbia University Press, 1980), 238. 45. Kristeva, _Powers of Horror_, 72. 46. Saint Teresa of Avila, _Way of Perfection_, 189. 47. "Que Su Majestad mesmo sea nuestra morada, como lo es en esta oracion de union, labrandola nosotras! Parece que quiero decir que podemos quitar y poner en Dios, pues digo que El es la morada, y la podemos nosotras fabricar para meternos en ella." _Las moradas_ (_The Interior Castle of the Dwellings of the Soul_) (Madrid: Espasa-Calpe, Col. Austral, 1964), 72. 48. _The Way of Perfection_, 175. 49. _The Way of Perfection_, 136-37. 50. _The Way of Perfection_, 137. 51. "The Obese," 27. 52. Cf. "Judy Freespirit and Aldebaran, "Fat Liberation Manifesto," _Rough Times_ (formerly _The Radical Therapist_), 4, 2 (March-April-May 1974); Aldebaran, "Fat Liberation--a Luxury?" _State and Mind_, 5 (June-July 1977): 34-38; Alan Dolit, _Fat Liberation_ (Millbrae, CA: 1975); Frances Moore Lappe, _Diet for a Small Planet_ (New York: Ballantine Books, 1975). 53. Frances Moore Lappe, _Rediscovering America's Values_ (New York: Ballantine, 1989). The quote is from an interview with the author: Diana Ketcham, "Author Lappe's plan for planet: Back to basics," _The Tribune Calendar_ (5/28/89). 30-Sep-90 23:40:04-GMT,35641;000000000000 Received: from aramis.rutgers.edu by klinzhai.rutgers.edu (5.59/SMI4.0/RU1.4/3.08) id AA26448; Sun, 30 Sep 90 19:40:01 EDT Received: by aramis.rutgers.edu (5.59/SMI4.0/RU1.4/3.08) id AA08366; Sun, 30 Sep 90 19:39:53 EDT Resent-Message-Id: <9009302339.AA08366@aramis.rutgers.edu> Received: from ncsuvm.ncsu.edu by aramis.rutgers.edu (5.59/SMI4.0/RU1.4/3.08) id AA18538; Sun, 30 Sep 90 05:30:44 EDT Message-Id: <9009300930.AA18538@aramis.rutgers.edu> Received: from ncsuvm.ncsu.edu by ncsuvm.ncsu.edu (IBM VM SMTP R1.2.2MX) with BSMTP id 7829; Sun, 30 Sep 90 05:29:27 EDT Received: from NCSUVM.BITNET by ncsuvm.ncsu.edu (Mailer R2.07) with BSMTP id 7728; Sun, 30 Sep 90 05:19:28 EDT Date: Sun, 30 Sep 90 05:06:18 EDT Reply-To: " Editors" Sender: "" From: " Editors" Subject: ACKER 990 To: Multiple recipients of list PMC-LIST Resent-To: mcgrew@darkstar.rutgers.edu Resent-Date: Sun, 30 Sep 90 19:39:52 EDT Resent-From: Charles Mcgrew DEAD DOLL HUMILITY by KATHY ACKER Copyright (c) 1990 by Kathy Acker, all rights reserved. IN ANY SOCIETY BASED ON CLASS, HUMILIATION IS A POLITICAL REALITY. HUMILIATION IS ONE METHOD BY WHICH POLITICAL POWER IS TRANSFORMED INTO SOCIAL OR PERSONAL RELATIONSHIPS. THE PERSONAL INTERIORIZATION OF THE PRACTICE OF HUMILIATION IS CALLED _HUMILITY_. CAPITOL IS AN ARTIST WHO MAKES DOLLS. MAKES, DAMAGES, TRANSFORMS, SMASHES. ONE OF HER DOLLS IS A WRITER DOLL. THE WRITER DOLL ISN'T VERY LARGE AND IS ALL HAIR, HORSE MANE HAIR, RAT FUR, DIRTY HUMAN HAIR, PUSSY. ONE NIGHT CAPITOL GAVE THE FOLLOWING SCENARIO TO HER WRITER DOLL: As a child in sixth grade in a North American school, won first prize in a poetry contest. In late teens and early twenties, entered New York City poetry world. Prominent Black Mountain poets, mainly male, taught or attempted to teach her that a writer becomes a writer when and only when he finds his own voice. CAPITOL DIDN'T MAKE ANY AVANT-GARDE POET DOLLS. Since wanted to be a writer, tried hard to find her own voice. Couldn't. But still loved to write. Loved to play with language. Language was material like clay or paint. Loved to play with verbal material, build up slums and mansions, demolish banks and half-rotten buildings, even buildings which she herself had constructed, into never-before-seen, even unseeable jewels. To her, every word wasn't only material in itself, but also sent out like beacons, other words. _Blue_ sent out _heaven_ and _The Virgin_. Material is rich. I didn't create language, writer thought. Later she would think about ownership and copyright. I'm constantly being given language. Since this language- world is rich and always changing, flowing, when I write, I enter a world which has complex relations and is, perhaps, illimitable. This world both represents and is human history, public memories and private memories turned public, the records and actualizations of human intentions. This world is more than life and death, for here life and death conjoin. I can't make language, but in this world, I can play and be played. So where is 'my voice'? Wanted to be a writer. Since couldn't find 'her voice', decided she'd first have to learn what a Black Mountain poet meant by 'his voice'. What did he do when he wrote? A writer who had found his own voice presented a viewpoint. Created meaning. The writer took a certain amount of language, verbal material, forced that language to stop radiating in multiple, even unnumerable directions, to radiate in only one direction so there could be his meaning. The writer's voice wasn't exactly this meaning. The writer's voice was a process, how he had forced the language to obey him, his will. The writer's voice is the voice of the writer-as-God. Writer thought, Don't want to be God; have never wanted to be God. All these male poets want to be the top poet, as if, since they can't be a dictator in the political realm, can be dictator of this world. Want to play. Be left alone to play. Want to be a sailor who journeys at every edge and even into the unknown. See strange sights, see. If I can't keep on seeing wonders, I'm in prison. Claustrophobia's sister to my worst nightmare: lobotomy, the total loss of perceptual power, of seeing new. If had to force language to be uni-directional, I'd be helping my own prison to be constructed. There are enough prisons outside, outside language. Decided, no. Decided that to find her own voice would be negotiating against her joy. That's what the culture seemed to be trying to tell her to do. Wanted only to write. Was writing. Would keep on writing without finding 'her own voice'. To hell with the Black Mountain poets even though they had taught her a lot. Decided that since what she wanted to do was just to write, not to find her own voice, could and would write by using anyone's voice, anyone's text, whatever materials she wanted to use. Had a dream while waking that was running with animals. Wild horses, leopards, red fox, kangaroos, mountain lions, wild dogs. Running over rolling hills. Was able to keep up with the animals and they accepted her. Wildness was writing and writing was wildness. Decision not to find this own voice but to use and be other, multiple, even innumerable, voices led to two other decisions. There were two kinds of writing in her culture: good literature and schlock. Novels which won literary prizes were good literature; science fiction and horror novels, pornography were schlock. Good literature concerned important issues, had a high moral content, and, most important, was written according to well- established rules of taste, elegance, and conservatism. Schlock's content was sex horror violence and other aspects of human existence abhorrent to all but the lowest of the low, the socially and morally unacceptable. This trash was made as quickly as possible, either with no regard for the regulations of politeness or else with regard to the crudest, most vulgar techniques possible. Well-educated, intelligent, and concerned people read good literature. Perhaps because the masses were gaining political therefore economic and social control, not only of literary production, good literature was read by an elite diminishing in size and cultural strength. Decided to use or to write both good literature and schlock. To mix them up in terms of content and formally, offended everyone. Writing in which all kinds of writing mingled seemed, not immoral, but amoral, even to the masses. Played in every playground she found; no one can do that in a class or hierarchichal society. (In literature classes in university, had learned that anyone can say or write anything about anything if he or she does so cleverly enough. That cleverness, one of the formal rules of good literature, can be a method of social and political manipulation. Decided to use language stupidly.) In order to use and be other voices as stupidly as possible, decided to copy down simply other texts. Copy them down while, maybe, mashing them up because wasn't going to stop playing in any playground. Because loved wildness. Having fun with texts is having fun with everything and everyone. Since didn't have one point of view or centralized perspective, was free to find out how texts she used and was worked. In their contexts which were (parts of) culture. Liked best of all mushing up texts. Began constructing her first story by placing mashed-up texts by and about Henry Kissinger next to 'True Romance' texts. What was the true romance of America? Changed these 'True Romance' texts only by heightening the sexual crudity of their style. Into this mush, placed four pages out of Harold Robbins', one of her heroes', newest hottest bestsellers. Had first made Jacqueline Onassis the star of Robbins' text. Twenty years later, a feminist publishing house republished the last third of the novel in which this mash occurred. CAPITOL MADE A FEMINIST PUBLISHER DOLL EVEN THOUGH, BECAUSE SHE WASN'T STUPID, SHE KNEW THAT THE FEMINIST PUBLISHING HOUSE WAS ACTUALLY A LOT OF DOLLS. THE FEMINIST PUBLISHER DOLL WAS A BEAUTIFUL WOMAN IN A ST. LAURENT DRESS. CAPITOL, PERHAPS OUT OF PERVERSITY, REFRAINED FROM USING HER USUAL CHEWED UP CHEWING GUM, HALF-DRIED FLECKS OF NAIL POLISH, AND BITS OF HER OWN BODY THAT HAD SOMEHOW FALLEN AWAY. Republished the text containing the Harold Robbins' mush next to a text she had written only seventeen years ago. In this second text, the only one had ever written without glopping up hacking into and rewriting other texts (appropriating), had tried to destroy literature or what she as a writer was supposed to write by making characters and a story that were so stupid as to be almost non-existent. Ostensibly, the second text was a porn book. The pornography was almost as stupid as the story. The female character had her own name. Thought just after had finished writing this, here is a conventional novel. Perhaps, here is 'my voice'. Now I'll never again have to make up a bourgeois novel. Didn't. The feminist publisher informed her that this second text was her most important because here she had written a treatise on female sexuality. Since didn't believe in arguing with people, wrote an introduction to both books in which stated that her only interest in writing was in copying down other people's texts. Didn't say liked messing them up because was trying to be polite. Like the English. Did say had no interest in sexuality or in any other content. CAPITOL MADE A DOLL WHO WAS A JOURNALIST. CAPITOL LOVED MAKING DOLLS WHO WERE JOURNALISTS. SOMETIMES SHE MADE THEM OUT OF THE NEWSPAPERS FOUND IN TRASHCANS ON THE STREETS. SHE KNEW THAT LOTS OF CATS INHABITED TRASH CANS. THE PAPERS SAID RATS CARRY DISEASES. SHE MADE THIS JOURNALIST OUT OF THE FINGERNAILS SHE OBTAINED BY HANGING AROUND THE TRASHCANS IN THE BACK LOTS OF LONDON HOSPITALS. HAD PENETRATED THESE BACK LOTS WITH THE HOPE OF MEETING MEAN OLDER MEN BIKERS. FOUND LOTS OF OTHER THINGS THERE. SINCE, TO MAKE THE JOURNALIST, SHE MOLDED THE FINGERNAILS TOGETHER WITH SUPER GLUE AND, BEING A SLOB, LOTS OF OTHER THINGS STUCK TO THIS SUPER GLUE, THE JOURNALIST DIDN'T LOOK ANYTHING LIKE A HUMAN BEING. A journalist who worked on a trade publishing magazine, so the story went, no one could remember whose story, was informed by another woman in her office that there was a resemblance between a section of the writer's book and Harold Robbins' work. Most of the literati of the country in which the writer was currently living were upper-middle class and detested the writer and her writing. CAPITOL THOUGHT ABOUT MAKING A DOLL OF THIS COUNTRY, BUT DECIDED NOT TO. Journalist decided she had found a scoop. Phoned up the feminist publisher to enquire about plagiarism; perhaps feminist publisher said something wrong because then phoned up Harold Robbins' publisher. "Surely all art is the result of one's having been in danger, of having gone through an experience all the way to the end, where no one can go any further. The further one goes, the more private, the more personal, the more singular an experience becomes, and the thing one is making is finally, the necessary, irrepressible, and, as nearly as possible, definitive utterance of this singularity . . . Therein lies the enormous aid the work of art brings to the life of the one who must make it . . . "So we are most definitely called upon to test and try ourselves against the utmost, but probably we are also bound to keep silence regarding this utmost, to beware of sharing it, of parting with it in communication so long as we have not entered the work of art: for the utmost represents nothing other than that singularity in us which no one would or even should understand, and which must enter into the work as such . . . " Rilke to Cezanne. CAPITOL MADE A PUBLISHER LOOK LIKE SAM PECKINPAH. THOUGH SHE HAD NO IDEA WHAT SAM PECKINPAH LOOKED LIKE. HAD LOOKED LIKE? SHE TOOK A HOWDY DOODY DOLL AND AN ALFRED E. NEUMAN DOLL AND MASHED THEM TOGETHER, THEN MADE THIS CONGLOMERATE INTO AN AMERICAN OFFICER IN THE MEXICAN-AMERICAN WAR. ACTUALLY SEWED, SHE HATED SEWING, OR WHEN SHE BECAME TIRED OF SEWING, GLUED TOGETHER WITH HER OWN TWO HANDS, JUST AS THE EARLY AMERICAN PATRIOT WIVES USED TO DO FOR THEIR PATRIOT HUSBANDS, A FROGGED AND BRAIDED CAVALRY JACKET, STAINED WITH THE BLOOD FROM SOME FORMER OWNERS. THEN FASHIONED A STOVEPIPE HAT OUT OF ONE SHE HAD STOLEN FROM A BUM IN AN ECSTASY OF ART. THE HAT WAS A BIT BIG. FOR THE PUBLISHER. INSIDE A GOLD HEART, THERE SHOULD BE A PICTURE OF A WOMAN. SINCE CAPITOL DIDN'T HAVE A PICTURE OF A WOMAN, SHE PUT IN ONE OF HER MOTHER. SINCE SAM PECKINPAH OR HER PUBLISHER HAD SEEN TRAGEDY, AN ARROW HANGING OUT OF THE WHITE BREAST OF A SOLDIER NO OLDER THAN A CHILD, HORSES GONE MAD WALLEYED MOUTHS FROTHING AMID DUST THICKER THAN THE SMOKE OF GUNS. SHE MADE HIS FACE FULL OF FOLDS, AN EYEPATCH OVER ONE EYE. Harold Robbins' publisher phoned up the man who ran the company who owned the feminist publishing company. From now on, known as 'The Boss'. The Boss told Harold Robbins' publisher that they have a plagiarist in their midst. CAPITOL NO LONGER WANTED TO MAKE DOLLS. IN THE UNITED STATES, UPON SEEING THE WORK OF THE PHOTOGRAPHER ROBERT MAPPLETHORPE, SENATOR JESSE HELMS PROPOSED AN AMENDMENT TO THE FISCAL YEAR 1990 INTERIOR AND RELATED AGENCIES BILL FOR THE PURPOSE OF PROHIBITING "THE USE OF APPROPRIATED FUNDS FOR THE DISSEMINATION, PROMOTION, OR PRODUCTION OF OBSCENE OR INDECENT MATERIALS OR MATERIALS DENIGRATING A PARTICULAR RELIGION." THREE SPECIFIC CATEGORIES OF UNACCEPTABLE MATERIAL FOLLOWED: "(1) OBSCENE OR INDECENT MATERIALS, INCLUDING BUT NOT LIMITED TO DEPICTIONS OF SADOMASOCHISM [ALWAYS GET THAT ONE IN FIRST], HOMO-EROTICISM, THE EXPLOITATION OF CHILDREN, OR INDIVIDUALS ENGAGED IN SEX ACTS; OR (2) MATERIAL WHICH DENIGRATES THE OBJECTS OR BELIEFS OF THE ADHERENTS OF A PARTICULAR RELIGION OR NON-RELIGION; OR (3) MATERIAL WHICH DENIGRATES, DEBASES, OR REVILES A PERSON, GROUP, OR CLASS OF CITIZENS ON THE BASIS OF RACE, CREED, SEX, HANDICAP, AGE, OR NATIONAL ORIGIN." IN HONOR OF JESSE HELMS, CAPITOL MADE, AS PILLOWS, A CROSS AND A VAGINA. SO THE POOR COULD HAVE SOMEWHERE TO SLEEP. SINCE SHE NO LONGER HAD TO MAKE DOLLS OR ART, BECAUSE ART IS DEAD IN THIS CULTURE, SHE SLOPPED THE PILLOWS TOGETHER WITH DEAD FLIES, WHITE FLOUR MOISTENED BY THE BLOOD SHE DREW OUT OF HER SMALLEST FINGER WITH A PIN, AND OTHER TYPES OF GARBAGE. Disintegration. Feminist publisher then informed writer that the Boss and Harold Robbins' publisher had decided, due to her plagiarism, to withdraw the book from publication and to have her sign an apology to Harold Robbins which they had written. This apology would then be published in two major publishing magazines. Ordinarily impolite, told feminist publisher they could do what they wanted with their edition of her books but she wasn't going to apologize to anyone for anything, much less for twenty years of work. Didn't have to think to herself because every square inch of her knew. For freedom. Writing must be for and must be freedom. Feminist publisher replied that she knew writer was actually a nice sweet girl. Asked if should tell her agent or try talking directly to Harold Robbins. Feminist publisher replied she'd take care of everything. Writer shouldn't contact Harold Robbins because that would make everything worse. Would, the feminist publisher asked, the writer please compose a statement for the Boss why the writer used other texts when she wrote so that the Boss wouldn't believe that she was a plagiarist. CAPITOL MADE A DOLL WHO LOOKED EXACTLY LIKE HERSELF. IF YOU PRESSED A BUTTON ON ONE OF THE DOLL'S CUNT LIPS THE DOLL SAID, "I AM A GOOD GIRL AND DO EXACTLY AS I AM TOLD TO DO." Wrote: Nobody save buzzards. Lots of buzzards here. In the distance, lay flies and piles of shit. Herds of animals move against the skyline like black caravans in an unknown east. Sheeps and goats. Another place, a horse is lapping the water of a pool. Lavendar and grey trees behind this black water are leafless and spineless. As the day ends, the sun in the east flushes out pale lavendars and pinks, then turns blood red as it turns on itself, becoming a more definitive shape, the more definitive, the bloodier. Until it sits, totally unaware of the rest of the universe, waiting at the edge of a sky that doesn't yet know what colors it wants to be, a hawk waiting for the inevitable onset of human slaughter. The light is fleeing. Instead, sent a letter to feminist publisher in which said that she composed her texts out of 'real' conversations, anything written down, other texts, somewhat in the ways the Cubists had worked. (Not quite true. But thought this statement understandable.) Cited, as example, her use of 'True Confessions' stories. Such stories whose content seemed purely and narrowly sexual, composed simply for purposes of sexual titillation and economic profit, if deconstructed, viewed in terms of context and genre, became signs of political and social realities. So if the writer or critic (deconstructionist) didn't work with the actual language of these texts, the writer or critic wouldn't be able to uncover the political and social realities involved. For instance, both genre and the habitual nature of perception hide the violence of the content of many newspaper stories. To uncover this violence is to run the risk of being accused of loving violence or all kinds of pornography. (As if the writer gives a damn about what anyone considers risks.) Wrote, living art rather than dead art has some connection with passion. Deconstructions of newspaper stories become the living art in a culture that demands that any artistic representation of life be non-violent and non-sexual, misrepresent. To copy down, to appropriate, to deconstruct other texts is to break down those perceptual habits the culture doesn't want to be broken. Deconstruction demands not so much plagiarism as breaking into the copyright law. In the Harold Robbins' text which had used, a rich white woman walks into a disco, picks up a black boy, has sex with him. In the Robbins' text, this scene is soft-core porn, has as its purpose mild sexual titillation and pleasure. [When Robbins' book had been published years ago, the writer's mother had said that Robbins had used Jacqueline Onassis as the model for the rich white woman.] Wrote, had made apparent that bit of politics while amplifying the pulp quality of the style in order to see what would happen when the underlying presuppositions or meanings of Robbins' writing became clear. Robbins as emblematic of a certain part of American culture. What happened was that the sterility of that part of American culture revealed itself. The real pornography. Cliches, especially sexual cliches, are always signs of power or political relationships. BECAUSE SHE HAD JUST GOTTEN HER PERIOD, CAPITOL MADE A HUGE RED SATIN PILLOW CROSS THEN SMEARED HER BLOOD ALL OVER IT. Her editor at the feminist publisher said that the Boss had found her explanation "literary." Later would be informed that this was a legal, not a literary, matter. "HERE IT ALL STINKS," CAPITOL THOUGHT. "ART IS MAKING ACCORDING TO THE IMAGINATION. BUT HERE, BUYING AND SELLING ARE THE RULES; THE RULES OF COMMODITY HAVE DESTROYED THE IMAGINATION. HERE, THE ONLY ART ALLOWED IS MADE BY POST-CAPITALIST RULES; ART ISN'T MADE ACCORDING TO RULES." ANGER MAKES YOU WANT TO SUICIDE. Journalist who broke the 'Harold Robbins story' had been phoning and leaving messages on writer's answering machine for days. Had stopped answering her phone. By chance picked it up; journalist asked her if anything to say. "You mean about Harold Robbins?" Silence. "I've just given my publisher a statement. Perhaps you could read that." "Do you have anything to add to it?" As if she was a criminal. A few days later writer's agent over the phone informed writer what was happening was simply horrible. CAPITOL DIDN'T WANT TO MAKE ANY DOLLS. How could the writer be plagiarizing Harold Robbins? Writer didn't know. Agent told writer if writer had phoned her immediately, agent could have straightened out everything because she was good friends with Harold Robbins' publisher. But now it was too late. Writer asked agent if she could do anything. Agent answered that she'd phone Harold Robbins' publisher and that the worst that could happen is that she'd have to pay a nominal quotation rights fee. So a few days later was surprised when feminist publisher informed her that if she didn't sign the apology to Harold Robbins which they had written for her, feminist publishing company would go down a drain because Harold Robins or harold Robbins' publisher would slap a half-a-million [dollar? pound?] lawsuit on the feminist publishing house. Decided she had to take notice of this stupid affair, though her whole life wanted to notice only writing and sex. "WHAT IS IT" CAPITOL WROTE, "TO BE AN ARTIST? WHERE IS THE VALUE THAT WILL KEEP THIS LIFE IN HELL GOING?" For one of the first times in her life, was deeply scared. Was usually as wild as they come. Doing anything if it felt good. So when succumbed to fear, succumbed to reasonless, almost bottomless fear. Panicked only because she might be forced to apologize, not to Harold Robbins, that didn't matter, but to anyone for her writing, for what seemed to be her life. Book had already been withdrawn from print. Wasn't that enough? Panicked, phoned her agent without waiting for her agent to phone her. Agent asked writer if she knew how she stood legally. Writer replied that as far as knew Harold Robbins had made no written charge. Feminist publisher sometime in beginning had told her they had spoken to a solicitor who had said neither she nor they "had a leg to stand on." Since didn't know with what she was being charged, she didn't know what that meant. Agent replied, "Perhaps we should talk to a solicitor. Do you know a solicitor?" Knew the name of a tax solicitor. Since had no money, asked her American publisher what to do, if he knew a lawyer. WOULD MAKE NO MORE DOLLS. American publisher informed her couldn't ask anyone's advice until she knew the charges against her, saw them in writing. Asked the feminist publisher to send the charges against her and whatever else was in writing to her. Received two copies of the 'Harold Robbins' text she had written twenty years ago, one copy of the apology she was supposed to sign, and a letter from Harold Robbins' publisher to the head of the feminist publishing company. Letter said they were not seeking damages beyond withdrawal of the book from publication [which had already taken place] and the apology. Didn't know of what she was guilty. Later would receive a copy of the letter sent to her feminist publisher from the solicitor whom the feminist publisher and then her agent had consulted. Letter stated: According to the various documents and texts which the feminist publisher had supplied, the writer should apologize to Mr. Harold Robbins. First, because in her text she has used a substantial number of Mr. Robbins' words. Second, because she did not use any texts other than Mr. Robbins' so there could be no literary theory or praxis responsible for her plagiarism. Third, because the contract between the writer and the feminist publisher states that the writer had not infringed upon any existing copyright. When the writer wrote, not wrote back, to the solicitor that most of the novel in question had been appropriated from other texts, that most of these texts had been in the public domain, that the writers of texts not in the public domain were either writers of 'True Confessions' stories (anonymous) or writers who knew she had reworked their texts and felt honored, except for Mr. Robbins, that she had never misrepresented nor hidden her usages of other texts, her methods of composition, that there was already a body of literary criticism on her and others' methods of appropriation, and furthermore [this was to become the major point of contention], that she would not sign the apology because she could not since there was no assurance that all possible litigation and harassment would end with the signature of guilt, guilt which anyway she didn't feel: the solicitor did not reply. Not knowing of what she was guilty, feeling isolated, and pressured to finish her new novel, writer became paranoid. Would do anything to stop the pressure from the feminist publisher and simultaneously would never apologize for her work. Considered her American publisher her father. Told her that the 'Harold Robbins affair' was a joke, she should take the phone off the hook, go to Paris for a few days. Finish your book. That's what's important. WOULD MAKE NO MORE DOLLS. Paris is a beautiful city. In Paris decided that it's stupid to live in fear. Didn't yet know what to do about isolation. All that matters is work and work must be created in and can't be created in isolation. (Remembered a conversation she had had with her feminist publisher. Still trying to explain, writer said, in order to deconstruct, the deconstructionist needs to use the actual other texts. Editor had said she understood. For instance, she was sure, Peter Carey in _Oscar and Lucinda_ had used other people's writings in his dialogue, but he would never admit it. This writer did what every other writer did, but she is the only one who admits it. "It's not a matter of not being able to write," the writer replied. It's a matter of a certain theory which is also a literary theory. Theory and belief." Then shut up because knew that when you have to explain and explain, nothing is understood. Language is dead.) SINCE THERE WERE NO MORE DOLLS, CAPITOL STARTED WRITING LANGUAGE. Decided that it's stupid living in fear of being forced to be guilty without knowing why you're guilty and, more important, it's stupid caring about what has nothing to do with art. It doesn't really matter whether or not you sign the fucking apology. Over the phone asked the American publisher whether or not it mattered to her past work whether or not signed the apology. Answered that the sole matter was her work. Thought alike. Wanted to ensure that there was no more sloppiness in her work or life, that from now on all her actions served only her writing. Upon returning to England, consulted a friend who consulted a solicitor who was his friend about her case. This solicitor advised that since she wasn't guilty of plagiarism and since the law was unclear, grey, about whether or not she had breached Harold Robbins' copyright, it could be a legal precedent, he couldn't advise whether or not she should sign the apology. But must not sign unless, upon signing, received full and final settlement. Informed her agent that would sign if and only if received full and final settlement upon signing. Over the phone, feminist publisher asked her who had told her about full and final settlement. A literary solicitor. Could they, the feminist publishing house, have his name and his statement in writing? "This is my decision," writer said. "That's all you need to know." WROTE DOWN "PRAY FOR US THE DEAD," THE FIRST LINE IN THE FIRST POEM BY CHARLES OLSON SHE HAD EVER READ WHEN SHE WAS A TEENAGER. ALL THE DOLLS WERE DEAD. DEAD HAIR. WHEN SHE LOOKED UP THIS POEM, ITS FIRST LINE WAS, "WHAT DOES NOT CHANGE/ IS THE WILL TO CHANGE." WENT TO A NEARBY CEMETERY AND WITH STICK DOWN IN SAND WROTE THE WORDS "PRAY FOR US THE DEAD." THOUGHT, WHO IS DEAD? THE DEAD TREES? WHO IS DEAD? WE LIVE IN SERVICE OF THE SPIRIT. MADE MASS WITH TREES DEAD AND DIRT AND UNDERNEATH HUMANS AS DEAD OR LIVING AS ANY STONE OR WOOD. I WON'T BURY MY DEAD DOLLS, THOUGHT. I'LL STEP ON THEM AND MASH THEM UP. For two weeks didn't hear from either her agent or feminist publisher. Could return to finishing her novel. Thought that threats had died. In two weeks received a letter from her agent which read something like: On your express instructions that your publisher communicate to you through me, your publisher has informed me that they have communicated to Harold Robbins your decision that you will sign the apology which his publisher drew up only if you have his assurance that there will be no further harassment or litigation. Because you have requested such assurance, predictably, Harold Robbins is now requiring damages to be paid. Your publisher now intends to sign and publish the apology to Harold Robbins as soon as possible whether or not you sign it. In view of what I have discovered about the nature of your various telephone communications to me, please contact me only in writing from now on. Signature. Understood that she had lost. Lost more than a struggle about the appropriation of four pages, about the definition of _appropriation_. Lost her belief that there can be art in this culture. Lost spirit. All humans have to die, but they don't have to fail. Fail in all that matters. It turned out that the whole affair was nothing. CAPITOL REALIZED THAT SHE HAD FORGOTTEN TO BURY THE WRITER DOLL. SINCE THE SMELL OF DEATH STUNK, RETURNED TO THE CEMETERY TO BURY HER. SHE KICKED OVER A ROCK AND THREW THE DOLL INTO THE HOLE WHICH THE ROCK HAD MADE. CHANTED, "YOU'RE NOT SELLING ENOUGH BOOKS IN CALIFORNIA. YOU'D BETTER GO THERE IMMEDIATELY. TRY TO GET INTO READING IN ANY BENEFIT YOU CAN SO FIVE MORE BOOKS WILL BE SOLD. YOU HAVE BAGS UNDER YOUR EYES." CAPITOL THOUGHT, DEAD DOLL. SINCE CAPITOL WAS A ROMANTIC, SHE BELIEVED DEATH IS PREFERABLE TO A DEAD LIFE, A LIFE NOT LIVED ACCORDING TO THE DICTATES OF THE SPIRIT. SINCE SHE WAS THE ONE WHO HAD POWER IN THE DOLL- HUMAN RELATIONSHIP, HER DOLLS WERE ROMANTICS TOO. Toward the end of paranoia, had told her story to a friend who was secretary to a famous writer. Informed her that famous writer's first lawyer used to work with Harold Robbins' present lawyer. First lawyer was friends with her American publisher. Her American publisher asked the lawyer who was his friend to speak privately to Harold Robbins' lawyer. Later the lawyer told the American publisher that Harold Robbins' lawyer advised to let the matter die quietly. This lawyer himself advised that under no circumstances should the writer sign anything. It turned out that the whole affair was nothing. Despite these lawyer's advice, Harold Robbins' publisher and the feminist publisher kept pressing the writer to sign the apology and eventually, as everything becomes nothing, she had to. Knew that none of the above has anything to do with what matters, writing. Except for the failure of the spirit. THEY'RE ALL DEAD, CAPITOL THOUGHT. THEIR DOLLS' FLESH IS NOW BECOMING PART OF THE DIRT. CAPITOL THOUGHT, IS MATTER MOVING THROUGH FORMS DEAD OR ALIVE? CAPITOL THOUGHT, THEY CAN'T KILL THE SPIRIT. 30-Sep-90 23:40:11-GMT,58200;000000000000 Received: from aramis.rutgers.edu by klinzhai.rutgers.edu (5.59/SMI4.0/RU1.4/3.08) id AA26454; Sun, 30 Sep 90 19:40:06 EDT Received: by aramis.rutgers.edu (5.59/SMI4.0/RU1.4/3.08) id AA08375; Sun, 30 Sep 90 19:40:03 EDT Resent-Message-Id: <9009302340.AA08375@aramis.rutgers.edu> Received: from ncsuvm.ncsu.edu by aramis.rutgers.edu (5.59/SMI4.0/RU1.4/3.08) id AA18579; Sun, 30 Sep 90 05:36:24 EDT Message-Id: <9009300936.AA18579@aramis.rutgers.edu> Received: from ncsuvm.ncsu.edu by ncsuvm.ncsu.edu (IBM VM SMTP R1.2.2MX) with BSMTP id 7952; Sun, 30 Sep 90 05:33:15 EDT Received: from NCSUVM.BITNET by ncsuvm.ncsu.edu (Mailer R2.07) with BSMTP id 7769; Sun, 30 Sep 90 05:24:46 EDT Date: Sun, 30 Sep 90 05:07:24 EDT Reply-To: " Editors" Sender: "" From: " Editors" Subject: BEVERLEY 990 To: Multiple recipients of list PMC-LIST Resent-To: mcgrew@darkstar.rutgers.edu Resent-Date: Sun, 30 Sep 90 19:40:02 EDT Resent-From: Charles Mcgrew THE IDEOLOGY OF POSTMODERN MUSIC AND LEFT POLITICS by JOHN BEVERLEY University of Pittsburgh Copyright (c) 1989 by _Critical Quarterly_, all rights reserved. Reprinted by permission. ------------------------------------------------------ This article appeared initially in the British journal _Critical Quarterly_ 31.1 (Spring, 1989). I'm grateful to its editors for permission to reproduce it here, and in particular to Colin MacCabe for suggesting the idea in the first place. I've added a few minor corrections and updates. ------------------------------------------------------ for Rudy Van Gelder, friend of ears [1] Adorno directed some of his most acid remarks on musical sociology to the category of the "fan." For example: What is common to the jazz enthusiast of all countries, however, is the moment of compliance, in parodistic exaggeration. In this respect their play recalls the brutal seriousness of the masses of followers in totalitarian states, even though the difference between play and seriousness amounts to that between life and death (...) While the leaders in the European dictatorships of both shades raged against the decadence of jazz, the youth of the other countries has long since allowed itself to be electrified, as with marches, by the syncopated dance-steps, with bands which do not by accident stem from military music.^1^ One of the most important contributions of postmodernism has been its defense of an aesthetics of the _consumer_, rather than as in the case of romanticism and modernism an aesthetics of the producer, in turn linked to an individualist and phallocentric ego ideal. I should first of all make it clear then that I am writing here from the perspective of the "fan," the person who buys records and goes to concerts, not like Adorno from the perspective of the trained musician or composer. What I will be arguing, in part with Adorno, in part against him, is that music is coming to represent for the Left something like a "key sector." * * * * * * * * * [2] For Adorno, the development of modern music is a reflection of the decline of the bourgeoisie, whose most characteristic cultural medium on the other hand music is.^2^ Christa Burger recalls the essential image of the cultural in Adorno: that of Ulysses, who, tied to the mast of his ship, can listen to the song of the sirens while the slaves underneath work at the oars, cut off from the aesthetic experience which is reserved only for those in power.^3^ What is implied and critiqued at the same time in the image is the stance of the traditional intellectual or aesthete in the face of the processes of transformation of culture into a commodity--mass culture--and the consequent collapse of the distinction between high and low culture, a collapse which precisely defines the postmodern and which postmodernist ideology celebrates. In the postmodern mode, not only are Ulysses and his crew both listening to the siren song, they are singing along with it as in "Sing Along with Mitch" and perhaps marking the beat with their oars--one-two, one-two, one-two-three-four. * * * * * * * * [3] One variant of the ideology of postmodern music may be illustrated by the following remarks from an interview John Cage gave about his composition for electronic tape _Fontana Mix_ (1958): Q.--I feel that there is a sense of logic and cohesion in your indeterminate music. A.--This logic was not put there by me, but was the result of chance operations. The thought that it is logical grows up in you... I think that all those things that we associate with logic and our observance of relationships, those aspects of our mind are extremely simple in relation to what actually happens, so that when we use our perception of logic we minimize the actual nature of the thing we are experiencing. Q.--Your conception (of indeterminacy) leads you into a universe nobody has attempted to charter before. Do you find yourself in it as a lawmaker? A.--I am certainly not at the point of making laws. I am more like a hunter, or an inventor, than a lawmaker. Q.--Are you satisfied with the way your music is made public--that is, by the music publishers, record companies, radio stations, etc.? Do you have complaints? A.--I consider my music, once it has left my desk, to be what in Buddhism would be called a non- sentient being... If someone kicked me--not my music, but me--then I might complain. But if they kicked my music, or cut it out, or don't play it enough, or too much, or something like that, then who am I to complain?^4^ We might contrast this with one of the great epiphanies of literary modernism, the moment of the jazz song in Sartre's _Nausea_: (...)there is no melody, only notes, a myriad of tiny jolts. They know no rest, an inflexible order gives birth to them and destroys them without even giving them time to recuperate and exist for themselves. They race, they press forward, they strike me a sharp blow in passing and are obliterated. I would like to hold them back, but I know if I succeeded in stopping one it would remain between my fingers only as a raffish languishing sound. I must accept their death; I must even _will_ it: I know few impressions stronger or more harsh. I grow warm, I begin to feel happy. There is nothing extraordinary in this, it is a small happiness of Nausea: it spreads at the bottom of the viscous puddle, at the bottom of _our_ time-- the time of purple suspenders and broken chair seats; it is made of wide, soft instants, spreading at the edge, like an oil stain. No sooner than born, it is already old, it seems as though I have known it for twenty years (...) The last chord has died away. In the brief silence which follows I feel strongly that there it is, that _something has happened_. Silence. _Some of these days You'll miss me honey_ What has just happened is that the Nausea has disappeared. When the voice was heard in the silence, I felt my body harden and the Nausea vanish. Suddenly: it was almost unbearable to become so hard, so brilliant. At the same time the music was drawn out, dilated, swelled like a waterspout. It filled the room with its metallic transparency, crushing our miserable time against the walls. I am _in_ the music. Globes of fire turn in the mirrors; encircled by rings of smoke, veiling and unveiling the hard smile of light. My glass of beer has shrunk, it seems heaped up on the table, it looks dense and indispensable. I want to pick it up and feel the weight of it, I stretch out my hand... God! That is what has changed, my gestures. This movement of my arm has developed like a majestic theme, it has glided along the jazz song; I seemed to be dancing.^5^ * * * * * * * * [4] The passage from _Nausea_ illustrates Adorno's dictum that music is "the promise of reconciliation." This is what betrays its origins in those moments of ritual sacrifice and celebration in which the members of a human community are bonded or rebonded to their places within it. In _Nausea_ the jazz song prefigures Roquentin's eventual reconciliation with his own self and his decision to write what is in effect his dissertation, a drama of choice that will not be unfamiliar to readers of this journal. Even for an avant-gardist like Cage music is still--in the allusion to Buddhism--in some sense the sensuous form or "lived experience" of the religious.^6^ [5] Was it not the function of music in relation to the great feudal ideologies--Islam, Christianity, Buddhism, Hinduism, Shinto, Confucianism--to produce the sensation of the sublime and the eternal so as to constitute the image of the reward which awaited the faithful and obedient: the reward for submitting to exploitation or the reward for accepting the burden of exploiting? I am remembering as I write this Monteverdi's beautiful echo duet _Due Seraphim_--two angels--for the _Vespers of the Virgin Mary_ of 1610, whose especially intense sweetness is perhaps related to the fact that it was written in a moment of crisis of both feudalism and Catholicism. [6] Just before Monteverdi, the Italian Mannerists had proclaimed the formal autonomy of the art work from religious dogma. But if the increasing secularization of music in the European late Baroque and 18th century led on the one hand to the Jacobin utopianism of the _Ninth Symphony_, it produced on the other something like Kant's aesthetics of the sublime, that is a mysticism of the bourgeois ego. As Adorno was aware, we are still in modern music in a domain where, as in the relation of music and feudalism, aesthetic experience, repression and sublimation, and class privilege and self-legitimation converge.^7^ * * * * * * * * [7] Genovese has pointed out in the Afro-American slave spiritual something like a contrary articulation of the relation of music and the religious to the one I have been suggesting: the sense in which both the music and the words of the song keep alive culturally the image of an imminent redemption from slavery and oppression, a redemption which lies within human time and a "real" geography of slave and free states ("The river Jordan is muddy and wide / Gotta get across to the other side").^8^ Of the so-called Free Jazz movement of the 60s--Cecil Taylor, Ornette Coleman, Albert Ayler, late Coltrane, Archie Shepp, Sun Ra, etc.--the French critic Pierre Lere remarked in a passage quoted centrally by Herbert Marcuse in one of the key statements of 60s aesthetic radicalism: (...)the liberty of the musical form is only the aesthetic translation of the will to social liberation. Transcending the tonal framework of the theme, the musician finds himself in a position of freedom(...) The melodic line becomes the medium of communication between an initial order which is rejected and a final order which is hoped for. The frustrating possession of the one, joined with the liberating attainment of the other, establishes a rupture in between the Weft of harmony which gives way to an aesthetic of the cry (_esthetique du cri_). This cry, the characteristic resonant (_sonore_) element of "free music," born in an exasperated tension, announces the violent rupture with the established white order and translates the advancing (_promotrice_) violence of a new black order.^9^ * * * * * * * * [8] Music itself as ideology, as an ideological practice? What I have in mind is not at all the problem, common both to a Saussurian and a vulgar marxist musicology, of "how music expresses ideas." Jacques Attali has correctly observed that while music can be defined as noise given form according to a code, nevertheless it cannot be equated with a language. Music, though it has a precise operationality, never has stable reference to a semantic code of the linguistic type. It is a sort of language without meaning.^10^ [9] Could we think of music then as outside of ideology to the extent that it is non-verbal? (This, some will recall, was Della Volpe's move in his _Critique of Taste_.) One problem with poststructuralism in general and deconstruction in particular has been their tendency to see ideology as essentially bound up with language--the "Symbolic"-- rather than organized states of feeling in general.^11^ But we certainly inhabit a cultural tradition where it is a common-sense proposition that people listen to music precisely to escape from ideology, from the terrors of ideology and the dimension of practical reason. Adorno, in what I take to be the quintessential modernist dictum, writes: "Beauty is like an exodus from the world of means and ends, the same world to which beauty however owes its objective existence."^12^ [10] Adorno and the Frankfurt School make of the Kantian notion of the aesthetic as a purposiveness without purpose precisely the locus of the radicalizing and redemptive power of art, the sense in which by alienating practical aims it sides with the repressed and challenges domination and exploitation, particularly the rationality of capitalist institutions. By contrast, there is Lenin's famous remark--it's in Gorki's _Reminiscences_--that he had to give up listening to Beethoven's _Appasionata_ sonata: he enjoyed it too much, it made him feel soft, happy, at one with all humanity. His point would seem to be the need to resist a narcotic and pacifying aesthetic gratification in the name of the very difficult struggle--and the corresponding ideological rigor--necessary to at least setting in motion the process of building a classless society. But one senses in Lenin too the displacement or sublation of an aesthetic sensibility onto the field of revolutionary activism. And in both Adorno and Lenin there is a sense that music is somehow in excess of ideology. [11] Not only the Frankfurt School, but most major tendencies in "Western Marxism" (a key exception is Gramsci) maintain some form or other of the art/ideology distinction, with a characteristic ethical-epistemological privileging of the aesthetic _over_ the ideological. In Althusser's early essays-- "A Letter on Art to Andre Daspre," for example--art was said to occupy an intermediate position between science and ideology, since it involved ideology (as, so to speak, its raw material), but in such a way as to provoke an "internal distancing" from ideology, somewhat as in Brecht's notion of an "alienation effect" which obliges the spectator to scrutinize and question the assumptions on which the spectacle has been proceeding. In the section on interpellation in Althusser's later essay on ideology, this "modernist" and formalist concern with estrangement and defamiliarization has been displaced by what is in effect a postmodernist concern with fascination and fixation. If ideology, in Althusser's central thesis, is what constitutes the subject in relation to the real, then the domain of ideology is not a world-view or set of (verbal) ideas, but rather the ensemble of signifying practices in societies: that is, the cultural. In interpellation, the issue is not _whether_ ideology is happening in the space of something like aesthetic experience, or whether "good" or "great" art transcends the merely ideological (whereas "bad" art doesn't), but rather _what_ or _whose_ ideology, because the art work is precisely (one of the places) where ideology happens, though of course this need not be the dominant ideology or even any particular ideology. * * * * * * * * [12] If the aesthetic effect consists in a certain satisfaction of desire--a "pleasure" (in the formalists, the recuperation or production of sensation)--, and if the aesthetic effect is an ideological effect, then the question becomes not the separation of music and ideology but rather their relation. [13] Music would seem to have in this sense a special relation to the pre-verbal, and thus to the Imaginary or more exactly to something like Kristeva's notion of the semiotic.^13^ In the sort of potted lacanianism we employ these days in cultural studies, we take it that objects of imaginary identification function in the psyche--in a manner Lacan designated as "orthopedic"-- as metonyms of an object of desire which has been repressed or forgotten, a desire which can never be satisfied and which consequently inscribes in the subject a sense of insufficiency or fading. In narcissism, this desire takes the form of a libidinal identification of the ego with an image or sensation of itself as (to recall Freud's demarcation of the alternatives in his 1916 essay on narcissism) it is, was or should be. From the third of these possibilities--images or experiences of the ego as it should be--Freud argued that there arises as a consequence of the displacement of primary narcissism the images of an ideal ego or ego ideal, internalized as the conscience or super ego. Such images, he added, are not only of self but also involve the social ideals of the parent, the family, the tribe, the nation, the race, etc. Consequently, those sentiments which are the very stuff of ideology in the narrow sense of political "isms" and loyalties--belonging to a party, being an "american," defending the family "honor," fighting in a national liberation movement, etc.--are basically transformations of homoerotic libidinal narcissism. [14] It follows then that the aesthetic effect--even the sort of non-semantic effect produced by the organization of sound (in music) or color and line (in painting or sculpture)--always implies a kind of social Imaginary, a way of being with and/or for others. Although they are literature-centered, we may recall in this context Jameson's remarks at the end of _The Political Unconscious_ (in the section titled "The Dialectic of Utopia and Ideology") to the effect that "all class consciousness--that is all ideology in the strict sense--, as much the exclusive forms of consciousness of the ruling classes as the opposing ones of the oppressed classes, are in their very nature utopian." From this Jameson claims--this is his appropriation of Frankfurt aesthetics--that the aesthetic value of a given work of art can never be limited to its moment of genesis, when it functioned willy-nilly to legitimize some form or other of domination. For if its utopian quality as "art"--its "eternal charm," to recall Marx's (eurocentric, petty bourgeois) comment on Greek epic poetry--is precisely that it expresses pleasurably the imaginary unity of a social collectivity, then "it is utopian not as a thing in itself, but rather to the extent that such collectivities are themselves ciphers for the final concretion of collective life, that is the achieved utopia of a classless society."^14^ [15] What this implies, although I'm not sure whether Jameson himself makes this point as such, is that the political unconscious of the aesthetic is (small c) communism. (One would need to also work through here the relation between music--Wagner, Richard Strauss --and fascism.) * * * * * * * * [16] I want to introduce at this point an issue which was particularly crucial to the way in which I experienced and think about music, which is the relation of music and drugs. It is said the passage from _Nausea_ I used before derived from Sartre's experiments in the 30s with mescaline. Many of you will have your own versions of essential psychedelic experiences of the 60s, but here--since I'm not likely to be nominated in the near future for the Supreme Court--is one of mine. It is 1963, late at night. I'm a senior in college and I've taken peyote for the first time. I'm lying face down on a couch with a red velour cover. Mozart is playing, something like the adagio of a piano concerto. As my nausea fades--peyote induces in the first half hour or so a really intense nausea--I begin to notice the music which seems to become increasingly clear and beautiful. I feel my breath making my body move against the couch and I feel the couch respond to me as if it were a living organism, very soft and very gentle, as if it were the body of my mother. I remember or seem to remember being close to my mother in very early childhood. I am overwhelmed with nostalgia. The room fills with light. I enter a timeless, paradisiacal state, beyond good and evil. The music goes on and on. [17] There was of course also the freak-out or bad trip: the drug exacerbated sensation that the music is incredibly banal and stupid, that the needle of the record player is covered with fuzz, that the sound is thick and ugly like mucus; Charlie Manson hearing secret apocalyptic messages in "Helter Skelter" on the Beatles's _White Album_; the Stones at Altamont. Modernism in music, say the infinitely compressed fragments of late Webern, is the perception in the midst of the bad trip, of dissonance, of a momentary cohesion and radiance, whose power is all the greater because it shines out of chaos and evil. In Frankfurt aesthetics, dissonance is the voice of the oppressed in music. Thus for Adorno it is only in dissonance, which destroys the illusion of reconciliation represented by harmony, that the power of seduction of the inspiring character of music survives.^15^ * * * * * * * * Consider what moderation is required to express oneself so briefly... You can stretch every glance out into a poem, every sigh into a novel. But to express a novel in a single gesture, a joy in a breath--such concentration can only be present in proposition to the absence of self- pity. --Schoenberg on Webern^16^ * * * * * * * * [18] Cage's _4'33"_--which is a piece where the performer sits at a piano without playing anything for four minutes and thirty-three seconds--is a postmodernist homage to modernist aesthetics, to serialism and private language music. What it implies is that the listening subject is to compose from the very absence of music the music, the performance from the frustration of the expected performance. As in the parallel cases of Duchamp's ready-mades or Rauschenberg's white paintings, such a situation gives rise to an appropriately "modernist" anxiety (which might be allegorized in Klee's twittering birds whose noise emanates from the very miniaturization, compression and silent tension of the pictorial space) to create an aesthetic experience out of the given, whatever it is. [19] Postmodernism per se in music, on the other hand, is where the anxiety of the listener to "make sense of" the piece is either perpetually frustrated by pure randomness--Cage's music of chance--or assuaged and dissipated by a bland, "easy-listening" surface with changes happening only in a Californian _longue duree_, as in the musics of La Monte Young, Philip Glass, Terry Riley, or Steve Reich. The intention of such musics, we might say, is to transgress both the Imaginary and Symbolic: they are a sort of brainwashing into the Real. * * * * * * * * I [heart] ADORNO --bumper sticker (thanks to Hilary Radner) * * * * * * * * [20] One form of capitalist utopia which is portended in contemporary music--we could call it the Chicago School or neoliberal form--is the utopia of the record store, with its incredible proliferation and variety of musical commodities, its promise of "different strokes for different folks," as Sly Stone would have it: Michael Jackson--or Prince--, Liberace, Bach on original instruments or _a la _ Cadillac by the Philadelphia Orchestra, Heavy Metal--or Springsteen--, Country (what kind of Country: Zydeco, Appalachian, Bluegrass, Dolly Parton, trucker, New Folk, etc.?), jazz, blues, spirituals, soul, rap, hip hop, fusion, college rock (Grateful Dead, REM, Talking Heads), SST rock (Meat Puppets etc.), Holly Near, _Hymnen_, _salsa_, reggae, World Beat, _norteno_ music, _cumbias_, Laurie Anderson, 46 different recorded versions of _Bolero_, John Adams, and so on and on, with the inevitable "crossovers" and new "new waves." By contrast, even the best stocked record outlets in socialist countries were spartan. [21] But this is also "Brazil" (as in the song/film): the dystopia of behaviorly tailored, industrially manufactured, packaged and standardized music--Muzak--, where it is expected that everyone except owners and managers of capital will be at the same time a fast food chain worker and consumer. Muzak is to music what, say, McDonalds is to food; and since its purpose is to generate an environment conducive to both commodity production and consumption, it is more often than not to be heard in places like McDonalds (or, so we are told in prison testimonies, in that Latin American concomitant of Chicago School economics which are torture chambers, with the volume turned up to the point of distortion). [22] In Russell Berman's perhaps overly anxious image, Muzak implies a fundamental mutation of the public sphere, "the beautiful illusion of a collective, singing along in dictatorial unanimity." Its ubiquity, as in the parallel cases of advertising and packaging and design, refers to a situation where there is no longer, Berman writes, "an outside to art (...) There is no pre-aesthetic dimension to social activity, since the social order itself has become dependent on aesthetic organization."^17^ [23] Berman's concern here I take to be in the spirit of the general critique Habermas--and in this country Christopher Lasch--have made of postmodern commodity culture, a critique which as many people have noted coincides paradoxically (since its main assumption is that postmodernism is a reactionary phenomenon) with the cultural politics of the new Right, for example Alan Bloom's clinically paranoid remarks on rock in _The Closing of the American Mind_.^18^ [24] Is the loss of autonomy of the aesthetic however a bad thing--something akin to Marcuse's notion of a "repressive desublimation" which entails the loss of art's critical potential--, or does it indicate a new vulnerability of capitalist societies--a need to legitimize themselves through aestheticization--and therefore both a _new possibility_ for the left and a new centrality for cultural and aesthetic matters in left practice? For, as Berman is aware, the aestheticization of everyday life was also the goal of the historical avant garde in its attack on the institution of the autonomy of the aesthetic in bourgeois culture, which made it at least potentially a form of anti-capitalist practice. The loss of aura or desublimation of the art work may be a form of commodification but it is also, as Walter Benjamin pointed out, a form of democratization of culture.^19^ [25] Cage writes suggestively, for example, of "a music which is like furniture--a music, that is, which will be part of the noises of the environment, will take them into consideration. I think of it as a melodious softening the noises of the knives and forks, not dominating them, not imposing itself. It would fill up those heavy silences that sometimes fall between friends dining together."^20^ In some of the work of La Monte Young or Brian Eno, music becomes consciously an aspect of interior decorating. What this takes us back to is not Muzak but the admirable baroque tradition of _Tafel Musik_: "table" or dinner music. Mozart still wrote at the time of the French Revolution comfortably and well _divertimentii_ meant to accompany social gatherings, including meetings of his Masonic lodge. After Mozart, this utilitarian or "background" function is repressed in bourgeois art music, which will now require the deepest concentration and emotional and intellectual involvement on the part of the listening subject. [26] The problem with Muzak is not its ubiquity or the idea of environmental music per se, but rather its insistently kitsch and conservative melodic-harmonic content. What is clear, on the other hand, is that the intense and informed concentration on the art work which is assumed in Frankfurt aesthetics depends on an essentially Romantic, formalist and individualist conception of both music and the listening subject, which is not unrelated to the actual processes of commodification "classical" music was undergoing in the late 18th and 19th centuries. * * * * * * * * [27] The antidote to Muzak would seem to be something like Punk. By way of a preface to a discussion of Punk and extending the considerations above on the relation between music and commodification, I want to refer first to Jackson Pollock's great painting _Autumn Rhythm_ in the Met, a picture that--like Pollock's work in general--is particularly admired by Free Jazz musicians. It's a vast painting with splotches of black, brown and rust against the raw tan of unprimed canvas, with an incredible dancing, swirling, clustering, dispersing energy. As you look at it, you become aware that while the ambition of the painting seems to be to explode or expand the pictorial space of the canvas altogether, it is finally only the limits of the canvas which make the painting possible as an art object. The limit of the canvas is its aesthetic autonomy, its separation from the life world, but also its commodity status as something that can be bought, traded, exhibited. The commodity is implicated in the very form of the "piece;" as in the jazz record in _Nausea_, "The music ends." (The 78 RPM record--the commodity form of recorded music in the 20s and 30s-- imposed a three minute limit per side on performances and this in turn shaped the way songs were arranged in jazz or pop recording: cf. the 45 and the idea today of the "single.") [28] Such a situation might indicate one limit of Jameson's cultural hermeneutic. If the strategy in Jameson is to uncover the emancipatory utopian- communist potential locked up in the artifacts of the cultural heritage, this is also in a sense to leave everything as it is, as in Wittgenstein's analytic (because that which is desired is already there; it only has to be "seen" correctly), whereas the problem of the relation of art and social liberation is also clearly the need to _transgress_ the limits imposed by existing artistic forms and practices and to produce new ones. To the extent, however, such transgressions can be recontained within the sphere of the aesthetic-- in a new series of "works" which may also be available as commodities--, they will produce paradoxically an affirmation of bourgeois culture: in a certain sense they _are _ bourgeois high culture. [29] A representation of this paradox in terms of 60s leftism is the great scene in Antonioni's film _Zabriskie Point_ where the (modernist) desert home of the capitalist pig is (in the young woman's imagination) blown up, and we see in ultra slow motion, in beautiful Technicolor, accompanied by a spacy and sinister Pink Floyd music track, the whole commodity universe of late capitalism--cars, tools, supermarket food, radios, TVs, clothes, furniture, records, books, decorations, utensils--float by. What is not clear is who could have placed the bomb, so that Jameson might ask in reply a question the film itself also leaves unanswered: is this an image of the destruction of capitalism or of its fission into a new and "higher" stage where it fills all space and time, where there is no longer something--nature, the Third World, the unconscious--outside it? And this question suggests another one: to what extent was the cultural radicalism of the 60s, nominally directed against the rationality of capitalist society and its legitimating discourses, itself a form of modernization of capitalism, a prerequisite of its "expanded" reproduction in the new international division of labor and the proliferation of electronic technologies--with corresponding "mind- sets"--which emerge in the 70s?^21^ * * * * * * * * From Punk manifestos: Real life stinks. What has been shown is that you and I can do anything in any area without training and with little cash. We're demanding that real life keep up with advertising, the speed of advertising on TV... We are living at the speed of advertising. We demand to be entertained all the time, we get bored very quickly. When we're on stage, things happen a thousand times faster, everything we do is totally compressed and intense on stage, and that's our version of life as we feel and see it. In the future T.V. will be so good that the printed word will function as an artform only. In the future we will not have time for leisure activities. In the future we will "work" one day a week. In the future there will be machines which will produce a religious experience in the user. In the future there will be so much going on that no one will be able to keep track of it. (David Byrne)^22^ [30] The emergence and brief hegemony of Punk--from, say, 1975 to 1982--was related to the very high levels of structural unemployment or subemployment which appear in First World capitalist centers in the 70s as a consequence of the winding down of the post-World War II economic long cycle, and which imply especially for lower middle class and working class youth a consequent displacement of the work ethic towards a kind of on the dole bohemianism or dandyism. Punk aimed at a sort of rock or Gesamtkunstwerk (Simon Frith has noted its connections with Situationist ideology^23^) which would combine music, fashion, dance, speech forms, mime, graphics, criticism, new "on the street" forms of appropriation of urban space, and in which in principle everybody was both a performer and a spectator. Its key musical form was three-chord garage power rock, because its intention was to contest art rock and superstar rock, to break down the distance between fan and performer. Punk was loud, aggressive, eclectic, anarchic, amateur, self-consciously anti- commercial and anti-hippie at the same time. [31] As it was the peculiar genius of the Sex Pistol's manager, Malcolm McClaren, to understand, both the conditions of possibility and the limits of Punk were those of a still expanding capitalist consumer culture --a culture which, in one sense, was intended as a _compensation_ for the decline in working-class standards of living. Initially, Punk had to create its own forms of record production and distribution, independent of the "majors" and of commercial music institutions in general. The moment that to be recognized as Punk is to conform to an established image of consumer desire, to be different say than New Wave, is the moment Punk becomes the new commodity. It is the moment of the Sex Pistols' US tour depicted in _Sid and Nancy_, where on the basis of the realization that they are becoming a commercial success on the American market--_the_ new band--they auto- destruct. But the collapse of Punk--and its undoubted flirtation with nihilism--should not obscure the fact that it was for a while--most consciously in the work of British groups like the Clash or the Gang of Four and also in collective projects like Rock Against Racism--a very powerful form of Left mass culture, perhaps--if we are attentive to Lenin's dictum that ideas acquire a material force when they reach the millions--one of the most powerful forms we have seen in recent years in Western Europe and the United States. Some of Punk's heritage lives on in the popularity of U2 or Tracy Chapman today and or in the recent upsurge of Heavy Metal (which, it should be recalled, has one of its roots in the Detroit 60s movement band, MC5). * * * * * * * * [32] The notion of postmodernism initially comes into play to designate a crisis in the dominant canons of American architecture. Hegel posited architecture over music as the world historical form of Romantic art, because in architecture the reconciliation of spirit and matter, reason and history, represented ultimately by the state was more completely realized. Hence, for example, Jameson's privileging of architecture in his various discussions of postmodernism. I think that today, however, particularly if we are thinking about how to develop a left practice on the terrain of the postmodern, we have to be for music as against architecture, because it is in architecture that the power and self-representation of capital and the imperialist state reside, whereas music--like sports-- is always and everywhere a power of cultural production which is in the hands of the people. Capital can master and exploit music--and modern musics like rock are certainly forms of capitalist culture--, but it can never seize hold of and monopolize its means of production, as it can say with literature. The cultural presence of the Third World in and against the dominant of imperialism is among other things, to borrow Jacques Attali's concept, "noise"--the intrusion of new forms of language and music which imply new forms of community and pleasure: Bob Marley's reggae; Run-DMC on MTV with "Walk This Way" (a crossover of rap with white Heavy Metal); "We Shall Overcome" sung at a sit-in for Salvadoran refugees; the beautiful South African choral music Paul Simon used on _Graceland_ sung at a township funeral; _La Bamba_; Public Enemy's "Fight the Power"; Ruben Blades' _Crossover Dreams_. [33] The debate over _Graceland_ some years ago indicates that the simple presence of Third World music in a First World context implies immediately a series of ideological effects, which doesn't mean that I think there was a "correct line" on _Graceland_, e.g. that it was a case of Third World suffering and creative labor sublimated into an item of First World white middle-class consumption.^24^ Whatever the problems with the concept of the Third World, it can no longer mark an "other" that is radically outside of and different than contemporary American or British society. By the year 2000, one out of four inhabitants of the United States will be non-european (black, hispanic of latin american origin, asian or native american); even today we are the fourth or fifth largest hispanic country in the world (out of twenty). In this sense, the Third World is also _inside_ the First, "en las entranas del monstruo" (in the entrails of the monster) as Jose Marti would have said, and for a number of reasons music has been and is perhaps the hegemonic cultural form of this insertion. What would American musical culture be like for example without the contribution of Afro-American musics? [34] Turning this argument on its head, assume something like the following: a young guerrilla fighter of the FMLN in El Salvador wearing a Madonna T-shirt. A traditional kind of Left cultural analysis would have talked about cultural imperialism and how the young man or woman in question had become a revolutionary _in spite of_ Madonna and American pop culture. I don't want to discount entirely the notion of cultural imperialism, which seems to me real and pernicious enough, but I think we might also begin to consider how being a fan of Madonna might in some sense _contribute to_ becoming a guerrilla or political activist in El Salvador. (And how wearing a Madonna T-shirt might be a form of revolutionary cultural politics: it certainly defines--correctly--a community of interest between young people in El Salvador and young people in the United States who like Madonna.) * * * * * * * * [35] Simon Frith has summarized succinctly the critique of the limitations of Frankfurt school aesthetic theory that has been implicit here: The Frankfurt scholars argued that the transformation of art into commodity inevitably sapped imagination and withered hope--now all that could be imagined was what was. But the artistic impulse is not destroyed by capital; it is transformed by it. As utopianism is mediated through the new processes of cultural production and consumption, new sorts of struggles over community and leisure begin.^25^ More and more--the point has been made by Karl Offe among others--the survival of capitalism has become contingent on non-capitalist forms of culture, including those of the Third World. What is really utopian in the present context is not so much the sublation of art into life under the auspices of advanced consumer capitalism, but rather the current capitalist project of reabsorbing the entire life energy of world society into labor markets and industrial or service production. One of the places where the conflict between forces and relations of production is most acutely evident is in the current tensions--the FBI warning at the start of your evening video, for example--around the commercialization of VCR and digital sound technologies. Cassettes and CDs are the latest hot commodities, but by the same token they portend the possibility of a virtual decommodification of music and film material, since its reproduction via these technologies can no longer be easily contained within the "normal" boundaries of capitalist property rights. [36] As opposed to both Frankfurt school style _Angst_ about commodification and a neopopulism which can't imagine anything finer than Bruce Springsteen (I have in mind Jesse Lemisch's polemic against Popular Front style "folk" music in _The Nation_)^26^, I think we have to reject the notion that certain kinds of music are _a priori_ ethically and politically OK and others not (which doesn't mean that there is not ideological struggle in music and choice of music). Old Left versions of this, some will recall, ranged from jazz=good, classical=bad (American CP), to jazz=bad, classical=good (Soviet CP). The position of the Left today--understanding this in the broadest possible sense, as in the idea of the Rainbow--should be in favor of the broadest possible variety and proliferation of musics and related technologies of pleasure, on the understanding--or hope--that in the long run this will be deconstructive of capitalist hegemony. This is a postmodernist position, but it also involves challenging a certain smugness in postmodernist theory and practice about just how far elite/popular, high culture/mass culture distinctions have broken down. Too much of postmodernism seems simply a renovated form of bourgeois "art" culture. To my mind, the problem is not how much but rather how little commodification of culture has introduced a universal aestheticization of everyday life. The Left needs to defend the pleasure principle ("fun") involved in commodity aesthetics at the same time that it needs to develop effective images of _post-commodity_ gratification linked--as transitional demands--to an expansion of leisure time and a consequent transformation of the welfare state from the realm of economic maintenance--the famous "safety net"--to that of the provision of forms of pleasure and personal development outside the parameters of commodity production. While it is good and necessary to remind ourselves that we are a long way away from the particular cultural forms championed by the Popular Front--that these are now the stuff of_our_ nostalgia mode--, we also need to think about the ways in which the Popular Fronts in their day were able to hegemonize both mass and elite culture. The creation--as in a tentative way in this paper--of an _ideologeme_ which articulates the political project of ending or attenuating capitalist domination with both the production _and_ consumption of contemporary music seems to me one of the most important tasks in cultural work the Left should have on its present agenda. [37] Of course, what we anticipate in taking up this task is also the moment--or moments--when architecture becomes the form of expression of the people, because that would be the moment when power had really begun to change hands. What would this architecture be like? _______________________________________________________ NOTES 1. Theodor Adorno, "Perennial Fashion--Jazz," in _Prisms_, trans. Samuel and Shierry Weber (London: Neville Spearman, 1967), 128-29. 2. On this point, see Adorno's remarks in _The Philosophy of Modern Music_, trans. Anne Mitchell and Wesley Blomster (New York: Seabury, 1980), 129-33. 3. Christa Burger, "The Disappearance of Art: The Postmodernism Debate in the U.S.," _Telos_, 68 (Summer 1986), 93-106. 4. Ilhan Mimaroglu, extracts from interview with John Cage in record album notes for Berio, Cage, Mimaroglu, _Electronic Music_ (Turnabout TV34046S). 5. Jean-Paul Sartre, _Nausea_, trans. Lloyd Alexander (New York: New Directions, 1959), 33-36. 6. Cf. the following remarks by the minimalist composer La Monte Young: Around 1960 I became interested in yoga, in which the emphasis is on concentration and focus on the sounds inside your head. Zen meditation allows ideas to come and go as they will, which corresponds to Cage's music; he and I are like opposites which help define each other (...) In singing, when the tone becomes perfectly in tune with a drone, it takes so much concentration to keep it in tune that it drives out all other thoughts. You become one with the drone and one with the Creator. Cited in Kyle Gann, "La Monte Young: Maximal Spirit," _Village Voice_, June 9, 1987, 70. (Gann's column in the _Voice_ is a good place to track developments in contemporary modernist and postmodernist music in the NY scene.) 7. "Beethoven's symphonies in their most arcane chemistry are part of the bourgeois process of production and express the perennial disaster brought on by capitalism. But they also take a stance of tragic affirmation towards reality as a social fact; they seem to say that the status quo is the best of all possible worlds. Beethoven's music is as much a part of the revolutionary emancipation of the bourgeoisie as it anticipates the latter's apologia. The more profoundly you decode works of art, the less absolute is their contrast to praxis." Adorno, _Aesthetic Theory_, trans. C. Lenhardt (New York: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1986), 342. 8. Eugene Genovese, _Roll, Jordan, Roll. The World the Slaves Made_ (New York: Vintage, 1976), 159- 280. 9. Pierre Lere, "_Free Jazz_: Evolution ou Revolution," _Revue d'esth tique_, 3-4, 1970, 320-21, translated and cited in Herbert Marcuse, _Counterrevolution and Revolt_ (Boston: Beacon, 1972), 114. 10. See Attali's, _Noise: The Political Economy of Music_, trans. Brian Massumi (Minneapolis: Univ. of Minnesota Press, 1985). 11. Barthes is perhaps an exception, and Derrida has written on pictures and painting. John Mowitt at the University of Minnesota has been doing the most interesting work on music from a poststructuralist perspective that I have seen. He suggests as a primer on poststructuralist music theory I. Stoianova, _Geste, Texte, Musique_ (Paris: 10/18, 1985). 12. _Aesthetic Theory_, 402. 13. The semiotic for Kristeva is a sort of babble out of which language arises--something between glossolalia and the pre-oedipal awareness of the sounds of the mother's body--and which undermines the subject's submission to the Symbolic. "Kristeva makes the case that the semiotic is the effect of bodily drives which are incompletely repressed when the paternal order has intervened in the mother/child dyad, and it is therefore 'attached' psychically to the mother's body." Paul Smith, _Discerning the Subject_ (Minneapolis: Univ. of Minnesota Press, 1988), 121. 14. Fredric Jameson, _The Political Unconscious. Narrative as a Socially Symbolic Act_ (Ithaca: Cornell, 1981), 288-91. 15. _Aesthetic Theory_, 21-22. 16. I've lost the reference for this quote. 17. Russell Berman, "Modern Art and Desublimation," _Telos_, 62 (Winter 1984-85): 48. 18. Andreas Huyssen notes perceptively that "Given the aesthetic field-force of the term postmodernism, no neo-conservative today would dream of identifying the neo-conservative project as postmodern." "Mapping the Postmodern," in his _After the Great Divide: Modernism, Mass Culture, Postmodernism_ (Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1986), 204. I became aware of Huyssen's work only as I was finishing this paper, but it's obvious that I share here his problematic and many of his sympathies (including an ambivalence about McDonalds). 19. See in particular Susan Buck-Morss, "Benjamin's _Passagen-Werk_: Redeeming Mass Culture for the Revolution." _New German Critique_, 29 (Spring- Summer 1983), 211-240; and in general the work of Stuart Hall and the Birmingham Center for Cultural Studies. Peter Burger's summary of recent work on the autonomy of art in bourgeois society is useful here: _Theory of the Avant-Garde_, trans. Michael Shaw (Minneapolis: Univ. of Minnesota, 1984), 35-54. In a way Frankfurt theory didn't anticipate, it has seemed paradoxically necessary for capitalist merchandising to preserve or inject some semblance of aura in the commodity--hence kitsch: the Golden Arches--, whereas communist or socialized production should in principle have no problem with loss of aura, since it is not implicated in the commodity status of a use value or good. Postmodernist pastiche or _mode retro_--where a signifier of aura is alluded to or incorporated, but in an ironic and playful way--seems an intermediate position, in the sense that it can function both to endow the commodity with an "arty" quality or to detach aspects of commodity aesthetics from commodity production and circulation per se, as in Warhol. 20. John Cage, "Erik Satie," in _Silence_ (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1966), p.76. 21. "Yet this sense of freedom and possibility-- which is for the course of the 60s a momentarily objective reality, as well as (from the hindsight of the 80s) a historical illusion--may perhaps best be explained in terms of the superstructural movement and play enabled by the transition from one infrastructural or systemic stage of capitalism to another." Fredric Jameson, "Periodizing the 60s," in Sohnya Sayres ed., _The 60s Without Apology_ (Minneapolis: _Social Text_/Univ. of Minnesota Press, 1984), 208. 22. From Isabelle Anscombe and Dike Blair eds., _Punk!_ (New York: Urizen, 1978). 23. Simon Frith, _Sound Effects. Youth, Leisure and the Politics of Rock 'n' Roll_ (New York: Pantheon, 1981), 264-268. 24. On this point, see Andrew Goodwin and Joe Gore "World Beat and the Cultural Imperialism Debate," _Socialist Review_ 20.3 (Jul.-Sep., 1990): 63-80. 25. _Sound Effects_, 268. Cf. Huyssen: "The growing sense that we are not bound to _complete_ the project of modernity (Habermas' phrase) and still do not necessarily have to lapse into irrationality or into apocalyptic frenzy, the sense that art is not exclusively pursuing some telos of abstraction, non- representation, and sublimity--all of this has opened up a host of possibilities for creative endeavors today." _After the Great Divide_, 217. 26. "I Dreamed I Saw MTV Last Night," _The Nation_ (October 18, 1986), 361, 374-376; and Lemisch's reply to the debate which ensued, "The Politics of Left Culture," _The Nation_ (December 20, 1986), 700 ff. 30-Sep-90 23:41:25-GMT,61909;000000000000 Received: from aramis.rutgers.edu by klinzhai.rutgers.edu (5.59/SMI4.0/RU1.4/3.08) id AA26464; Sun, 30 Sep 90 19:41:20 EDT Received: by aramis.rutgers.edu (5.59/SMI4.0/RU1.4/3.08) id AA08433; Sun, 30 Sep 90 19:41:18 EDT Resent-Message-Id: <9009302341.AA08433@aramis.rutgers.edu> Received: from ncsuvm.ncsu.edu by aramis.rutgers.edu (5.59/SMI4.0/RU1.4/3.08) id AA18776; Sun, 30 Sep 90 05:43:02 EDT Message-Id: <9009300943.AA18776@aramis.rutgers.edu> Received: from ncsuvm.ncsu.edu by ncsuvm.ncsu.edu (IBM VM SMTP R1.2.2MX) with BSMTP id 8044; Sun, 30 Sep 90 05:38:54 EDT Received: from NCSUVM.BITNET by ncsuvm.ncsu.edu (Mailer R2.07) with BSMTP id 7828; Sun, 30 Sep 90 05:30:22 EDT Date: Sun, 30 Sep 90 05:08:30 EDT Reply-To: " Editors" Sender: "" From: " Editors" Subject: LARSEN 990 To: Multiple recipients of list PMC-LIST Resent-To: mcgrew@darkstar.rutgers.edu Resent-Date: Sun, 30 Sep 90 19:41:17 EDT Resent-From: Charles Mcgrew POSTMODERNISM AND IMPERIALISM: THEORY AND POLITICS IN LATIN AMERICA by NEIL LARSEN Northeastern University Copyright (c) 1990 by Neil Larsen, all rights reserved. [1] My remarks here^1^ concern the following topics of critical discussion and debate: 1) the ideological character of postmodernism as both a philosophical standpoint and as a set of political objectives and strategies; 2) the development within a broadly postmodernist theoretical framework of a trend advocating a critique of certain postmodern tenets from the standpoint of anti-imperialism; and 3) the influence of this trend on both the theory and practice of oppositional culture in Latin America. So as to eliminate the need for second-guessing my own standpoint in what follows, let me state clearly at the outset that I will adhere to what I understand to be both a Marxist and a Leninist position as concerns both epistemology and the social and historical primacy of class contradiction. In matters philosophical, then, I will be advancing and defending dialectical materialist arguments. Regarding questions of culture and aesthetics, as well as those of revolutionary strategy under existing conditions--areas in which Marxist and Leninist theory have either remained relatively speculative or have found it necessary to re-think older positions--my own thinking may or may not merit the attribution of 'orthodoxy,' depending on how that term is currently to be understood. (1) [2] One typically appeals to the term 'postmodern' to characterize a broad and ever-widening range of aesthetic and cultural practices and artifacts. But the concept itself, however diffuse and contested, has also come to designate a very definite current of philosophy as well as a theoretical approach to politics. Postmodern philosophy--or simply postmodern 'theory,' if we are to accept Jameson's somewhat ingenuous observation that it "marks the end of philosophy"^2^--arguably includes the now standard work of poststructuralist thinkers such as Derrida and Foucault as well as the more recent work by ex-post- Althusserian theorists such a Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe, academic philosophical converts such as Richard Rorty and the perennial vanguardist Stanley Aronowitz. The latter elaborate and re-articulate an increasingly withered poststructuralism, re-deploying the grandly dogmatic and quasi-mystical "critique of the metaphysics of presence" as a critical refusal of the "foundationalism" and "essentialism" of the philosophy of the Enlightenment. These two assignations--which now come to replace the baneful Derridean charge of "metaphysics"--refer respectively to the Enlightenment practice of seeking to *ground* all claims regarding either truth or value in terms of a self-evidencing standard of Reason; and to the ontological fixation upon being as *essence*, rather than as relationality or 'difference.' [3] Postmodern philosophy for the most part adopts its "anti-essentialism" directly from Derrida and company, adding little if anything to accepted (or attenuated) post-structuralist doctrine. Where postmodernism contributes more significantly to the honing down and re-tooling of poststructuralism is, I propose, in its indictment of foundationalism--in place of the vaguer abstractions of "presence" or "identity"--as the adversarial doctrine. It is not all "Western" modes of thought and being which must now be discarded, but more precisely their Enlightenment or %modern% modalities, %founded% on the concept of %reason%. Indeed, even the charge of "foundationalism" perhaps functions as a minor subterfuge here. What postmodern philosophy intends is, to cite Aronowitz's forthright observation, a "rejection of reason as a foundation for human affairs."^3^ Postmodernism is thus a form, albeit an unconventional one, of %irrationalism%. [4] To be sure, important caveats can be raised here. Postmodernist theoreticians often carefully stipulate that a rejection of reason as foundation does not imply or require a rejection of all narrowly 'reasonable' procedures. Postmodernity is not to be equated with an anti-modernity. Aronowitz, for example, has written that "postmodern movements" (e.g., ecology and "Solidarity" type labor groups) "borrow freely the terms and programs of modernity but place them in new discursive contexts" (_UA_ 61). Chantal Mouffe insists that "radical democracy"--according to her, the political and social project of postmodernity--aims to "defend the political project [of Enlightenment] while abandoning the notion that it must be based on a specific form of rationality."^4^ Ernesto Laclau makes an even nicer distinction by suggesting that "it is precisely the %ontological status% of the central categories of the discourses of modernity and not their %content%, that is at stake. . . . Postmodernity does not imply a %change% in the values of Enlightenment modernity but rather a particular %weakening% of their absolutist character."^5^ And a similarly conservative gesture within the grander irrationalist impulse can, of course, be followed in Lyotard's characterization of "paralogy" as those practices legitimating themselves exclusively within their own "small narrative" contexts, rather than within the macro-frames of modernist meta-narratives of Reason, Progress, History, etc.^6^ [5] Two counter-objections are necessary here, however. The first is that any thoughtful consideration of claims to locate the attributes of reason within supposedly local or non-totalizable contexts immediately begs the question of what, then, acts to set the limits to any particular instance of "paralogy," etc.? How does the mere adding of the predicate "local" or "specific" or "weakened" serve to dispense with the logic of an external ground or foundation? Cannot, for example, the ecology movement be shown to be %grounded% in a social and political context outside and 'larger' than it is, whatever the movement may think of itself? If reason is present (or absent) in the fragment, does not this presence/absence necessarily connect with the whole on some level? If, as one might say, postmodernism wants to proclaim a rationality of means entirely removed from a rationality of ends, does it not thereby sacrifice the very "means/ends" logic it wants to invoke, the very logical framework in which one speaks of "contexts"? I suggest it would be more precise to describe the measured, non-foundationalist 'rationalism' of postmodernism as simply an evasive maneuver designed to immunize from critique the real object here: that is to preserve "Enlightenment" as merely an outward and superficial guise for irrationalist content, to reduce "Enlightenment," as an actual set of principles designed to govern consciously thought and action, to merely the specific mythology needed to inform the project of a "new radical imaginary" (Laclau, _UA_ 77). [6] Clearly, there is a complete failure--or refusal-- of %dialectical% reasoning incurred in postmodernism's attempted retention of an Enlightenment 'micro'- rationality. And this brings up the second rejoinder: postmodern philosophy's practiced avoidance on this same score of the %Marxist%, dialectical materialist critique of Enlightenment. Postmodern theory, virtually without exception, consigns something it calls "Marxism" to the foul Enlightenment brew of "foundationalism.th" Marxism is, in effect, collapsed back into Hegelianism, the materialist dialectic into the idealist dialectic--or, as Aronowitz somewhat puzzlingly puts it, the "form of Marxism is retained while its categories are not" (_UA_ 52). But in no instance that I know of has a postmodern theorist systematically confronted the contention first developed by Marx and Engels that "this realm of reason was nothing more than the idealized realm of the bourgeoisie."^7^ I think perhaps it needs to be remembered that the Marxist project was not and is not the simple replacement of one "universal reason" with another, but the practical and material transformation of reason to be attained in classless society; and that this attainment would %not% mean the culmination of reason on earth a la Hegel but a raising of reason to a higher level through its very de-"idealization." Reason, then, comes to be grasped as a time-bound, relative principle which nevertheless attains an historical universality through the social universality of the proletariat (gendered and multi-ethnic) as they/we who--to quote a famous lyric--"shall be the human race." [7] But again, postmodern irrationalism systematically evades confrontation with %this% critique of Enlightenment. It typically manages this through a variety of fundamentally dogmatic maneuvers, epitomized in the work of Laclau and Mouffe--who, as Ellen Meiksins Wood has shown,^8^ consistently and falsely reduce Marxism to a "closed system" of pure economic determinism. [8] Why this evasion? Surely there is more than a casual connection here with the fact that the typical postmodern theorist probably never got any closer to Marxism or Leninism than Althusser's left-wing structuralism and Lacanianism. One can readily understand how the one time advocate of a self-enclosed "theoretical practice" might elicit postmodern suspicions of closure and 'scientism.' Indeed, Althusser's 'Marxism' can fairly be accused of having pre-programmed, in its flight from the class struggles of its time and into methodologism, the subsequent turn-about in which even the residual category of "theoretical practice" is deemed "foundationalist." [9] But this is secondary. What I would propose is that postmodernism's hostility towards a "foundationalist" parody of Marxism, combined with the elision of Marxism's genuinely dialectical and materialist content, flows not from a simple misunderstanding but, objectively, from the consistent need of an ideologically embattled capitalism to seek displacement and pre-emption of Marxism through the formulation of radical-sounding "third paths." That postmodern philosophy normally refrains from open anti- communism, preferring to pay lip service to "socialism" even while making the necessary obeisances to the demonologies of "Stalin" may make it appear as some sort of a "left" option. But is there really anything "left"? The most crucial problem for Marxism today-- how to extend and put into practice a critique %from the left% of retreating "socialism" at the moment of the old communist movement's complete transformation into its opposite--remains safely beyond postmodernist conceptual horizons. [10] Postmodernist philosophy's oblique but hostile relation to Marxism largely duplicates that of Nietzsche. And the classical analysis here belongs to Lukacs' critique of Nietzschean irrationalism in _The Destruction of Reason_, a work largely ignored by contemporary theory since being anathematized by Althusserianism two decades ago. Lukacs identifies in Nietzsche's radically anti-systemic and counter- cultural thinking a consistent drive to attack and discredit the socialist ideals of his time. But against these Nietzsche proposes nothing with any better claim to social rationality. Any remaining link between reason and the emancipatory is refused. It is, according to Lukacs, this very antagonism towards socialism--a movement of whose most advanced theoretical expression Nietzsche remained fundamentally ignorant--which supplies to Nietzschean philosophy its point of departure and its principal unifying "ground" as such. "It is material from 'enemy territory,' problems and questions imposed by the class enemy which ultimately determine the content of his philosophy."^9^ Unlike his more typical fellow reactionaries, however, Nietzsche perceived the fact of bourgeois decadence and the consequent need to formulate an intellectual creed which could give the appearance of overcoming it. In this he anticipates the later, more explicit "anti- bourgeois" anti-communisms of the coming imperialist epoch--most obviously fascism. This defense of a decadent bourgeois order, based on the partial acknowledgement of its defects and its urgent need for cultural renewal, and pointing to a "third path" "beyond" the domain of reason,^10^ Lukacs terms an "indirect apologetic." [11] Postmodern philosophy receives Nietzsche through the filters of Deleuze, Foucault and Derrida, blending him with similarly mediated versions of Heidegger and William James into a new irrationalist hybrid. But the terms of Lukacs' Nietzsche-critique on the whole remain no less appropriate. Whereas, on the one hand, postmodernist philosophy's aversion for orthodox fascism is so far not to be seriously questioned, its basic content continues, I would argue, to be "dictated by the adversary." And this adversary--revolutionary communism as both a theory and a practice--assumes an even sharper identity today than in Nietzsche's epoch. Let it be said that Lukacs, writing forty years ago, posits an adversarial Marxism-Leninism more free of the critical tensions and errors than we know it to have been then or to be now. If, from our own present standpoint, _The Destruction of Reason_ has a serious flaw, then it is surely this failure to anticipate or express openly the struggles and uncertainties within communist orthodoxy itself. (Lukacs' subsequent allegiance to Krushchevite positions--by then, perhaps, inevitable--marks his decisive move to the right on these issues.) But the fact that postmodern philosophy arises in a conjuncture marked by capitalist restoration throughout the "socialist" bloc and the consequent extreme crisis and disarray within the theoretical discourse of Marxism, while it may explain the relative freedom from genuinely contestatory Marxist critique enjoyed by postmodern theorists, in no way alters the essence of this ideological development as a reprise of pseudo-dialectical, Nietzschean "indirect apologetics." [12] This becomes fully apparent when one turns to post-modernism's more explicit formulations as a politics. I am thinking here mainly of Laclau and Mouffe's _Hegemony and Socialist Strategy_, a work which, though it remains strongly controversial, has attained in recent years a virtually manifesto-like standing among many intellectuals predisposed to poststructuralist theory. _Hegemony and Socialist Strategy_ proposes to free the Gramscian politics linked to the concept of "hegemony" (the so-called "war of position," as opposed to "war of maneuver") from its residual Marxian 'foundationalism' in recognition of what is held to be the primary efficacy of discourse itself and its "articulating" agents in forming hegemonic subjects. And it turns out of course that "socialist strategy" means dumping socialism altogether for a "radical democracy" which more adequately conforms to the "indeterminacy" of a "society" whose concept is modeled directly on the poststructuralist critique of the sign. [13] The key arguments of _Hegemony and Socialist Strategy_--as, in addition, the serious objections they have elicited--have become sufficiently well known to avoid lengthy repetitions here. What Mouffe and Laclau promise to deliver is, in the end, a revolutionary or at least emancipatory political strategy shorn of 'foundationalist' ballast. In effect, however, they merely succeed in shifting the locus of political and social agency from "essentialist" categories of class and party to a discursive agency of "articulation."^11^ And when it comes time to specify concretely the actual articulating subjects themselves, _Hegemony and Socialist Strategy_ resorts to a battery of argumentative circularities and subterfuges which simply relegate the articulatory agency to "other discourses."^12^ [14] Ellen Meiksins Wood has shown the inevitable collapse of _Hegemony and Socialist Strategy_ into its own illogic as an argument with any pretense to denote political or social realities--a collapse which, because of its very considerable synthetic ambitions and conceptual clarity perhaps marks the conclusive failure of poststructuralism to produce a viable political theory. But the failure of argument has interfered little with the capacity of this theoretical tract to supply potentially anti-capitalist intellectuals with a powerful dose of "indirect apologetics." The fact that the "third path" calls itself "radical democracy," draping itself in the "ethics" if not the epistemology of Enlightenment, the fact that it outwardly resists the "fixity" of any one privileged subject, makes it, in a sense, the more perfect "radical" argument for a capitalist politics of pure irrationalist spontaneity. And we know who wins on the battlefield of the spontaneous.^13^ While the oppressed are fed on the myths of their own "hegemony"--and why not, since "on the threshold of postmodernity" humanity is "for the first time the creator and constructor of its own history"? (Laclau, _UA_ 79-80)--those already in a position to "articulate" the myths for us only strengthen their hold on power. (2) [15] In my remarks so far I have emphasized how contemporary postmodern philosophy's blanket hostility towards the universalisms of Enlightenment thought might merely work to pre-empt Marxism's carefully directed critique of that %particular universal% which is present-day capitalist ideology and power. Does not the merely theoretical refusal of the (ideal) %ground% serve in fact to strengthen the %real% foundations of %real% oppression by rendering all putative knowledge of the latter illicit? When Peter Dews criticizes Foucault for his attempt to equate the "plural" with the emancipatory, the remark applies to more recent postmodern theory with equal force: "the deep naivety of this conception lies in the assumption that once the aspiration to universality is abandoned what will be left is a harmonious plurality of unmediated perspectives."^14^ In light of this perverse blindness to %particular% universals, postmodernism's seemingly general skepticism towards Marxism as %one% possible instance of 'foundationalism' would be better grasped as a specific and determining antagonism. Is there an extant, living--i.e., %practiced%--philosophy %other% than Marxism which any longer purports to ground rational praxis in universal (but in this case also practical-material) categories? We are saying, then, that postmodern philosophy and political theory becomes objectively, albeit perhaps obliquely, a variation of anti-communism. [16] It might, however, be objected at this point that postmodernism encompasses not only this demonstrably right-wing tendency but also a certain 'left' which, like Marxism, aims at an actual transcendence of oppressive totalities but which diverges from Marxism in its precise identification of the oppressor and of the social agent charged with its opposition and overthrow. Under this more "practical" aegis, the axis of postmodern antagonism shifts from the universal versus the particular to the more politically charged tension between the "center" and the "margin." Such a shift has, for example, been adumbrated by Cornel West as representing a particularly %American% inflection of the postmodern. "For Americans," says West, are politically always already in a condition of postmodern fragmentation and heterogeneity in a way that Europeans have not been; and the revolt against the center by those constituted as marginals is an %oppositional% difference in a way that poststructuralist notions of difference are not. These American attacks on universality in the name of difference, these 'postmodern' issues of otherness (Afro-Americans, Native Americans, women, gays) are in fact an implicit critique of certain French postmodern discourses about otherness that really serve to hide and conceal the power of the voices and movements of Others.^15^ Among instances of a "left" postmodernism we might then include certain of contemporary feminisms and the theoretical opposition to homophobia as well as the cultural nationalisms of ethnic minority groups. The category of the "marginal" scarcely exhausts itself here, however. Arrayed against the "center" even as also "concealed" by its discourses and "disciplines" are, in this conception, also the millions who inhabit the neocolonial societies of the 'third world.' Hence there might be a definite logic in describing the contemporary anti-colonial and anti-imperialist movements of the periphery as in their own way also "postmodern." [17] It is this "marginal" and "anti-imperialist" claim to postmodernity which I now wish to assess in some depth. In particular I propose to challenge the idea that such a "left" movement within postmodernism really succeeds in freeing itself from the right-wing apologetic strain within the postmodern philosophy of the "center." [18] The basic outlines of this "left" position are as follows: both post-structuralism and postmodernism, as discourses emergent in the "center," have failed to give adequate theoretical consideration to the international division of labor and to what is in fact the uneven and oppressive relation of metropolitan knowledge and its institutions to the "life-world" of the periphery. Both metropolitan knowledge as well as metropolitan systems of ethics constitute themselves upon a prior exclusion of peripheral reality. They therefore become themselves falsely 'universal' and as such ideological rather than genuinely critical. The remedy to such false consciousness is not to be sought in the mere abstract insistence on "difference" (or "unfixity," the "heterogeneous," etc.), but in the %direct% practical intervention of those who %are% different, those flesh and blood "others" whom, as West observes, the very conceptual appeal to alterity has ironically excluded. As a corollary, it is then implied that a definite epistemological priority, together with a kind of ethical exemplariness, adheres to those subjects and practices marginalized by imperialist institutions of knowledge and culture. [19] Among 'first world' theorists who have put forward this kind of criticism perhaps the best known is Fredric Jameson. In his essay "Third World Literature in the Era of Multi-national Capitalism" Jameson argues that "third world texts necessarily project a political dimension in the form of national allegory: the story of the private individual destiny is always an allegory of the embattled situation of the public third world culture and society."^16^ Third world texts, then--and by extension those who produce them and their primary public--retain what the culture of postmodernism in the 'first world' is unable to provide, according to another of Jameson's well-known arguments: a "cognitive map"^17^ equipped to project the private onto the public sphere. As such, these peripheral practices of signification consciously represent a political bedrock reality which for the contemporary postmodern metropole remains on the level of the political unconscious. (It should be pointed out of course that Jameson's schema is largely indifferent in this respect to the modernism/postmodernism divide.) What enables this is the fact that the third world subject, like Hegel's slave, exhibits a "situational consciousness" (Jameson's preferred substitute term for materialism). As "master," however, the metropolitan consciousness becomes enthralled to the fetishes which symbolize its dominance. [20] An analogous but weaker theory of the marginal as epistemologically privileged is to be found in the writings of Edward Said. In _The World, the Text and the Critic_, for example, Said chastises contemporary critical theory, especially poststructuralism, for its lack of "worldliness"--by which he evidently means much the same thing designated by Jameson's "situational consciousness." What is needed, according to Said, is "a sort of spatial sense, a sort of measuring faculty for locating or situating theory"^18^ which Said denotes simply as "critical consciousness." _The World, the Text and the Critic_ ultimately disappoints in its %own% failure to historically or "spatially" situate such "critical consciousness," but given Said's public commitment to Palestinian nationalism it wouldn't seem unreasonable to identify in his call for "worldliness" a prescription for "third-worldliness." [21] Both Jameson and Said--the former far more openly and forthrightly than the latter--violate central tenets of postmodernism, of course, insofar as they posit the existence of a marginal %consciousness% imbued with "presence" and "self-identity." That is, they appear to justify an orthodox postmodernist counter-accusation of "essentialism." Lest this should be thought to constitute a final incompatibility of postmodernism for an anti-imperialist, post-colonial standpoint, however, it is imperative to mention here the work of Gayatry Chakravorty Spivak. Foreseeing this difficulty, Spivak has (in her critical reading of the work of a radical collective of Indian historians known as the "subaltern studies group") sought to justify such "essentialism" as a strategic necessity, despite its supposed epistemological falsity. The radical, third world historian, writes Spivak, "must remain committed to the subaltern as the subject of his history. As they choose this strategy, they reveal the limits of the critique of humanism as produced in the west."^19^ Spivak, that is to say, poses the necessity for an exceptionalism: a conceptual reliance on the "subject of history," which as a poststructuralist she would condemn as reactionary and "humanist," is allowed on "strategical" grounds within the terrain of the "subaltern." It begins to sound ironically like the old pro-colonialist condescension to the "native's" need for myths that the educated metropolitan city- dweller has now dispensed with--but more on this below. [22] Even if the "marginal" cannot be proved to enjoy an epistemological advantage, however, its very %reality% as a 'situation' requiring direct action against oppression can be appealed to as politically and ethically exemplary. Thus, in her very poignant essay entitled "Feminism: the Political Conscience of Postmodernism?" (_UA_ 149-166) the critic and video artist Laura Kipnis proposes that feminism, seemingly entrapped between the "textualist" (i.e., modernist) aestheticism of French poststructuralist critics on the order of Cixous, Irigaray, etc., and North American liberal reformism (another case of "essentialism"), adopt "a theory of women not as class or caste but as colony" (_UA_ 161). The efforts of a Rorty or a Laclau to salvage "Enlightenment" by ridding it of foundationalism and leaving only its "pragmatic" procedures would, in this view, be too little too late. For Kipnis, as for Craig Owens,^20^ postmodernism denotes what is really the definitive decline of the "West" and its colonial systems of power. If those marginalized within the center itself, e.g., women, are to rescue themselves from this sinking ship they must model their opposition on the practice of non-Western anti-colonial rebels. Referring to the 1986 bombing of Libya, Kipnis writes: "When retaliation is taken, as has been announced, for 'American arrogance,' %this% is the postmodern critique of Enlightenment; it is, in fact, a decentering, it is the margin, the absence, the periphery rewriting the rules from its own interest" (_UA_ 163). [23] An analogous proposal for third world revolt within the conceptual terrain of postmodernism has been issued by George Yudice. Against the postmodern 'ethics' formulated by Foucault as an "aesthetics of existence"--manifesting itself, e.g., in the liberal comforts of pluralism--Yudice suggests finding an ethical standard "among the dominated and oppressed peoples of the 'peripheral' or underdeveloped countries."^21^ As a mere "aesthetic" the postmodern "explores the marginal, yet is incapable of any solidarity with it" (_UA_ 224). Yudice terms this marginal ethic an "ethic of survival" and points to the example set by Rigoberta Menchu, a Guatemalan Mayan woman who has recorded her experiences as an organizer for the Christian base community movement against genocidal repression.^22^ "Menchu, in fact, has turned her very identity into a 'poetics of defense.' Her oppression and that of her people have opened them to an unfixity delimited by the unboundedness of struggle" (_UA_ 229). In Menchu's ethical example we thus have, so to speak, the subversive promise of "unfixity" a la Mouffe-Laclau made flesh. [24] Yudice is not the first to attempt this particular inflection with specific reference to Latin America. The "liberation theology" which guides Menchu's practice as a militant might itself lay some claim to represent an indigenously Latin American postmodernism--"avant la lettre" insofar as Foucault and his followers are concerned. The philosophical implications of liberation theology have been worked out by the so-called "Philosophy of Liberation," a intellectual current which developed in Argentina in the early 1970s. As recounted recently by Horacio Cerutti-Guldberg,^23^ "Philosophy of Liberation" set out explicitly to formulate a uniquely Latin American doctrine of liberation which would be "neither a liberal individualism nor a Marxist collectivism" (_LAP_ 47). Rather, it would set itself the goal of "philosophizing out of the social demands of the most needy, the marginalized and despised sectors of the population" (_LAP_ 44). This in turn requires, according to exponent Enrique Dussel, a new philosophical method--known as "analectics"--based on the logical priority or "anteriority" of the exterior (i.e., the marginal, the Other) over totality.^24^ "Analectics" are to supplant the "Eurocentric" method of dialectics. As Cerutti-Guldberg observes: Dialectics (it doesn't matter whether Hegelian or Marxist, since analectical philosophy identifies them) could never exceed "intra-systematicity." It would be incapable of capturing the requirements of "alterity" expressed in the "face" of the "poor" that demands justice. In this sense, it would appear necessary to postulate a method that would go beyond (ana-) and not merely through (dia-) the totality. This is the "analectical" method which works with the central notion of analogy. In this way, analectical philosophy would develop the "essential" thinking longed for by Heidegger. Such thinking would be made possible when it emerges out of the cultural, anthropological "alterative" Latin American space. This space is postulated as "preliminary in the order of Being" and "posterior in the order of knowledge" with respect to the "ontological totality." It is constituted by the poor of the "third world." (_LAP_ 50) [25] In Dussel's _Philosophy of Liberation_ the logic of going "beyond" the totality ultimately leads to explicit theology and mysticism. "What reason can never embrace--the mystery of the other as other--only faith can penetrate" (Dussel 93). But the "analectical" method has received other, non- theological formulations in Latin America, most notably in the case of the Cuban critic Roberto Fernandez Retamar, whose theoretical writings of the early 1970s^25^ were aimed at refuting the possibility that a "universal" theory of literature could truthfully reflect the radical alterity of "Nuestra America." This is argued to be so not only as a result of the unequal, exploitative relation of imperial metropolis to periphery--a relation which is historically evolved and determined and thus subject to transformation--but because all notions of universality (e.g., Goethe's, and Marx and Engels' idea of a _Weltliteratur_) are fictions masking the reality of radical diversity and alterity. [26] One should point out here that Retamar's philosophical authority is Jose Marti and certainly not Derrida, Deleuze or Foucault, whom, had he been aware of them at the time, Retamar would almost surely have regarded with skeptical hostility. Dussel and the various Latin American philosophers associated with "Philosophy of Liberation" have obvious debts to European phenomenology and existentialism, especially Heidegger and Levinas. But here, too, a philosophical trend in which we can now recognize the idea of postmodernity as a radical break with Enlightenment develops out of what is perceived at least as a direct %social and political% demand for theory to adequately reflect the life-world of those who are, as it were, both "marginal" and the "subject of history" at once. One can sympathize with the general impatience of Latin American critics and theorists who see in the category of the "postmodern" what appears to be yet another neo- colonial attempt to impose alien cultural models. (Such would probably be Retamar's conscious sentiments.) But the example of the "analectical" critiques of Dussel and Retamar shows, in fact, that the intellectual and cultural gulf is overdrawn and that all roads to postmodernism do not lead through French poststructuralism. (3) [27] Do we then find a %Latin American culture% of postmodernism linked to these particular conceptual trends? I would argue--and have argued elsewhere^26^-- that the recent proliferation in Latin America of so- called "testimonial" narratives like that of Rigoberta Menchu, as well as the fictional and quasi-fictional texts which adopt the perspective of the marginalized (see, _inter alia_, the works of Elena Poniatowska, Eduardo Galeano and Manlio Argueta), give some evidence of postmodernity insofar as they look for ways of "giving voice" to alterity. Significant here is their implicit opposition to the more traditional (and modernist) approach of "magical realism" in which the marginal becomes a kind of aesthetic mode of access to the ground of national or regional unity and identity. One could include here as well the general wave of interest in Latin American popular and "barrio" culture as an embodiment of 'resistance.' [28] But our direct concern here is with the ideological character of the conceptual trend as such. Does the move to, as it were, %found% post-modernism's anti-foundationalism in the rebellious consciousness of those marginalized by modernity alter orthodox postmodernism's reactionary character? [29] I submit that it does not. Basing themselves on what is, to be sure, the decisive historical and political reality of unequal development and the undeniably imperialist and neo-colonialist bias of much metropolitan-based theory, the "left" postmodernists we have surveyed here all, to one degree or another, proceed to distort this reality into a new irrationalist and spontaneist myth. Marginality is postulated as a condition which, purely by virtue of its objective %situation%, spontaneously gives rise to the %subversive particularity% upon which postmodern politics pins its hopes. %But where has this been shown actually to occur? Where has imperialism, and its attendant "scientific" and cultural institutions, actually given way and not simply adapted to the "new social movements" founded on ideals of alterity?% [30] Jameson, whose argument for a third-world cognitive advantage points openly to an anti- imperialist nationalism as the road to both political and cultural redemption from postmodern psychic and social pathologies, speaks to us of Ousmane Sembene and Lu Hsun, but leaves out the larger question of where strategies of all-class national liberation have ultimately led Africa and China--of whether, in fact, nationalism, even the radical nationalism of cultural alterity, can be said to have succeeded as a strategy of anti-imperialism. As Aijaz Ahmad remarked in his well-taken critique of Jameson's essay, Jameson's retention of a "three worlds" theoretical framework imposes a view of neo-colonial society as free of class contradictions.^27^ [31] Spivak's move to characterize the "subaltern" as what might be termed "deconstruction with a human face" only leads us further into a spontaneist thicket-- although the logic here is more consistent than in Jameson and Said, since the transition from colonial to independent status itself is reduced to a "displacement of function between sign systems" (Spivak, 198). [32] Kipnis, whose attempt to implicate %both% textualist and reformist feminisms in a politics of elitism and quietism has real merits, can in the end offer up as models for an "anti-colonial" feminism little more than the vague threat of anti-Western counter-terror from radical third-world nationalists such as Muammar Khadafy. We recall here Lenin's dialectical insight in _What is to be Done?_ regarding the internal link between spontaneism and an advocacy of terrorism. Yudice's counter-posing of a third world "ethic of survival" to a postmodern ethic of "self- formation" possesses real force as itself an ethical judgement and one can only concur in arguing the superior moral example of a Rigoberta Menchu. But where does this lead us %politically%? Those super- exploited and oppressed at the periphery thus become pegged with a sort of sub-political consciousness, as if they couldn't or needn't see beyond the sheer fact of "survival." [33] Are these lapses into the most threadbare sorts of political myths and fetishes simply the result of ignorance or bad faith on the part of sympathetic first world theorists? Not at all, I would suggest. Regarding current political reality in Latin America, at least, such retreats into spontaneism and the overall sub-estimation of the conscious element in the waging of political struggle merely reflect in a general way the continuing and indeed %increasing% reliance of much of the autochthonous anti-imperialist left on a similar mix of romantic faith in exemplary violence and in the eventual spontaneous uprising of the "people," whether with bullets or with ballots. Although both _foquismo_ and the strategy of a "peaceful road to socialism" based on populist alliances are recognized on one level to have failed, the conclusions drawn from this by the mainstream left have on the whole only led to an even more thorough- going abandonment of Marxist and Leninist political strategies in favor of a "democratic" politics of consensus. The strategic watchword seems to be "hegemony"--as derived, so far, from Gramsci, although who can say whether Laclau and Mouffe might not stage a rapid conquest of the Latin American left intelligentsia the way Althusser did two decades ago? If the left is to reverse the disastrous consequences of praetorian fascism in the Southern Cone and Brazil, for example--a reversal now basically limited to the regaining of a "lost" bourgeois "democracy"--this will supposedly require a less "sectarian" approach in which such slogans as "democracy" and "national sovereignty" are given a "popular" rather than an "elite" content. The matter of %ideology%--the question of whether, for example, "democracy," "national sovereignty," etc., are the political ideas through which the masses of exploited Latin Americans are to attain true emancipation--is now generally dropped. (Another case of "essentialism.") What is needed is to wage a "war of position" fought by a left-hegemonized "popular bloc" and not by a movement of workers and class-allies organized in a revolutionary party. [34] This is not to say that the Gramscian political strategy associated with "hegemony" is necessarily tied to spontaneism; for Gramsci, at least, the "hegemony" required could only be the result of conscious political organizing and guidance by a working-class party itself led by its own "organic intellectuals." (To what extent this accords or diverges from the Leninist strategy of democratic centralism is a matter we cannot go into here.) In its currently general acceptation in Latin America, however--linked as it is to purely %reformist% ends--"hegemony" implies a need to substitute a form of organization based on spontaneously arising social and cultural ideologies and practices for the "older" one of party-based, consciousness-raising agitation and recruitment. The almost unanimous move of the mainstream left to embrace liberation theology and the Catholic Church-led Christian base-community movement (or at least to refrain from open polemics with it) is the most significant example of a politics of "hegemony" over one of ideology. [35] I think this entire political trend within Latin America can be correctly grasped only as a consequence of the failure of Marxists, in particular the established Communist Parties and allied organizations, to carry out a self-criticism from the left, and of the resulting shift rightward into political positions which merely compound the errors of the past. The response of traditional Latin American Marxism to the evident failure of populism (with or without a _foco_ component) as a variation on the orthodox "two-stage" model (democratic capitalism first, then socialism) has typically been to jettison the second stage entirely. One could argue with a certain justice that this collapse was inevitable, given the political mistakes already embedded in the older line. As Adolfo Sanchez Vasquez has recently pointed out,^28^ Latin Americans inherited the Marxism of the Second International, the Marxism which regarded revolution in the Western centers of capitalism as the necessary precondition for even national liberation, much less socialism or communism on the periphery. The Marx who, after studying British colonialism in Ireland, concluded that the liberation of Irish workers from imperialism was key to the political advance of an increasingly reformist and conservative British working class; the Marx who speculated that peasant communes in Russia might make feasible a %direct% transition to socialism: this Marx was largely unknown in Latin America. Thus when the Communism of the Third International adopted the "two stage" model for neocolonial countries, Latin American revolutionaries had scarcely any theoretical basis upon which to dissent. (This, according to Sanchez Vasquez, held true even for so original a Marxist thinker as Mariategui, who, perhaps because he had to go outside Marxism for theories sensitive to factors of unequal development, was ultimately led in the direction of the irrationalism of Bergson and Sorel.) Latin America is in no way unique in this, needless to say. Everywhere the dominant trend is to compound past errors with even greater ones, thus reaching the point of renouncing the very core of Marxism as such in preference for liberal anachronisms and worse. [36] I dwell on this because I think a truly critical assessment of an "anti-imperialist" postmodernism, as of orthodox postmodernism, requires a prior recognition of the essentially parasitical dependence of such thinking on Marxism and particularly on the %crisis within Marxism%--a dependence which, as we have repeatedly observed, postmodernism must systematically seek to erase. The very insistence on a politics of spontaneism and myth, on the tacit abandonment of conscious and scientific revolutionary strategy and organization, is, I am suggesting, the derivative %effect% of developments within Marxism itself, of what amounts to the %conscious political% decision to give up the principle of revolution as a scientifically grounded activity, as a praxis with a rational foundation. The contemporary emphasis on "cultural politics" which one finds throughout intellectual and radical discourse in Latin America as well as in the metropolis, while useful and positive to the degree that it opens up new areas for genuinely political analysis and critique, is symptomatic, in my view, of this theoretical surrender, and more often than not simply ratifies the non-strategy of spontaneism. One might almost speak these days of a "culturalism" occupying the ideological space once held by the "economism" of the Second International revisionists. To adopt the "postmodern" sensibility means, in this sense, to regard the "culturalization" of the political as somehow simply in accordance with the current nature of things--to so minimize the role of political determination as to eliminate it altogether. And yet, this sensibility itself is %politically% determined. [37] Spontaneism, however it may drape itself in populist slogans and admiration for the people's day to day struggle for survival, etc., rests on an intellectual distrust of the masses, a view of the mass as beyond the reach of reason and hence to be guided by myth. The Latin American masses have a long history of being stigmatized in this way by both imperial and creole elites. This elitism begins to lose its hold on the intelligentsia in the writings of genuine "radical democrats" such as Marti and is still further overcome in the discourses of revolutionary intellectuals such as Mariategui and Guevara, although even here vestiges of the old viewpoint remain. (Mariategui, who saw the Quechua-speaking indigenous peasants of Peru as beings with full historical and political subjecthood, maintained ridiculously archaic and racist views regarding Peru's blacks.) And, of course, sexism has been and remains a serious and deadly obstacle. [38] But in the era of 'postmodernity' we are being urged, in exchange for a cult of alterity, to relinquish this conception of the masses as the rational agents of social and historical change, as the bearers of progress. Given the increasing prevalence of such aristocratism, however it may devise radical credentials for itself, it becomes possible to fall short of this truly democratic vision, to be seduced by the false Nietzschean regard for the masses as capable only of an unconscious, instinctual political agency. [39] Ultimately, it may be only revolutionary practice, the %activity% of strategy and organization, that can successfully trouble the political reveries of postmodernism. But just the sheer history of such practice, particularly in Latin America, makes risible any theory which considers politics (in the Leninist sense) to be either too abstract to matter, or--in what finally amounts to the same thing--to be "self- produced," as Aronowitz has phrased it. [40] Perhaps the most eloquent refutation of spontaneist faith in "new social movements" is recorded in Roque Dalton's "testimonial classic" _Miguel Marmol_, in which the legendary Salvadoran revolutionary named in the title recounts a life as a communist militant in Central America. It is impossible to do justice to the combined practical wisdom and theoretical profundity of this narrative by citing excerpts--but one in particular speaks poignantly to the question at hand: In the third chapter of the text, Marmol discusses his return in 1930, shortly before he participates in founding the Salvadoran Communist Party, to his home town of Ilopango. His task is to organize a union of rural workers. At first, as he tells it, the workers reject him, suspicious of his being anti-Catholic. He is led to recall the failure of previous union organizing efforts carried out by a local teacher and a railroad engineer. "However, we suspected they had always worked outside reality, that they hadn't based their organizing work on the actual problems of people and, on the contrary, had created an impenetrable barrier between their 'enlightenment' and the 'backwardness' they ascribed to the people."^29^ [41] Marmol, however, persists in "finding out what the people thought" (_M_ 119)--that is, he refuses to take their initially backward reaction (defense of the church) to mean that they lack "enlightenment." Meetings are called, and as the people begin to talk about working conditions, Marmol recalls, "it wasn't hard to hear, over and over again, concepts that sounded to me just like the 'class struggle,' the 'dictatorship of the proletariat,' etc." (_M_ 136-136). Marmol's task, then, is not that of "enlightening" the "backward" masses, nor is it simply to acknowledge "what the people thought" as sovereign. Rather, it is to collect these isolated concepts, to %articulate% them, and to draw the logically necessary conclusions. [42] Here, in so many words, Marmol demonstrates his profound, dialectical grasp of the essential, contradictory relation of theory to practice, of concept to reality, of the conscious to the spontaneous, of the "from without" to the "from within." Postmodernism, meanwhile, even at its most "left," political and self-critical, remains cut-off from the dialectical truths discovered in the practice of Marmol and of the millions of others in Latin America and across the planet who preceded and will follow him. _______________________________________________________ NOTES 1. An original version of this paper was presented as a lecture, entitled "Postmodernism and Hegemony: Theory and Politics in Latin America," at the Humanities Institute at SUNY Stony Brook on March 2, 1989. 2. Fredric Jameson, "Postmodernism and Consumer Society," in _The Anti-aesthetic: Essays on Postmodern Culture_, ed. Hal Foster (Port Townsend, WA:Bay Press, 1983), 112. 3. Stanley Aronowitz, "Postmodern and Politics," in _Universal Abandon?: the Politics of Postmodernism_, ed. Andrew Ross (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1988), 50. _Universal Abandon?_ cited hereafter in text and notes as _UA_. 4. Chantal Mouffe, "Radical Democracy," _UA_ 32. 5. Ernesto Laclau, "Politics and the Limits of Modernity," _UA_ 66-67. 6. Jean-Francois Lyotard, _The Postmodern Condition_, trans. Geoff Bennington and Brian Massumi (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984). 7. Frederick Engels, _Socialism: Utopian and Scientific_ (Beijing: Foreign Languages Press, 1975), 46. 8. See Ellen Meiksins Wood, _The Retreat from Class: a New 'True' Socialism_ (London: Verso, 1986) chapter 4, "The Autonomization of Ideology and Politics." 9. Georg Lukacs, _The Destruction of Reason_, trans. Peter Palmer (Atlantic Highlands, N.J.: Humanities Press, 1981), 395. 10. "The two moments--that of reason and that of its other--stand not in opposition pointing to a dialectical _Aufhebung_, but in a relationship of tension characterized by mutual repugnance and exclusion" (Habermas, "The Entry into Postmodernity: Nietzsche as Turning Point" in _The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity_, trans. Frederick Lawrence (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1987), 103). 11. See the introductory chapter to my _Modernism and Hegemony: a Materialist Critique of Aesthetic Agencies_ (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1990). 12. "[T]he exterior is constituted by other discourses." Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe, _Hegemony and Socialist Strategy: Towards Radical Democratic Politics_ (London: Verso, 1985), 146. 13. See Lenin, _What is to Be Done?: Burning Questions of Our Movement_ (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1973): all worship of the spontaneity of the working class movement, all belittling of the role of the "conscious element," of the role of Social- Democracy, means, quite independently of whether he who belittles that role desires it or not, a strengthening of the influence of bourgeois ideology upon the workers. (39) Since there can be no talk of an independent ideology formulated by the working masses themselves in the process of their movement, the only choice is--either bourgeois or socialist ideology. There is no middle course (for mankind has not created a "third" ideology, and, moreover, in a society torn by class antagonisms, there can never be a non-class or an above-class ideology). Hence to belittle the socialist ideology in any way, to turn aside from it in the slightest degree means to strengthen bourgeois ideology. There is much talk of spontaneity. But the spontaneous development of the working class movement leads to its subordination to bourgeois ideology. . . . (40-41) 14. Peter Dews, _Logics of Disintegration_ (London: Verso, 1987), 217. 15. "Interview with Cornell West," _UA_ 273. 16. Fredric Jameson, "Third-World Literature in the Era of Multinational Capitalism," _Social Text_ 15 (Fall 1986): 69. 17. See Fredric Jameson, "Postmodernism: the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism," _New Left Review_ 146 (July-August 1984). 18. Edward Said, _The World, the Text and the Critic_ (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1983), 241. 19. Gayatry Chakravorty Spivak, _In Other Worlds: Essays in Cultural Politics_ (New York, London: Methuen, 1987), 209. 20. See "The Discourse of Others: Feminism and Postmodernism," in Foster, 57-82. 21. George Yudice, "Marginality and the Ethics of Survival," _UA_ 220. 22. See Rigoberta Menchu, _Me llamo Rigoberta Menchu y asi me nacio la conciencia_ (Mexico: Siglo veintiuno, 1983). 23. See "Actual Situation and Perspectives of Latin American Philosophy for Liberation," _The Philosophical Forum_ 20.1-2 (Fall-Winter 1988-89): 43- 61. Cited hereafter in text as _LAP_. 24. See Enrique Dussel, _Philosophy of Liberation_, trans. Aquilina Martinez and Christine Morkovsky (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis, 1985), 158-160. 25. Roberto Fernandez Retamar, _Para una teoria de la literatura hispano-americana_ (Habana: Casa de las Americas, 1975). 26. Neil Larsen, "Latin America and Postmodernity: a Brief Theoretical Sketch," unpublished paper; and _Modernism and Hegemony_. 27. Aijaz Ahmad, "Jameson's Rhetoric of Otherness and the 'National Allegory'," _Social Text_ 17 (Fall 1987): 3-27. 28. Adolfo Sanchez Vasquez, "Marxism in Latin America," _The Philosophical Forum_ 20.1-2 (Fall-Winter 1988-89): 114-128. 29. Roque Dalton, _Miguel Marmol_, trans. Kathleen Ross and Richard Schaaf (Willimantic, CT: Curbstone Press, 1982), 119. Cited hereafter in text as _M_. 30-Sep-90 23:41:57-GMT,18467;000000000000 Received: from aramis.rutgers.edu by klinzhai.rutgers.edu (5.59/SMI4.0/RU1.4/3.08) id AA26472; Sun, 30 Sep 90 19:41:54 EDT Received: by aramis.rutgers.edu (5.59/SMI4.0/RU1.4/3.08) id AA08464; Sun, 30 Sep 90 19:41:53 EDT Resent-Message-Id: <9009302341.AA08464@aramis.rutgers.edu> Received: from ncsuvm.ncsu.edu by aramis.rutgers.edu (5.59/SMI4.0/RU1.4/3.08) id AA18909; Sun, 30 Sep 90 05:46:41 EDT Message-Id: <9009300946.AA18909@aramis.rutgers.edu> Received: from ncsuvm.ncsu.edu by ncsuvm.ncsu.edu (IBM VM SMTP R1.2.2MX) with BSMTP id 8081; Sun, 30 Sep 90 05:45:28 EDT Received: from NCSUVM.BITNET by ncsuvm.ncsu.edu (Mailer R2.07) with BSMTP id 7879; Sun, 30 Sep 90 05:34:54 EDT Date: Sun, 30 Sep 90 05:09:53 EDT Reply-To: " Editors" Sender: "" From: " Editors" Subject: REVIEWS 990 To: Multiple recipients of list PMC-LIST Resent-To: mcgrew@darkstar.rutgers.edu Resent-Date: Sun, 30 Sep 90 19:41:51 EDT Resent-From: Charles Mcgrew VOICING THE NEONEW by SUSAN M. SCHULTZ University of Hawaii-Manoa Copyright (c) 1990 by Susan M. Schultz All rights reserved. Review of "Postmodern Poetries: Jerome J. McGann Guest -Edits an Anthology of Language Poets From North America and the United Kingdom," _Verse_ 7:1 (Spring, 1990): 6-73. [1] Postmodern poetry, especially Language poetry, is coming in from the cold. Not so long ago, postmodern poets published their work exclusively in small journals and disseminated it through small presses. Their radical differences from members of the Deep Image, Confessional, New York, and New Formalist schools probably condemned them to the margins of the publishing and the teaching worlds. But so, it seems, did their desire not to take part in (or to be co-opted by) that world. The climate is changing, however; a poetic greenhouse effect has lured well-known Language poets, among them Bob Perelman and Charles Bernstein, into the academy. Susan Howe has a book forthcoming from the well-established Wesleyan University Press. And the generally conservative pages of _Verse_, a journal published in Great Britain and the United States, have opened to their "neonew" (the word is Perelman's) attack on traditional versifying. The shepherd for this latest assault is Jerome McGann, long a lobbyist (or apologist, depending on your sympathies) for Language poetry. [2] Language writing is at once post-structuralist and interested in history, power, and leftist ideology. Language poetry bears an acknowledged debt to the Modernists' style, if not their substance; it also shores fragments against ruins, although it means to revel in that fragmentation. This issue of _Verse_ seems geared more toward the demands of the initiated than toward those of the merely curious; as McGann notes in his introduction, no anthology of postmodernist poetry is complete without postmodernist prose (these writers, like the Modernists, are poet- critics). The lack of a critical background hurts, as does McGann's teasing introduction. I will dwell a bit on the introduction, because its paradoxes seem to me central to the movement that McGann describes in it. [3] If editors are a species of literary parent, McGann is a benevolent father who neither instructs his progeny nor leaves them to fend entirely for themselves. His introduction takes the middle ground between these options, hinting at purpose, yet refusing at all turns to name it. And a tenuous middle ground it is, at least for readers not already privy to postmodernism's concerns--and perhaps also for those who are. For McGann does not so much mediate between the reader and the texts that follow as write an introduction that consistently fails to introduce. His various indeterminacies would not be so frustrating were he not to promise something more specific. "[T]he aim here is to give a more catholic view of the radical change which poetry has undergone since the Vietnam War" (6). "From a social and historical point of view, this collection aims to show certain features of the contemporary avant-garde poetry scene which are not apparent in [other collections]" (7). McGann never makes clear what he means by "radical change" and the "certain features" that distinguish his anthology from those that come before (Ron Silliman's _In the American Tree_ and Douglas Messerli's 1987, _Language Poetries, An Anthology_). [4] McGann's prose imitates the postmodern poetries he has chosen, and begins to define them by unravelling the kinds of definitions that we still like to believe govern the selection-process for any anthology. Curiously, however, McGann subscribes to his own set of definitions. According to McGann, these are not just Language poems, though "all the writing here is language-centered, whether the work in question is 'Language Writing' properly so-called (e.g., the selections from Hejinian, Bernstein, and McCaffery) or whether it is not (e.g., the selections from Howe, Bromige, or D.S. Marriott)." The secret to the difference between Language writing and language-centered writing lies, one assumes, in the names here mentioned. Rather than witness the move from the "authority" of Blake and Shelley to the nonauthoritative postmodernist realm of language, we move from one set of Big Names to another. The proclaimed gulf between "vision" and "language," the Romantics and the postmoderns, is not so wide after all. [5] McGann's introduction, then, for all its principle of uncertainty, violates its own code. For McGann describes postmodern poetry as poetry in which "The [decentered] I is engulphed in the writing; not an authority, it becomes instead a witness, for and against" (6). This jibes with Charles Bernstein's attack on poetic voice in "Stray Straws and Straw Men," in _The L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E Book_: "'The voice of the poet' is an easy way of contextualizing poetry so that it can be more readily understood . . . as listening to someone talk in their distinctive manner" (_LB_ 41). This emphasis on voice "has the tendency to reduce the body of a poet's work to little more than personality." And finally, "Voice is a possibility for poetry not an essence" (42). Several of the poets in this issue go to fascinating lengths to disrupt our expectation that we will be hearing poetic voices. Their strategies are often formal; the disjunction between form and content has become as much a critical standard these days as the New Critical junction was some forty years ago. [6] The most dramatic attempt to deflect us into language, away from the poet, is by Tina Darragh, in her sequence, "Bunch-Ups." Darragh gives us four rectangular boxes in which she has drawn long pipe-shaped lines; it's as if the reader looked at what she knew was the page of a book, but found that the lines were empty of words. At the bottom right section of each page, the lines "bunch-up"; below them one sees the portions of several lines of what looks like the OED: a number here, the beginning of a Latin term there, parts and wholes of English words. The piece effectively dramatizes the way in which the reader of a dictionary becomes--at random--the writer of an incomplete text. As she has written elsewhere, "Reading the definitions is like reading a foreign language developed specifically for English" (_LB_ 108). And yet readers suspicious that nothing any writer sets down is, in truth, random will note that the seemingly haphazard glimpses from a dictionary that she gives us are in fact fragments about the self, about a network, a definition that includes a reference to "sense," and one that reads "post in a statio" and is the 17th, archaic sense of a word. She makes connections, in other words, between dictionaries and selves, between networks of language and of people; her final fragment also suggests historical depth, even as it argues against the possibility of understanding history. [7] There are other notable attempts to foreground language and downplay the author, instances when, as Bernstein puts it, "the writing itself is seen as an instance of reality / fantasy / experience / event" (_LB_ 41). Christopher Dewdney, for example, whose "source text" is a museum catalogue, describes his method as follows: "In _The Beach_, _The City_, _The Theatre Party_ and _The Self Portrait_ source lines alternate with interference lines which are generally permutations of the adjacent source lines. The permutation lines echo the line before at the same time as they preview the line after them. This profoundly skews the semantic valences of most of the reading subsequent to the first interference line (which is the second line in these four poems) [two of which are printed here]" (21). The two poems printed here reminded me very much of John Ashbery's "Finnish Rhapsody" (from _April Galleons_), which Ashbery based on the repetitive style of the _Kalevala_. But Dewdney's procedure is, in its way, more radical; where Ashbery writes, and then rewrites his own text, Dewdney's contribution to a pre-existing text is his "interference" in it. [8] Bob Perelman's poem "Neonew" experiments with stanzas, the shapes of which are reflexive of the shape of history. Each section, until the end of the poem, is numbered "1," which reminds us that history exists always in the present. In the second section "1" Perelman writes about the way in which a change in spelling affected the "poor Tatars." backwards into the body into the body of the poor the body of the poor Tatars body of the poor Tatars Roman of the poor Tatars Roman history the poor Tatars Roman history intercalated an alphabetic letter Tatars Roman history intercalated an alphabetic letter they continue Tartars Roman history intercalated an alphabetic letter they continue Tartars of fell Tartarean nature to this day (41) Political power does not just give the victors the power to rewrite history; it also governs the empire's spelling books. As Foucault knew, power operates everywhere, even when its effects seem accidental. Perelman's limited text is also an open one, because it eschews poetic "voice" in favor of "writing" (like Derrida, Language poets reverse the traditional narrative, according to which voice precedes writing). In his talk, "The Rejection of Closure," Perelman notes that, "The open text often emphasizes or foregrounds process, either the process of the original composition or of subsequent compositions by readers, and thus resists the cultural tendencies that seek to identify and fix material, turn it into a product; that is, it resists reduction and commodification" (quoted in Hartley, 38). This conception of the text is radically utopian; are we not able to describe the passage about "poor Tatars" in story-form? Can we not "interpret" this poem as we do "closed" texts? I suspect that we can, and that what Perelman--like any good poet--gives us is a new style in which to say what we already know. That the style is impersonal--that it does not reflect back on a subjective "I"--aligns it with the Modernism of T.S. Eliot and Marianne Moore. That this impersonal style works in the service of leftist politics does distinguish Perelman and his cohorts from the "great Modernists." Thus, the line: "'polis is eyes' 'O say can you see' 'police is eyes'," conveys the sweep of history from the Greek polis to the United States, and joins them through the connection of sight and authority. [9] Yet McGann's reliance on names to define postmodern poetries is revealing--not for anything it tells us of McGann, but for what it tells us about this --and other--anthologies of postmodern verse. Many of these poets do have recognizable styles. In that sense, to paraphrase Stevens, every disorder depends on there being an ordering consciousness in the background. If not voices, then, these poets have idiosyncratic ways of placing words on the page, individual means to distort syntax and to break "the basic assumptions of bourgeois subjectivity," as George Hartley phrases it in his cogent book on the Language poets (34). As Bernstein writes, "The best of the writing that gets called automatic issues from a series of choices as deliberate & reflected as can be" (43). Or, one might add, the best of postmodern writing issues through the filter of a mind that makes choices. [10] Charles Bernstein and Lyn Hejinian, identified by McGann as "proper" Language poets, and Susan Howe, an "improper" Language poet, all write with a lyricism that argues against the "decentered I"--or at least works in tension with it. Bernstein's "Debris of Shock/Shock of Debris" is a collage of mixed cliches (like mixed metaphors) that engages political concerns: Never burglarize a house with a standing army, nor take the garbage to an unauthorized junket. (69) He satirizes the capitalist's conflation of art with money, authority with seductiveness, as well as his "style," which formalizes capitalist politics: Yet it is the virile voice of authority, the condescending smugness in tone, that is thrilling. What does it matter that he hasn't any . . . "Creative goals and financial goals are identical: we just have different approaches on how to research those goals, and we have different definitions of risk." (71) Yet the comedy of pastiche that Bernstein creates melts into a lyricism that recalls John Ashbery's "Soonest Mended," where that poet moves abruptly from talk of brushing one's teeth to a lush Keatsian conclusion. We move from satire to a sense of loss: The salt of the earth is the tears of God, torn for penitence at having created this plenitude of sufferance. So we dismember (disremember) in homage to our maker, foraging in fits, forgiving in forests, spearing what we take to be our sustenance: belittling to rein things in to human scale. A holy land parched with grief & dulled envy. The land is soil & will not stain; such hope as we may rise from. (73) Here lyricism operates against what we think of as lyrical vision; this is a post-apocalyptic, post-Romantic vision. It is not Bernstein's only register, and yet the elegiac tone of the poem--the poet's grief for a wasted earth--suggests a new direction for postmodern poetry. Such poetry might acknowledge more fully its double desire to be jarring and lyrical, iconoclastic and reverential, skeptical and faithful to what land we have left. It might at least tease us with the possibility of an integrated self, even as it testifies to its loss, and the dangers of our nostalgia for it. [11] Let me add that there are moments of good fun in this anthology. After all, the deconstruction of established canons and styles is more often Dionysian than Apollonian. Consider David Bromige's "Romantic Traces," which proclaims its purpose in empurpled Keatsisms: It is time I pledge some vows, apart from those, that is, I've taken to the lyre, to be as true to it as chainsaw is to boughs ready to make a widow the next forest fire-- and suddenly I hear I'm to be retired for failing to accumulate sufficient fans and denied a seat with the Olympians because I sang and wrote when by democracy inspired! (51) Now that poets like Bromige and his fellow postmoderns are "accumulating sufficient fans," anthologies such as this one should provide an important link between poets and whatever "common readers" remain. _______________________________________________________ Works Cited Andrews, Bruce and Charles Bernstein, eds. _The L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E Book_. Carbondale: Southern Illinois UP, 1984. Hartley, George. _Textual Politics and the Language Poets_. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1989. 30-Sep-90 23:42:10-GMT,14877;000000000000 Received: from aramis.rutgers.edu by klinzhai.rutgers.edu (5.59/SMI4.0/RU1.4/3.08) id AA26477; Sun, 30 Sep 90 19:42:07 EDT Received: by aramis.rutgers.edu (5.59/SMI4.0/RU1.4/3.08) id AA08489; Sun, 30 Sep 90 19:42:05 EDT Resent-Message-Id: <9009302342.AA08489@aramis.rutgers.edu> Received: from ncsuvm.ncsu.edu by aramis.rutgers.edu (5.59/SMI4.0/RU1.4/3.08) id AA18919; Sun, 30 Sep 90 05:49:21 EDT Message-Id: <9009300949.AA18919@aramis.rutgers.edu> Received: from ncsuvm.ncsu.edu by ncsuvm.ncsu.edu (IBM VM SMTP R1.2.2MX) with BSMTP id 8115; Sun, 30 Sep 90 05:48:45 EDT Received: from NCSUVM.BITNET by ncsuvm.ncsu.edu (Mailer R2.07) with BSMTP id 7916; Sun, 30 Sep 90 05:36:41 EDT Date: Sun, 30 Sep 90 05:11:50 EDT Reply-To: " Editors" Sender: "" From: " Editors" Subject: POP-CULT 990 To: Multiple recipients of list PMC-LIST Resent-To: mcgrew@darkstar.rutgers.edu Resent-Date: Sun, 30 Sep 90 19:42:04 EDT Resent-From: Charles Mcgrew VACATION NOTES: HAUTE-TECH IN THE HAUTES-MONTAGNES by JIM ENGLISH University of Pennsylvania Copyright (c) 1990 by Jim English, all rights reserved. [1] Even to a fan like me, the Tour de France seems a pretty weird sporting event. By the standards of contemporary spectator sport, there is something almost laughable in a three-week-long bicycle race that is so elaborately staged and involves so much apparatus and so many people, yet offers so few moments of real excitement. Race organizers are aware of this, and have lately been attempting to bring the event better into line with the contemporary sporting scene. But to judge by this year's Tour, which two friends and I followed during its final week through the Pyrenees, these attempts to improve or normalize the race are only making it stranger. While we certainly enjoyed the race as a race, we found ourselves enjoying it even more as a sort of comedy of cultural contradictions. The recent efforts to "modernize" what remains basically an old-world, pain-oriented, macho sport (its traditional off-season counterpart is boxing) have created some bizarre incongruities. The commercial packaging and the "look" of the Tour have been dramatically altered by the introduction of new technologies, but the mythology of the sport, along with the activity itself--the actual physical demands made on competitors--have scarcely changed since the turn of the century. More and more one is confronted with disconcerting asymmetries between the "modernized" Tour de France and a cycling culture whose material and mythological elements resist modernization. [2] One such material element is the bike rider's derriere. For the second year in a row, an apparently secure victory was imperilled in the closing days by a saddle boil, reminding everyone that despite impressive recent developments in clothing and hygiene technologies, there has been little success in containing eruptions of the lower bodily stratum: a rider's sore bottom can still become the focal point and the decisive factor of the whole colossal production. It's easy to be misled in this regard by today's aerodynamic, miracle-fiber uniforms, which have a cleaner, zippier look than the old suits and, with their shiny surfaces, make far more effective billboards for team sponsors. But the fact is that inside this state-of-the-art gear there is not only perspiration, blood, and puss but also sometimes urine and even diarrhea. Seven consecutive hours of racing will induce unhappy effects in even the best dressed of competitors. [3] Like the uniforms, the bikes too keep getting sleeker, more reliable, more specialized and rational in design. But this only accentuates the extreme unreliability of the riders, who this year seemed more than ever uncertain of their abilities and confused about their roles. Consider Claudio Chiappucci, a second-rank rider for the struggling Carrera Jeans team. Judged a non-contender, Chiappucci was permitted a substantial lead on the opening stage, and then spent the entire race losing time to rivals while hurling insults at them for lacking his "panache." Yet this apparent mediocrity held on for an impressive second place and very nearly became the first rider in modern times to "steal" a Tour de France. Pre-race favorite Raul Alcala, a brilliant natural climber, was all bulked up this year to improve his strength on the flats. His weight training seemed to be paying off, and for the first week everyone was in awe of the new, more muscular Alcala. But as soon as the race hit the mountains, this aura of invincibility dissolved and, as one rider remarked at Mont Blanc, Alcala suddenly just seemed "big and slow like a dirigible." The other rider who came to the race with a new and more robust physique was defending champion Greg LeMond. But in this case no one was intimidated by the extra poundage. With his cutting-edge aerodynamic equipment and flawless position on the bike, the blimp-like LeMond had been a comical sight all season, putting in performances that can only be described as embarrassing. "I worry more about my grandmother," 1987 Tour winner Stephen Roche said at one point this spring. Yet LeMond proved against all evidence to be the fittest rider in the race, and produced a beautifully economical victory. As so often happens, the French cycling press was reduced in the end to explaining the race in terms of "miracles." While technological developments have succeeded in virtually eliminating the wild card of mechanical failure, oddsmakers are still losing their shirts on the Tour and sportswriters are still narrativizing it as spiritual quest. [4] Of course this is, for many, the whole appeal of the event, that it forces riders past known limits, past the point of predictability. The cumulative strain of stage racing actually makes the riders ill; by the final week you can hear collective coughing and wheezing at the crest of quite modest inclines. Under these conditions a rider's form is so fragile that even a proven champion can, as they say, "crack" or "explode" at a crucial moment. Indeed, such moments are for aficionados the race's main attraction. "Suffering" is the established god term of the French cycling vernacular. For diehard Tour fans, the only spectacle that matters is that of the body in pain. (The male body, that is. Though a women's race has been part of the Tour for a decade, few fans have accepted the idea of a woman stage racer. This year organizers finally gave up and, despite the near certainty of another French victory by the great Jeannie Longo, abolished the Tour Feminin.) [5] To take part in these pain-fests, fans are willing to suffer a bit themselves. To catch the finish of the decisive 16th stage at Luz-Ardiden in the Pyrenees we had to negotiate an enormous traffic jam at the base of the climb, hike fifteen kilometers uphill in near- record heat, wait three hours for the race, and then hike back down again through the exhaust fumes and honking horns of a traffic jam that now extended from the top of the mountain to the center of Lourdes, 35km away. All this to see a few small clusters of contenders shoot past, followed by perhaps a half hour's worth of intermittent stragglers. It is difficult to explain to non-Tour fanatics why five hundred thousand people would put up with so much for so little, some of them actually camping out at the summit days in advance, staking their ground at Luz- Ardiden while the race was still in Marseilles. For Tour fans, the point is simply to be there, not just for social reasons (as is the case in small villages en route) but in order to share in some measure the lived space of the riders during their moments of suffering. Even to know the final outcome of the stage is not as important as experiencing simultaneously with the riders themselves the terrain, the weather, the exact force of the obstacles that must be overcome. A particularly difficult stretch of road two or three kilometers from the summit, or an haute-categorie climb at some much earlier point in the race--any spot where a key contender is likely to "crack"--will attract nearly as many fans as the finish area itself. [6] But this determination simply to be there at all costs is not really what Tour organizers desire in a spectator, and the fans who made the trek up to Luz- Ardiden--variously French, Bearnaise-French, Basque, and Spanish, but overwhelmingly low-income farmers and laborers--do not represent an ideal mix from the standpoint of prospective sponsors. The predominance of "peasants" is one bottom-line disadvantage to the sport's old-world ethic of suffering. Another is that high levels of sickness and pain in the Tour can only be secured by long (sometimes week-long) stretches of utterly routine, and in themselves uninteresting, softening-up stages. And while it's true that a body at the breaking point has a certain marketability, in the grand calculus of advertising a 22-day sporting event configured around two or three moments of extreme anguish (for which, moreover, there can be no charge of admission) leaves plenty of room for commercial adjustments. [7] Hence the recent efforts to "modernize" the Tour, of which the increasing emphasis on equipment innovation and technological advantage is just one sign. Another and more telling sign was the giant "television" (actually a collapsible scoreboard-type screen mounted in a mock-TV cabinet) that was perched at the very summit of the Luz-Ardiden climb. The mountain is so barren, and rises so steeply to such a sharp peak, that this mammoth symbol of the "new" Tour de France was clearly visible four and five kilometers down the road. As the riders made their way over the fearsome col de Tourmalet, the last hurdle before the Luz, all eyes, binoculars, and telescopic camera lenses were trained on this impressive publicity gimmick from Antenne 2, the official channel of the Tour. It was quite a sight: half a million people clustered densely together atop a magnificent mountain in the Pyrenees, all watching TV. From our naked-eye perspective at the 2km mark, the screen itself looked blank: the scene resembled nothing so much as pilgrims come to make sacrifice before some great and impassive idol, their TV-God. But the real moment of truth arrived when the first of the riders came charging past. With the actual race now taking place before their eyes, many people continued to watch the simulation. And who can blame them? If we had been closer, or had brought binoculars, we would have done the same. A bike race on a TV screen is far more "watchable" by the measure of contemporary sports entertainment than is the erratic parade of men in pain that constitutes a bike race on a mountain side. [8] And of course this is what is really at stake in "modernizing" the Tour; altering patterns of consumption, reshaping the practice of spectatorship. The new parameters of the route, to which fans are already growing accustomed--fewer ultra-high-mileage days, fewer marathon climbing stages, more half-stages, more intermediate sprints for bonus points, etc.--are not just increasing the proportion of watchable to unwatchable moments, but re-presenting the whole race as something you watch rather than something you do. Persuading mountaintop spectators to keep their eyes on the box rather than the road is only an incidental step in this process of modernization. The main thing is to persuade a new and more "contemporary" audience, the chic boutique owners in the Marais, for example, or the yuppies who are buying condos out at La Villette (French for Silicon Valley)--all those upscale Parisians whose only contact with the race is the annoying jam of tourists along the Champs Elysees during the ceremonial final stage--that the Tour de France is for them, too. That it's fun to watch! [9] Whether this marketing strategy can ever really succeed with a "peasant sport" so strikingly ill-suited to the demands of commercial television is not at all certain. When the Tour rolled through the Alps this year there was a stylish young Parisian in the lead, yet organizers were unable to translate this into anything remotely resembling "Tour fever" in Paris. And their inability to sell the Tour Feminin, perhaps the boldest modernizing step of all, is another sign that their effectivity is far from unlimited. Nonetheless, that giant TV screen atop Luz Ardiden did represent genuine change. The Tour de France is already being practiced differently by its fans, and the transformation of cycling culture is likely to continue even if it doesn't pay off in the end for the sponsors. And although there's nothing to regret in the Tour's shedding of its pseudo-spiritual, macho- masochistic character, we can hardly celebrate the emergence of one more frameable, watchable sports- entertainment package. Personally, I take heart from the Tour's caricatural American twin--perhaps the first truly postmodern bicycle race--the Tour de Trump. Even a thoroughly banalized Tour de France can still exceed the organizers' intentions and leave space for some saving cultural comedy. 30-Sep-90 23:42:19-GMT,11806;000000000000 Received: from aramis.rutgers.edu by klinzhai.rutgers.edu (5.59/SMI4.0/RU1.4/3.08) id AA26483; Sun, 30 Sep 90 19:42:17 EDT Received: by aramis.rutgers.edu (5.59/SMI4.0/RU1.4/3.08) id AA08498; Sun, 30 Sep 90 19:42:16 EDT Resent-Message-Id: <9009302342.AA08498@aramis.rutgers.edu> Received: from ncsuvm.ncsu.edu by aramis.rutgers.edu (5.59/SMI4.0/RU1.4/3.08) id AA18947; Sun, 30 Sep 90 05:52:05 EDT Message-Id: <9009300952.AA18947@aramis.rutgers.edu> Received: from ncsuvm.ncsu.edu by ncsuvm.ncsu.edu (IBM VM SMTP R1.2.2MX) with BSMTP id 8156; Sun, 30 Sep 90 05:51:24 EDT Received: from NCSUVM.BITNET by ncsuvm.ncsu.edu (Mailer R2.07) with BSMTP id 7958; Sun, 30 Sep 90 05:38:10 EDT Date: Sun, 30 Sep 90 05:13:08 EDT Reply-To: " Editors" Sender: "" From: " Editors" Subject: POSTFACE 990 To: Multiple recipients of list PMC-LIST Resent-To: mcgrew@darkstar.rutgers.edu Resent-Date: Sun, 30 Sep 90 19:42:15 EDT Resent-From: Charles Mcgrew POSTFACE: POSITIONS ON POSTMODERNISM [What follows is a written exchange among the editors about the contents of the first issue of _Postmodern Culture_. It is called a "postface" because it is meant to be read after the other items in the issue; we hope it will serve as a preface to discussion among other readers.] Eyal: Several of the works in this issue imply that there is a dynamic relationship between the decentered individual or event generally celebrated by postmodernity and some governing ideal, a hidden ground that operates through these texts. Kipnis, for instance, argues finally not only that the body is a text, or that intellectual history has a body, but also that there are "moments in the social body"-- intellectual constructs which organize history as an idea, more than just the sum of its parts. She shows an interest in "TRANSITION," and not just in particulars, and those transitions--which are explicitly staged in her medium--imply some organizing principle. Elaine: I find it provocative to consider whose bodies, and what relationships between them, are represented in these essays. For example, Kipnis's narrative movement back and forth from Marx to his maid Helene to late twentieth century teenage girls suggests, to me at least, a feminization of Marx's body (feminists have argued that women's bodies are sites for masculine writing, but here, Marx's body, like the anorectic's, occupies the position of tablet for cultural text). John: I'd agree that Kipnis is making a connection between particular male bodies and particular female bodies as "tablets for cultural text," but I'm not sure the movement between particulars amounts to the projection of a "governing ideal, a hidden ground" that Eyal sees here. It strikes me that many of these writers (Acker, English, Kipnis, even Yudice) emphasize the rude eruptions and crude particulars of the body in a way that is anything but idealizing. And while I agree with the idea that Kipnis, and others in this issue, want to see history as having a meaning, I don't think this necessarily involves each of these authors in a commitment to an "ideal," or to a teleology. I think that Kipnis, Ross, hooks, and others try to establish a context, rather than a ground, for the particular. Eyal: That may be what they would say. It's a popular position--and one that Larsen takes to task. He writes that Marxist thought criticizes Enlightenment values by offering "particular universals" (15): reason is time-bound, but it is universal at any point in time because of "the social universality of the proletariat" (6). Larsen uses this claim to indict postmodernism-- which he reads much as you do here, John--as promoting contexts that are not grounds; he charges that postmodernists appeal to irrationalism instead of recognizing the claims of Marxist universals, and their irrationalism then allows them to deflect the charge against capitalism (7, 9). Elaine: As a feminist reader responding to these essays, I find myself struggling with the very tension we are talking about--between attention to the particular and a yearning, to use hooks's word, for a transcending idea, a narrative which helps me evaluate what I read. hooks begins her essay by telling us that she is a black woman at a dinner party (which one other black person is attending). This is certainly a context, but in the end when she tells us about talking with other black people about postmodernism, context attains a kind of transcendence--hooks's "authority of experience." Likewise, Yudice's focus on bulimia seems driven by a desire to understand the body's participation in larger designs and meanings. Eyal: There is a similar impulse in several of these works. Yudice moves from class and gender to "the mystic" (5); hooks returns to "yearning" as the common condition (9); Schultz finds in Bernstein's poem an "elegiac tone" (10); and Acker says that she is a romantic and projects that romanticism in her stand as artist- against-the-dead-world. John: Acker does sound like an idealist when she asks whether "matter moving through forms [is] dead or alive," and she sounds romantic when she asserts that "they can't kill the spirit." But the transcendence she describes at the beginning of her narrative is transcendence within language: "when I write, I enter a world which has complex relations and is, perhaps, illimitable. This world both represents and is human history, public memories and private memories turned public, the records and actualizations of human intentions. This world is more than life and death, for here life and death conjoin." Perhaps she fails in her stated desire not to have a voice (as Schultz argues the Language Poets do), but it seems to me that her piece is not only about "the artist against the world," but also about the contact between the writer and the world--an *unpleasant* contact between a fragmented individual and the monolithic forces behind property law, involving a struggle over language, and the right to language. Elaine: Many of the writers here (Schultz, English, hooks, Beverley, Ross) illustrate the power of culture (rather than of the individual) to determine our use of language and the creation of texts. Schultz's point about McGann's classification of the contributors to _Verse_--that the difference between "Language writing, properly so called" and "language-centered writing" appears to be a matter of big names vs. lesser knowns-- raises the issue of politics within academic writing (a criticism that may be relevant to the project of creating this journal). But what Schultz's review accomplishes, and what Ross, Beverley, and hooks suggest we should attempt, is an interrogation of authorities. These writers believe such a practice can make a difference. John: I think Larsen would say that the interrogation of authority is not in itself the practice that will make a difference; he feels, as Eyal pointed out, that liberal critiques of authority ultimately serve the interests of authority by helping to "displace or pre-empt" revolutionary political practice. On the other hand, the authors you mention all aim at something beyond critique or interrogation. Ross, for example, argues directly against the idea (expressed in Larsen) that cultural authority is monolithic, *because* he wants to persuade us that change is possible: "capitalism is merely the site, and not the source, of the power that is often autonomously attributed to the owners and sponsors of technology" (37). Larsen's rejoinder is to ask "Where has imperialism, and its attendant 'scientific' and cultural institutions, actually given way and not simply adapted to the 'new social movements' founded on ideals of alterity?" (29). Eyal: On the whole, the writers in the issue value those who, like themselves, oppose the authoritarian tendencies of society. Social power resides in architecture and we fight it with music (Beverley); political repression is enforced by manipulating our collective image of the body and we fight it with dietary negativity--obesity, bulimia, anorexia (Yudice); society uses "viral hysteria" and the "Computer Virus Eradication Act" to restrict access to technology and information, and we fight it with countercultural hacking (Ross); the publishing establishment enforces copyright and we fight it by acknowledging the intertextual transgression implicit in all artistic practice (Acker). These writers are looking for a place from which to criticize the impulses to power which they uncover in the social text--but then any critical position is bound within that text. Elaine: Critical positions may be bound within the social text, but as we said earlier, some of these writers appear to be in two places at once, positioned in a particular historical political struggle but casting their writing beyond the particular toward some larger claim or understanding. In any case, the difference in our readings of these writers suggests that postmodernism remains fertile territory within which writers can explore new positions, and I find this encouraging. We hoped that _Postmodern Culture_ would provide a place for experimentation, for opening discussions, for dialogue. In some of our early explorations of what the journal could or should be (and do), we expressed a hope that we could dis-establish the practice of admitting only those who speak our language or who position themselves as we do. In fact, we hoped that the medium itself would encourage us to think of our writing as constituted both from the writer's position and from the readers'. Such thinking (about writing and reading) can lead to further experimentation within the academy, in culture, and with/in those relationships fostered through _Postmodern Culture_. How much difference we make remains to be seen. 30-Sep-90 23:42:29-GMT,13599;000000000000 Received: from aramis.rutgers.edu by klinzhai.rutgers.edu (5.59/SMI4.0/RU1.4/3.08) id AA26490; Sun, 30 Sep 90 19:42:27 EDT Received: by aramis.rutgers.edu (5.59/SMI4.0/RU1.4/3.08) id AA08509; Sun, 30 Sep 90 19:42:26 EDT Resent-Message-Id: <9009302342.AA08509@aramis.rutgers.edu> Received: from ncsuvm.ncsu.edu by aramis.rutgers.edu (5.59/SMI4.0/RU1.4/3.08) id AA19035; Sun, 30 Sep 90 05:54:42 EDT Message-Id: <9009300954.AA19035@aramis.rutgers.edu> Received: from ncsuvm.ncsu.edu by ncsuvm.ncsu.edu (IBM VM SMTP R1.2.2MX) with BSMTP id 8201; Sun, 30 Sep 90 05:53:52 EDT Received: from NCSUVM.BITNET by ncsuvm.ncsu.edu (Mailer R2.07) with BSMTP id 8003; Sun, 30 Sep 90 05:39:13 EDT Date: Sun, 30 Sep 90 05:15:45 EDT Reply-To: " Editors" Sender: "" From: " Editors" Subject: NOTICES 990 To: Multiple recipients of list PMC-LIST Resent-To: mcgrew@darkstar.rutgers.edu Resent-Date: Sun, 30 Sep 90 19:42:25 EDT Resent-From: Charles Mcgrew NOTICES Every issue of _Postmodern Culture_ will carry notices of events, calls for papers, and other announcments, up to 250 words, free of charge. Advertisements will also be published on an exchange basis. _______________________________________________________ MLA SESSION ANNOUNCEMENT Special Session #344, Friday 28 December, 1:45-3:00 PM Grand Ballroom East, Hyatt Regency (1990 MLA Convention, Chicago, Illinois, 27-30 December 1990) "Canonicity and Hypertextuality: The Politics of Hypertext" Session leader: Terence Harpold, University of Pennsylvania Panelist 1: Ted Nelson, Autodesk, Inc.: "How Xanadu (Un)does the Canon" Panelist 2: Stuart Moulthrop, Univ. of Texas/Austin: "(Un)doing the Canon I: The Institutional Politics of Hypertext" Panelist 3: Jay David Bolter, UNC Chapel Hill: "(Un)doing the Canon II: Hypertext as Polis and Canon" For more information, contact: Terence Harpold 420 Williams Hall University of Pennsylvania Philadelphia, PA 19104 Bitnet: Internet: _______________________________________________________ VERSE: JOHN ASHBERY'S INFLUENCE Susan M. Schultz and Henry Hart invite submissions for a collection of essays on the subject of John Ashbery's influence on contemporary poetry. Essays may address Ashbery's influence on particular poets or on the climate of contemporary poetry more generally (e.g., his influence on the Language movement, New Formalism, etc.). Two copies of abstracts are due 15 November; two copies of your essays by 15 December to Susan Schultz at the Department of English, University of Hawaii-Manoa, 1733 Donaghho Road, Honolulu, Hawaii 96822. _______________________________________________________ THE CENTENNIAL REVIEW Edited by R.K. Meiners The Review aims to be a journal of cultural study, more concerned with the relationships among disciplines and their social implications than with any single discipline. It seeks to publish the best work available from both younger and established scholars. Ethics in the Profession Volume XXXIV, No. 2, Spring 1990 Guest Editor: Stephen L. Esquith Locating Professional Ethics Stephen L. Esquith Politically Cases and Codes: Challenges for Michael S. Pritchard Teaching Engineering Ethics Called to Profess: Religious and David H. Smith Secular Theories of Vocation The Ethics Boom: A Philosopher's Michael Davis History Pricing Human Life: The Moral Leonard M. Fleck Costs of Medical Progress Faith and the Unbelieving Ethics Judith Andre Teacher Professional Ethics, Ethos, and William M. Sullivan the Integrity of the Professions Bioethics and Democracy Bruce Jennings Subscription Rates: $10/year $15/two years Foreign Postage--$3/year Single Issue: $3 Please make your check payable to _The Centennial Review_. Mail to _The Centennial Review_, 110 Morrill Hall, Michigan State University, East Lansing, MI 48824-1036 _______________________________________________________ NEW DELTA REVIEW _New Delta Review_ seeks poetry, fiction, and black-and- white artwork. 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Though MAGAZINE's primary focus will be journalistic, it will also address other magazine-publishing matters of economic (management, marketing, circulation, production, research), technological, historical and social importance. In sum, MAGAZINE will explore the history, current state and future prospects of the American Magazine. Among the topics included will be: magazine editorial trends and practices; journalistic and management norms in magazine publishing; evolving magazine technologies (those currently in use and new ones envisioned); the economics of magazine publishing, including the economic factors influencing magazine content; the history of magazines; the role of magazines in social development; educational issues related to teaching magazine journalism; "laboratory" magazine-project concepts and resources; and studies and research exploring the issues above. The conference will be moderated by Professor David Abrahamson of New York University's Center for Publishing, where he teaches the editorial segments of the NYU Management Institute graduate Diploma Course in Magazine Publishing and the Executive Seminar in Magazine Editorial Management. He is also the author of two teaching texts, "The Magazine Writing Workbook" and "The Magazine Editing Workbook." The MAGAZINE Hotline is scheduled to begin October 1, 1990. Magazine publishing professionals, magazine journalism educators, scholars and students, and other individuals interested in magazine issues are encouraged to participate. The MAGAZINE Hotline is sponsored by New York University's Center for Publishing and Comserve (the online information and discussion service for the communication disciplines). Those interested in participating in MAGAZINE can subscribe free by: (1) From a Bitnet or Internet account, sending a one-line e-mail message to either COMSERVE@RPIECS or COMSERVE@VM.ECS.RPI.EDU with the following text: Join Magazine YourFirstName YourLastName [Example: Join Magazine Mary Smith] (2) From an MCI-Mail account, sending a message adressed as follows: [To:] COMSERVE (EMS) Internet COMSERVE@VM.ECS.RPI.EDU [No Subject] [Message text] Join Magazine YourFirstName YourLastName (3) From a Compuserve account, send the same one-line message (no subject) to: >INTERNET:COMSERVE@VM.ECS.RPI.EDU [Note: Include the indicated ">".] Further information about the MAGAZINE Hotline will be sent to subscribers when the Hotline begins. However, if you have any immediate ideas, suggestions or questions about the Hotline, please contact David Abrahamson, at: abrahamson@acfcluster.nyu.edu or 3567652@mcimail.com or 165 east 32, NY 10016. _______________________________________________________ A Screaming comes across the wires--the list, PYNCHON. Its purpose is the discussion of and exchange of information about Thomas Pynchon and his writing. Appropriate topics range from serious critical discussion through esthetic opinions to apocryphal stories and unsubstantiated sightings (or non-sightings). Simon Fraser University does not have a LISTSERVER, so I have kludged together a group with remote addresses. To join the list send a request to me (E-mail USERDOG1@SFU.BITNET or USERDOG1@CC.SFU.CA). Because of the nature of the kludge, I need a name, or pseudonym if you prefer, as well as your Email address. The list is unrestricted, its just that I have to add members manually. List address: PYNCHON@SFU.BITNET or PYNCHON@CC.SFU.CA Jody USERDOG1@SFU.BITNET or USERDOG1@CC.SFU.CA _______________________________________________________ 2-Oct-90 1:23:45-GMT,53372;000000000001 Received: from aramis.rutgers.edu by klinzhai.rutgers.edu (5.59/SMI4.0/RU1.4/3.08) id AA02619; Mon, 1 Oct 90 21:23:41 EDT Received: by aramis.rutgers.edu (5.59/SMI4.0/RU1.4/3.08) id AA09591; Mon, 1 Oct 90 21:23:38 EDT Resent-Message-Id: <9010020123.AA09591@aramis.rutgers.edu> Received: from ncsuvm.ncsu.edu by aramis.rutgers.edu (5.59/SMI4.0/RU1.4/3.08) id AA11676; Mon, 1 Oct 90 15:55:46 EDT Message-Id: <9010011955.AA11676@aramis.rutgers.edu> Received: from ncsuvm.ncsu.edu by ncsuvm.ncsu.edu (IBM VM SMTP R1.2.2MX) with BSMTP id 7650; Mon, 01 Oct 90 15:49:28 EDT Received: from NCSUVM.BITNET by ncsuvm.ncsu.edu (Mailer R2.07) with BSMTP id 7646; Mon, 01 Oct 90 15:49:14 EDT Date: Mon, 1 Oct 90 15:46:02 EDT Reply-To: Editors of PMC Sender: Postmodern Culture From: Editors of PMC Subject: ROSS-1 990 To: Multiple recipients of list PMC-LIST Resent-To: mcgrew@darkstar.rutgers.edu Resent-Date: Mon, 1 Oct 90 21:23:36 EDT Resent-From: Charles Mcgrew HACKING AWAY AT THE COUNTERCULTURE by ANDREW ROSS Princeton University Copyright (c) 1990 by Andrew Ross, all rights reserved. [1] Ever since the viral attack engineered in November of 1988 by Cornell University hacker Robert Morris on the national network system Internet, which includes the Pentagon's ARPAnet data exchange network, the nation's high-tech ideologues and spin doctors have been locked in debate, trying to make ethical and economic sense of the event. The virus rapidly infected an estimated six thousand computers around the country, creating a scare that crowned an open season of viral hysteria in the media, in the course of which, according to the Computer Virus Industry Association in Santa Clara, the number of known viruses jumped from seven to thirty during 1988, and from three thousand infections in the first two months of that year to thirty thousand in the last two months. While it caused little in the way of data damage (some richly inflated initial estimates reckoned up to $100m in down time), the ramifications of the Internet virus have helped to generate a moral panic that has all but transformed everyday "computer culture." [2] Following the lead of DARPA's (Defence Advance Research Projects Agency) Computer Emergency Response Team at Carnegie-Mellon University, anti-virus response centers were hastily put in place by government and defence agencies at the National Science Foundation, the Energy Department, NASA, and other sites. Plans were made to introduce a bill in Congress (the Computer Virus Eradication Act, to replace the 1986 Computer Fraud and Abuse Act, which pertained solely to government information), that would call for prison sentences of up to ten years for the "crime" of sophisticated hacking, and numerous government agencies have been involved in a proprietary fight over the creation of a proposed Center for Virus Control, modelled, of course, on Atlanta's Centers for Disease Control, notorious for its failures to respond adequately to the AIDS crisis. [3] In fact, media commentary on the virus scare has run not so much tongue-in-cheek as hand-in-glove with the rhetoric of AIDS hysteria--the common use of terms like killer virus and epidemic; the focus on hi-risk personal contact (virus infection, for the most part, is spread on personal computers, not mainframes); the obsession with defense, security, and immunity; and the climate of suspicion generated around communitarian acts of sharing. The underlying moral imperative being this: You can't trust your best friend's software any more than you can trust his or her bodily fluids--safe software or no software at all! Or, as Dennis Miller put it on _Saturday Night Live_, "Remember, when you connect with another computer, you're connecting to every computer that computer has ever connected to." This playful conceit struck a chord in the popular consciousness, even as it was perpetuated in such sober quarters as the Association for Computing Machinery, the president of which, in a controversial editorial titled "A Hygiene Lesson," drew comparisons not only with sexually transmitted diseases, but also with a cholera epidemic, and urged attention to "personal systems hygiene."^1^ In fact, some computer scientists who studied the symptomatic path of Morris's virus across Internet have pointed to its uneven effects upon different computer types and operating systems, and concluded that "there is a direct analogy with biological genetic diversity to be made."^2^ The epidemiology of biological virus, and especially AIDS, research is being closely studied to help implement computer security plans, and, in these circles, the new witty discourse is laced with references to antigens, white blood cells, vaccinations, metabolic free radicals, and the like. [4] The form and content of more lurid articles like _Time_'s infamous (September 1988) story, "Invasion of the Data Snatchers," fully displayed the continuity of the media scare with those historical fears about bodily invasion, individual and national, that are often considered endemic to the paranoid style of American political culture.^3^ Indeed, the rhetoric of computer culture, in common with the medical discourse of AIDS research, has fallen in line with the paranoid, strategic style of Defence Department rhetoric. Each language-repertoire is obsessed with hostile threats to bodily and technological immune systems; every event is a ballistic manoeuver in the game of microbiological war, where the governing metaphors are indiscriminately drawn from cellular genetics and cybernetics alike. As a counterpoint to the tongue-in-cheek AI tradition of seeing humans as "information-exchanging environments," the imagined life of computers has taken on an organicist shape, now that they too are subject to cybernetic "sickness" or disease. So, too, the development of interrelated systems, such as Internet itself, has further added to the structural picture of an interdependent organism, whose component members, however autonomous, are all nonetheless affected by the "health" of each individual constituent. The growing interest among scientists in developing computer programs that will simulate the genetic behavior of living organisms (in which binary numbers act like genes) points to a future where the border between organic and artificial life is less and less distinct. [5] In keeping with the increasing use of biologically derived language to describe mutations in systems theory, conscious attempts to link the AIDS crisis with the information security crisis have pointed out that both kinds of virus, biological and electronic, take over the host cell/program and clone their carrier genetic codes by instructing the hosts to make replicas of the viruses. Neither kind of virus, however, can replicate themselves independently; they are pieces of code that attach themselves to other cells/programs-- just as biological viruses need a host cell, computer viruses require a host program to activate them. The Internet virus was not, in fact, a virus, but a worm, a program that can run independently and therefore _appears_ to have a life of its own. The worm replicates a full version of itself in programs and systems as it moves from one to another, masquerading as a legitimate user by guessing the user passwords of locked accounts. Because of this autonomous existence, the worm can be seen to behave as if it were an organism with some kind of purpose or teleology, and yet it has none. Its only "purpose" is to reproduce and infect. If the worm has no inbuilt antireplication code, or if the code is faulty, as was the case with the Internet worm, it will make already-infected computers repeatedly accept further replicas of itself, until their memories are clogged. A much quieter worm than that engineered by Morris would have moved more slowly, as one supposes a "worm" should, protecting itself from detection by ever more subtle camouflage, and propagating its cumulative effect of operative systems inertia over a much longer period of time. [6] In offering such descriptions, however, we must be wary of attributing a teleology/intentionality to worms and viruses which can be ascribed only, and, in most instances, speculatively, to their authors. There is no reason why a cybernetic "worm" might be expected to behave in any fundamental way like a biological worm. So, too, the assumed intentionality of its author distinguishes the human-made cybernetic virus from the case of the biological virus, the effects of which are fated to be received and discussed in a language saturated with human-made structures and narratives of meaning and teleological purpose. Writing about the folkloric theologies of significance and explanatory justice (usually involving retribution) that have sprung up around the AIDS crisis, Judith Williamson has pointed to the radical implications of this collision between an intentionless virus and a meaning-filled culture: Nothing could be more meaningless than a virus. It has no point, no purpose, no plan; it is part of no scheme, carries no inherent significance. And yet nothing is harder for us to confront than the complete absence of meaning. By its very definition, meaninglessness cannot be articulated within our social language, which is a system _of_ meaning: impossible to include, as an absence, it is also impossible to exclude-- for meaninglessness isn't just the opposite of meaning, it is the end of meaning, and threatens the fragile structures by which we make sense of the world.^4^ [7] No such judgment about meaninglessness applies to the computer security crisis. In contrast to HIV's lack of meaning or intentionality, the meaning of cybernetic viruses is always already replete with social significance. This meaning is related, first of all, to the author's local intention or motivation, whether psychic or fully social, whether wrought out of a mood of vengeance, a show of bravado or technical expertise, a commitment to a political act, or in anticipation of the profits that often accrue from the victims' need to buy an antidote from the author. Beyond these local intentions, however, which are usually obscure or, as in the Morris case, quite inscrutable, there is an entire set of social and historical narratives that surround and are part of the "meaning" of the virus: the coded anarchist history of the youth hacker subculture; the militaristic environments of search-and-destroy warfare (a virus has two components--a carrier and a "warhead"), which, because of the historical development of computer technology, constitute the family values of information techno-culture; the experimental research environments in which creative designers are encouraged to work; and the conflictual history of pure and applied ethics in the science and technology communities, to name just a few. A similar list could be drawn up to explain the widespread and varied _response_ to computer viruses, from the amused concern of the cognoscenti to the hysteria of the casual user, and from the research community and the manufacturing industry to the morally aroused legislature and the mediated culture at large. Every one of these explanations and narratives is the result of social and cultural processes and values; consequently, there is very little about the virus itself that is "meaningless." Viruses can no more be seen as an objective, or necessary, result of the "objective" development of technological systems than technology in general can be seen as an objective, determining agent of social change. [8] For the sake of polemical economy, I would note that the cumulative effect of all the viral hysteria has been twofold. Firstly, it has resulted in a windfall for software producers, now that users' blithe disregard for makers' copyright privileges has eroded in the face of the security panic. Used to fighting halfhearted rearguard actions against widespread piracy practices, or reluctantly acceding to buyers' desire for software unencumbered by top-heavy security features, software vendors are now profiting from the new public distrust of program copies. So, too, the explosion in security consciousness has hyperstimulated the already fast-growing sectors of the security system industry and the data encryption industry. In line with the new imperative for everything from "vaccinated" workstations to "sterilized" networks, it has created a brand new market of viral vaccine vendors who will sell you the virus (a one-time only immunization shot) along with its antidote--with names like Flu Shot +, ViruSafe, Vaccinate, Disk Defender, Certus, Viral Alarm, Antidote, Virus Buster, Gatekeeper, Ongard, and Interferon. Few of the antidotes are very reliable, however, especially since they pose an irresistible intellectual challenge to hackers who can easily rewrite them in the form of ever more powerful viruses. Moreover, most corporate managers of computer systems and networks know that by far the great majority of their intentional security losses are a result of insider sabotage and monkeywrenching. [9] In short, the effects of the viruses have been to profitably clamp down on copyright delinquency, and to generate the need for entirely new industrial production of viral suppressors to contain the fallout. In this respect, it is easy to see that the appearance of viruses could hardly, in the long run, have benefited industry producers more. In the same vein, the networks that have been hardest hit by the security squeeze are not restricted-access military or corporate systems but networks like Internet, set up on trust to facilitate the open academic exchange of data, information and research, and watched over by its sponsor, DARPA. It has not escaped the notice of conspiracy theorists that the military intelligence community, obsessed with "electronic warfare," actually stood to learn a lot from the Internet virus; the virus effectively "pulsed the system," exposing the sociological behaviour of the system in a crisis situation.^5^ The second effect of the virus crisis has been more overtly ideological. Virus-conscious fear and loathing have clearly fed into the paranoid climate of privatization that increasingly defines social identities in the new post-Fordist order. The result-- a psycho-social closing of the ranks around fortified private spheres--runs directly counter to the ethic that we might think of as residing at the architectural heart of information technology. In its basic assembly structure, information technology is a technology of processing, copying, replication, and simulation, and therefore does not recognize the concept of private information property. What is now under threat is the rationality of a shareware culture, ushered in as the achievement of the hacker counterculture that pioneered the personal computer revolution in the early seventies against the grain of corporate planning. [10] There is another story to tell, however, about the emergence of the virus scare as a profitable ideological moment, and it is the story of how teenage hacking has come to be increasingly defined as a potential threat to normative educational ethics and national security alike. The story of the creation of this "social menace" is central to the ongoing attempts to rewrite property law in order to contain the effects of the new information technologies that, because of their blindness to the copyrighting of intellectual property, have transformed the way in which modern power is exercised and maintained. Consequently, a deviant social class or group has been defined and categorised as "enemies of the state" in order to help rationalize a general law-and-order clampdown on free and open information exchange. Teenage hackers' homes are now habitually raided by sheriffs and FBI agents using strong-arm tactics, and jail sentences are becoming a common punishment. Operation Sundevil, a nationwide Secret Service operation in the spring of 1990, involving hundreds of agents in fourteen cities, is the most recently publicized of the hacker raids that have produced several arrests and seizures of thousands of disks and address lists in the last two years.^6^ [11] In one of the many harshly punitive prosecutions against hackers in recent years, a judge went so far as to describe "bulletin boards" as "hi-tech street gangs." The editors of _2600_, the magazine that publishes information about system entry and exploration that is indispensable to the hacking community, have pointed out that any single invasive act, such as that of trespass, that involves the use of computers is considered today to be infinitely more criminal than a similar act undertaken without computers.^7^ To use computers to execute pranks, raids, frauds or thefts is to incur automatically the full repressive wrath of judges urged on by the moral panic created around hacking feats over the last two decades. Indeed, there is a strong body of pressure groups pushing for new criminal legislation that will define "crimes with computers" as a special category of crime, deserving "extraordinary" sentences and punitive measures. Over that same space of time, the term _hacker_ has lost its semantic link with the journalistic _hack,_ suggesting a professional toiler who uses unorthodox methods. So, too, its increasingly criminal connotation today has displaced the more innocuous, amateur mischief-maker-cum-media-star role reserved for hackers until a few years ago. [12] In response to the gathering vigor of this "war on hackers," the most common defences of hacking can be presented on a spectrum that runs from the appeasement or accommodation of corporate interests to drawing up blueprints for cultural revolution. (a) Hacking performs a benign industrial service of uncovering security deficiencies and design flaws. (b) Hacking, as an experimental, free-form research activity, has been responsible for many of the most progressive developments in software development. (c) Hacking, when not purely recreational, is an elite educational practice that reflects the ways in which the development of high technology has outpaced orthodox forms of institutional education. (d) Hacking is an important form of watchdog counterresponse to the use of surveillance technology and data gathering by the state, and to the increasingly monolithic communications power of giant corporations. (e) Hacking, as guerrilla know-how, is essential to the task of maintaining fronts of cultural resistance and stocks of oppositional knowledge as a hedge against a technofascist future. With all of these and other arguments in mind, it is easy to see how the social and cultural _management_ of hacker activities has become a complex process that involves state policy and legislation at the highest levels. In this respect, the virus scare has become an especially convenient vehicle for obtaining public and popular consent for new legislative measures and new powers of investigation for the FBI.^8^ [13] Consequently, certain celebrity hackers have been quick to play down the zeal with which they pursued their earlier hacking feats, while reinforcing the _deviant_ category of "technological hooliganism" reserved by moralizing pundits for "dark-side" hacking. Hugo Cornwall, British author of the bestselling _Hacker's Handbook_, presents a Little England view of the hacker as a harmless fresh-air enthusiast who "visits advanced computers as a polite country rambler might walk across picturesque fields." The owners of these properties are like "farmers who don't mind careful ramblers." Cornwall notes that "lovers of fresh-air walks obey the Country Code, involving such items as closing gates behind one and avoiding damage to crops and livestock" and suggests that a similar code ought to "guide your rambles into other people's computers; the safest thing to do is simply browse, enjoy and learn." By contrast, any rambler who "ventured across a field guarded by barbed wire and dotted with notices warning about the Official Secrets Act would deserve most that happened thereafter."^9^ Cornwall's quaint perspective on hacking has a certain "native charm," but some might think that this beguiling picture of patchwork-quilt fields and benign gentleman farmers glosses over the long bloody history of power exercised through feudal and postfeudal land economy in England, while it is barely suggestive of the new fiefdoms, transnational estates, dependencies, and principalities carved out of today's global information order by vast corporations capable of bypassing the laws and territorial borders of sovereign nation-states. In general, this analogy with "trespass" laws, which compares hacking to breaking and entering other people's homes restricts the debate to questions about privacy, property, possessive individualism, and, at best, the excesses of state surveillance, while it closes off any examination of the activities of the corporate owners and institutional sponsors of information technology (the almost exclusive "target" of most hackers).^10^ [14] Cornwall himself has joined the lucrative ranks of ex-hackers who either work for computer security firms or write books about security for the eyes of worried corporate managers.^11^ A different, though related, genre is that of the penitent hacker's "confession," produced for an audience thrilled by tales of high- stakes adventure at the keyboard, but written in the form of a computer security handbook. The best example of the "I Was a Teenage Hacker" genre is Bill (aka "The Cracker") Landreth's _Out of the Inner Circle_: The True Story of a Computer Intruder Capable of Cracking the Nation's Most Secure Computer Systems_, a book about "people who can't `just say no' to computers." In full complicity with the deviant picture of the hacker as "public enemy," Landreth recirculates every official and media cliche about subversive conspiratorial elites by recounting the putative exploits of a high-level hackers' guild called the Inner Circle. The author himself is presented in the book as a former keyboard junkie who now praises the law for having made a good moral example of him: If you are wondering what I am like, I can tell you the same things I told the judge in federal court: Although it may not seem like it, I am pretty much a normal American teenager. I don't drink, smoke or take drugs. I don't steal, assault people, or vandalize property. The only way in which I am really different from most people is in my fascination with the ways and means of learning about computers that don't belong to me.^12^ Sentenced in 1984 to three years probation, during which time he was obliged to finish his high school education and go to college, Landreth concludes: "I think the sentence is very fair, and I already know what my major will be...." As an aberrant sequel to the book's contrite conclusion, however, Landreth vanished in 1986, violating his probation, only to face later a stiff five-year jail sentence--a sorry victim, no doubt, of the recent crackdown. _Cyber-Counterculture_? [15] At the core of Steven Levy's bestseller _Hackers_ (1984) is the argument that the hacker ethic, first articulated in the 1950s among the famous MIT students who developed multiple-access user systems, is libertarian and crypto-anarchist in its right-to know principles and its advocacy of decentralized technology. This hacker ethic, which has remained the preserve of a youth culture for the most part, asserts the basic right of users to free access to all information. It is a principled attempt, in other words, to challenge the tendency to use technology to form information elites. Consequently, hacker activities were presented in the eighties as a romantic countercultural tendency, celebrated by critical journalists like John Markoff of the _New York Times_, by Stewart Brand of _Whole Earth Catalog_ fame, and by New Age gurus like Timothy Leary in the flamboyant _Reality Hackers_. Fuelled by sensational stories about phone phreaks like Joe Egressia (the blind eight- year old who discovered the tone signal of phone company by whistling) and Cap'n Crunch, groups like the Milwaukee 414s, the Los Angeles ARPAnet hackers, the SPAN Data Travellers, the Chaos Computer Club of Hamburg, the British Prestel hackers, _2600_'s BBS, "The Private Sector," and others, the dominant media representation of the hacker came to be that of the "rebel with a modem," to use Markoff's term, at least until the more recent "war on hackers" began to shape media coverage. [16] On the one hand, this popular folk hero persona offered the romantic high profile of a maverick though nerdy cowboy whose fearless raids upon an impersonal "system" were perceived as a welcome tonic in the gray age of technocratic routine. On the other hand, he was something of a juvenile technodelinquent who hadn't yet learned the difference between right and wrong---a wayward figure whose technical brilliance and proficiency differentiated him nonetheless from, say, the maladjusted working-class J.D. street-corner boy of the 1950s (hacker mythology, for the most part, has been almost exclusively white, masculine, and middle- class). One result of this media profile was a persistent infantilization of the hacker ethic--a way of trivializing its embryonic politics, however finally complicit with dominant technocratic imperatives or with entrepreneurial-libertarian ideology one perceives these politics to be. The second result was to reinforce, in the initial absence of coercive jail sentences, the high educational stakes of training the new technocratic elites to be responsible in their use of technology. Never, the given wisdom goes, has a creative elite of the future been so in need of the virtues of a liberal education steeped in Western ethics! [17] The full force of this lesson in computer ethics can be found laid out in the official Cornell University report on the Robert Morris affair. Members of the university commission set up to investigate the affair make it quite clear in their report that they recognize the student's academic brilliance. His hacking, moreover, is described, as a "juvenile act" that had no "malicious intent" but that amounted, like plagiarism, the traditional academic heresy, to a dishonest transgression of other users' rights. (In recent years, the privacy movement within the information community--a movement mounted by liberals to protect civil rights against state gathering of information--has actually been taken up and used as a means of criminalizing hacker activities.) As for the consequences of this juvenile act, the report proposes an analogy that, in comparison with Cornwall's _mature_ English country rambler, is thoroughly American, suburban, middle-class and _juvenile_. Unleashing the Internet worm was like "the driving of a golf-cart on a rainy day through most houses in the neighborhood. The driver may have navigated carefully and broken no china, but it should have been obvious to the driver that the mud on the tires would soil the carpets and that the owners would later have to clean up the mess."^13^ [18] In what stands out as a stiff reprimand for his alma mater, the report regrets that Morris was educated in an "ambivalent atmosphere" where he "received no clear guidance" about ethics from "his peers or mentors" (he went to Harvard!). But it reserves its loftiest academic contempt for the press, whose heroization of hackers has been so irresponsible, in the commission's opinion, as to cause even further damage to the standards of the computing profession; media exaggerations of the courage and technical sophistication of hackers "obscures the far more accomplished work of students who complete their graduate studies without public fanfare," and "who subject their work to the close scrutiny and evaluation of their peers, and not to the interpretations of the popular press."^14^ In other words, this was an inside affair, to be assessed and judged by fellow professionals within an institution that reinforces its authority by means of internally self-regulating codes of professionalist ethics, but rarely addresses its ethical relationship to society as a whole (acceptance of defence grants, and the like). Generally speaking, the report affirms the genteel liberal ideal that professionals should not need laws, rules, procedural guidelines, or fixed guarantees of safe and responsible conduct. Apprentice professionals ought to have acquired a good conscience by osmosis from a liberal education rather than from some specially prescribed course in ethics and technology. [19] The widespread attention commanded by the Cornell report (attention from the Association of Computing Machinery, among others) demonstrates the industry's interest in how the academy invokes liberal ethics in order to assist in the managing of the organization of the new specialized knowledge about information technology. Despite or, perhaps, because of the report's steadfast pledge to the virtues and ideals of a liberal education, it bears all the marks of a legitimation crisis inside (and outside) the academy surrounding the new and all-important category of computer professionalism. The increasingly specialized design knowledge demanded of computer professionals means that codes that go beyond the old professionalist separation of mental and practical skills are needed to manage the division that a hacker's functional talents call into question, between a purely mental pursuit and the pragmatic sphere of implementing knowledge in the real world. "Hacking" must then be designated as a strictly _amateur_ practice; the tension, in hacking, between _interestedness_ and _disinterestedness_ is different from, and deficient in relation to, the proper balance demanded by professionalism. Alternately, hacking can be seen as the amateur flip side of the professional ideal--a disinterested love in the service of interested parties and institutions. In either case, it serves as an example of professionalism gone wrong, but not very wrong. [20] In common with the two responses to the virus scare described earlier--the profitable reaction of the computer industry and the self-empowering response of the legislature-- the Cornell report shows how the academy uses a case like the Morris affair to strengthen its own sense of moral and cultural authority in the sphere of professionalism, particularly through its scornful indifference to and aloofness from the codes and judgements exercised by the media--its diabolic competitor in the field of knowledge. Indeed, for all the trumpeting about excesses of power and disrespect for the law of the land, the revival of ethics, in the business and science disciplines in the Ivy League and on Capitol Hill (both awash with ethical fervor in the post-Boesky and post-Reagan years), is little more than a weak liberal response to working flaws or adaptational lapses in the social logic of technocracy. [21] To complete the scenario of morality play example- making, however, we must also consider that Morris's father was chief scientist of the National Computer Security Center, the National Security Agency's public effort at safeguarding computer security. A brilliant programmer and codebreaker in his own right, he had testified in Washington in 1983 about the need to deglamorise teenage hacking, comparing it to "stealing a car for the purpose of joyriding." In a further Oedipal irony, Morris Sr. may have been one of the inventors, while at Bell Labs in the 1950s, of a computer game involving self-perpetuating programs that were a prototype of today's worms and viruses. Called Darwin, its principles were incorporated, in the eighties, into a popular hacker game called Core War, in which autonomous "killer" programs fought each other to the death.^15^ [22] With the appearance, in the Morris affair, of a patricidal object who is also the Pentagon's guardian angel, we now have many of the classic components of countercultural cross-generational conflict. What I want to consider, however, is how and where this scenario differs from the definitive contours of such conflicts that we recognize as having been established in the sixties; how the Cornell hacker Morris's relation to, say, campus "occupations" today is different from that evoked by the famous image of armed black students emerging from a sit-in on the Cornell campus; how the relation to technological ethics differs from Andrew Kopkind's famous statement "Morality begins at the end of a gun barrel" which accompanied the publication of the do-it-yourself Molotov cocktail design on the cover of a 1968 issue of the _New York Review of Books_; or how hackers' prized potential access to the networks of military systems warfare differs from the prodigious Yippie feat of levitating the Pentagon building. It may be that, like the J.D. rebel without a cause of the fifties, the disaffiliated student dropout of the sixties, and the negationist punk of the seventies, the hacker of the eighties has come to serve as a visible public example of moral maladjustment, a hegemonic test case for redefining the dominant ethics in an advanced technocratic society. (Hence the need for each of these deviant figures to come in different versions-- lumpen, radical chic, and Hollywood-style.) [23] What concerns me here, however, are the different conditions that exist today for recognizing countercultural expression and activism. Twenty years later, the technology of hacking and viral guerrilla warfare occupies a similar place in countercultural fantasy as the Molotov Cocktail design once did. While I don't, for one minute, mean to insist on such comparisons, which aren't particularly sound anyway, I think they conveniently mark a shift in the relation of countercultural activity to technology, a shift in which a software-based technoculture, organized around outlawed libertarian principles about free access to information and communication, has come to replace a dissenting culture organized around the demonizing of abject hardware structures. Much, though not all, of the sixties counterculture was formed around what I have elsewhere called the _technology of folklore_--an expressive congeries of preindustrialist, agrarianist, Orientalist, antitechnological ideas, values, and social structures. By contrast, the cybernetic countercultures of the nineties are already being formed around the _folklore of technology_--mythical feats of survivalism and resistance in a data-rich world of virtual environments and posthuman bodies-- which is where many of the SF-and technology-conscious youth cultures have been assembling in recent years.^16^ [24] There is no doubt that this scenario makes countercultural activity more difficult to recognize and therefore to define as politically significant. It was much easier, in the sixties, to _identify_ the salient features and symbolic power of a romantic preindustrialist cultural politics in an advanced technological society, especially when the destructive evidence of America's supertechnological invasion of Vietnam was being daily paraded in front of the public eye. However, in a society whose technopolitical infrastructure depends increasingly upon greater surveillance, cybernetic activism necessarily relies on a much more covert politics of identity, since access to closed systems requires discretion and dissimulation. Access to digital systems still requires only the authentication of a signature or pseudonym, not the identification of a real surveillable person, so there exists a crucial operative gap between authentication and identification. (As security systems move toward authenticating access through biological signatures-- the biometric recording and measurement of physical characteristics such as palm or retinal prints, or vein patterns on the backs of hands--the hacker's staple method of systems entry through purloined passwords will be further challenged.) By the same token, cybernetic identity is never used up, it can be recreated, reassigned, and reconstructed with any number of different names and under different user accounts. Most hacks, or technocrimes, go unnoticed or unreported for fear of publicising the vulnerability of corporate security systems, especially when the hacks are performed by disgruntled employees taking their vengeance on management. So, too, authoritative identification of any individual hacker, whenever it occurs, is often the result of accidental leads rather than systematic detection. For example, Captain Midnight, the video pirate who commandeered a satellite a few years ago to interrupt broadcast TV viewing, was traced only because a member of the public reported a suspicious conversation heard over a crossed telephone line. [25] Eschewing its core constituency among white males of the pre-professional-managerial class, the hacker community may be expanding its parameters outward. Hacking, for example, has become a feature of the young adult mystery-and-suspense novel genre for girls.^17^ The elitist class profile of the hacker prodigy as that of an undersocialized college nerd has become democratized and customized in recent years; it is no longer exclusively associated with institutionally acquired college expertise, and increasingly it dresses streetwise. In a recent article which documents the spread of the computer underground from college whiz kids to a broader youth subculture termed "cyberpunks," after the movement among SF novelists, the original hacker phone phreak Cap'n Crunch is described as lamenting the fact that the cyberculture is no longer an "elite" one, and that hacker-valid information is much easier to obtain these days.^18^ [26] For the most part, however, the self-defined hacker underground, like many other protocountercultural tendencies, has been restricted to a privileged social milieu, further magnetised by the self-understanding of its members that they are the apprentice architects of a future dominated by knowledge, expertise, and "smartness," whether human or digital. Consequently, it is clear that the hacker cyberculture is not a dropout culture; its disaffiliation from a domestic parent culture is often manifest in activities that answer, directly or indirectly, to the legitimate needs of industrial R&D. For example, this hacker culture celebrates high productivity, maverick forms of creative work energy, and an obsessive identification with on-line endurance (and endorphin highs)--all qualities that are valorised by the entrepreneurial codes of silicon futurism. In a critique of the myth of the hacker-as-rebel, Dennis Hayes debunks the political romance woven around the teenage hacker: They are typically white, upper-middle-class adolescents who have taken over the home computer (bought, subsidized, or tolerated by parents in the hope of cultivating computer literacy). Few are politically motivated although many express contempt for the "bureaucracies" that hamper their electronic journeys. Nearly all demand unfettered access to intricate and intriguing computer networks. In this, teenage hackers resemble an alienated shopping culture deprived of purchasing opportunities more than a terrorist network.^19^ [27] While welcoming the sobriety of Hayes's critique, I am less willing to accept its assumptions about the political implications of hacker activities. Studies of youth subcultures (including those of a privileged middle-class formation) have taught us that the political meaning of certain forms of cultural "resistance" is notoriously difficult to read. These meanings are either highly coded or expressed indirectly through media--private peer languages, customized consumer styles, unorthodox leisure patterns, categories of insider knowledge and behavior--that have no fixed or inherent political significance. If cultural studies of this sort have proved anything, it is that the often symbolic, not wholly articulate, expressivity of a youth culture can seldom be translated directly into an articulate political philosophy. The significance of these cultures lies in their embryonic or _protopolitical_ languages and technologies of opposition to dominant or parent systems of rules. If hackers lack a "cause," then they are certainly not the first youth culture to be characterized in this dismissive way. In particular, the left has suffered from the lack of a cultural politics capable of recognizing the power of cultural expressions that do not wear a mature political commitment on their sleeves. So, too, the escalation of activism-in-the- professions in the last two decades has shown that it is a mistake to condemn the hacker impulse on account of its class constituency alone. To cede the "ability to know" on the grounds that elite groups will enjoy unjustly privileged access to technocratic knowledge is to cede too much of the future. Is it of no political significance at all that hackers' primary fantasies often involve the official computer systems of the police, armed forces, and defence and intelligence agencies? And that the rationale for their fantasies is unfailingly presented in the form of a defence of civil liberties against the threat of centralized intelligence and military activities? Or is all of this merely a symptom of an apprentice elite's fledgling will to masculine power? The activities of the Chinese student elite in the pro-democracy movement have shown that unforeseen shifts in the political climate can produce startling new configurations of power and resistance. After Tiananmen Square, Party leaders found it imprudent to purge those high-tech engineer and computer cadres who alone could guarantee the future of any planned modernization program. On the other hand, the authorities rested uneasy knowing that each cadre (among the most activist groups in the student movement) is a potential hacker who can have the run of the communications house if and when he or she wants. [28] On the other hand, I do agree with Hayes's perception that the media have pursued their romance with the hacker at the cost of underreporting the much greater challenge posed to corporate employers by their employees. It is in the arena of conflicts between workers and management that most high-tech "sabotage" takes place. In the mainstream everyday life of office workers, mostly female, there is a widespread culture of unorganized sabotage that accounts for infinitely more computer downtime and information loss every year than is caused by destructive, "dark-side" hacking by celebrity cybernetic intruders. The sabotage, time theft, and strategic monkeywrenching deployed by office workers in their engineered electromagnetic attacks on data storage and operating systems might range from the planting of time or logic bombs to the discrete use of electromagnetic Tesla coils or simple bodily friction: "Good old static electricity discharged from the fingertips probably accounts for close to half the disks and computers wiped out or down every year."^20^ More skilled operators, intent on evening a score with management, often utilize sophisticated hacking techniques. In many cases, a coherent networking culture exists among female console operators, where, among other things, tips about strategies for slowing down the temporality of the work regime are circulated. While these threats from below are fully recognized in their boardrooms, corporations dependent upon digital business machines are obviously unwilling to advertize how acutely vulnerable they actually are to this kind of sabotage. It is easy to imagine how organised computer activism could hold such companies for ransom. As Hayes points out, however, it is more difficult to mobilize any kind of labor movement organized upon such premises: Many are prepared to publicly oppose the countless dark legacies of the computer age: "electronic sweatshops," Military technology, employee surveillance, genotoxic water, and ozone depletion. Among those currently leading the opposition, however, it is apparently deemed "irresponsible" to recommend an active computerized resistance as a source of worker's power because it is perceived as a medium of employee crime and "terrorism." ^21^ _Processed World_, the "magazine with a bad attitude" with which Hayes has been associated, is at the forefront of debating and circulating these questions among office workers, regularly tapping into the resentments borne out in on-the-job resistance. [29] While only a small number of computer users would recognize and include themselves under the label of "hacker," there are good reasons for extending the restricted definition of _hacking_ down and across the caste system of systems analysts, designers, programmers, and operators to include all high-tech workers, no matter how inexpert, who can interrupt, upset, and redirect the smooth flow of structured communications that dictates their positions in the social networks of exchange and determines the temporality of their work schedules. To put it in these terms, however, is not to offer any universal definition of hacker agency. There are many social agents, for example, in job locations that are dependent upon the hope of technological _reskilling_, for whom sabotage or disruption of communicative rationality is of little use; for such people, definitions of hacking that are reconstructive, rather than deconstructive, are more appropriate. A good example is the crucial role of worker technoliteracy in the struggle of labor against automation and deskilling. When worker education classes in computer programming were discontinued by management at the Ford Rouge plant in Dearborn, Michigan, union (UAW) members began to publish a newsletter called the _Amateur Computerist_ to fill the gap.^22^ Among the columnists and correspondents in the magazine have been veterans of the Flint sit-down strikes who see a clear historical continuity between the problem of labor organization in the thirties and the problem of automation and deskilling today. Workers' computer literacy is seen as essential not only to the demystification of the computer and the reskilling of workers, but also to labor's capacity to intervene in decisions about new technologies that might result in shorter hours and thus in "work efficiency" rather than worker efficiency. [30] The three social locations I have mentioned above all express different class relations to technology: the location of an apprentice technical elite, conventionally associated with the term "hacking"; the location of the female high-tech office worker, involved in "sabotage"; and the location of the shop- floor worker, whose future depends on technological reskilling. All therefore exhibit different ways of _claiming back_ time dictated and appropriated by technological processes, and of establishing some form of independent control over the work relation so determined by the new technologies. All, then, fall under a broad understanding of the politics involved in any extended description of hacker activities. [This file is continued in ROSS-2 990] 2-Oct-90 1:24:54-GMT,30417;000000000001 Received: from aramis.rutgers.edu by klinzhai.rutgers.edu (5.59/SMI4.0/RU1.4/3.08) id AA02630; Mon, 1 Oct 90 21:24:51 EDT Received: by aramis.rutgers.edu (5.59/SMI4.0/RU1.4/3.08) id AA09682; Mon, 1 Oct 90 21:24:49 EDT Resent-Message-Id: <9010020124.AA09682@aramis.rutgers.edu> Received: from ncsuvm.ncsu.edu by aramis.rutgers.edu (5.59/SMI4.0/RU1.4/3.08) id AA13153; Mon, 1 Oct 90 16:06:33 EDT Message-Id: <9010012006.AA13153@aramis.rutgers.edu> Received: from ncsuvm.ncsu.edu by ncsuvm.ncsu.edu (IBM VM SMTP R1.2.2MX) with BSMTP id 7795; Mon, 01 Oct 90 16:01:25 EDT Received: from NCSUVM.BITNET by ncsuvm.ncsu.edu (Mailer R2.07) with BSMTP id 7709; Mon, 01 Oct 90 15:58:07 EDT Date: Mon, 1 Oct 90 15:47:06 EDT Reply-To: Editors of PMC Sender: Postmodern Culture From: Editors of PMC Subject: ROSS-2 990 To: Multiple recipients of list PMC-LIST Resent-To: mcgrew@darkstar.rutgers.edu Resent-Date: Mon, 1 Oct 90 21:24:48 EDT Resent-From: Charles Mcgrew [Andrew Ross, "Hacking Away at the Counter-culture," part 2, continued from ROSS-1 990] _The Culture and Technology Question_ [31] Faced with these proliferating practices in the workplace, on the teenage cult fringe, and increasingly in mainstream entertainment, where, over the last five years, the cyberpunk sensibility in popular fiction, film, and television has caught the romance of the popular taste for the outlaw technology of human/machine interfaces, we are obliged, I think, to ask old kinds of questions about the new silicon order which the evangelists of information technology have been deliriously proclaiming for more than twenty years. The postindustrialists' picture of a world of freedom and abundance projects a sunny millenarian future devoid of work drudgery and ecological degradation. This sunny social order, cybernetically wired up, is presented as an advanced evolutionary phase of society in accord with Enlightenment ideals of progress and rationality. By contrast, critics of this idealism see only a frightening advance in the technologies of social control, whose owners and sponsors are efficiently shaping a society, as Kevin Robins and Frank Webster put it, of "slaves without Athens" that is actually the inverse of the "Athens without slaves" promised by the silicon positivists.^23^ [32] It is clear that one of the political features of the new post-Fordist order--economically marked by short-run production, diverse taste markets, flexible specialization, and product differentiation--is that the New Right has managed to appropriate not only the utopian language and values of the alternative technology movements but also the marxist discourse of the "withering away of the state" and the more compassionate vision of local, decentralized communications first espoused by the libertarian left. It must be recognized that these are very popular themes and visions, (advanced most famously by Alvin Toffler and the neoliberal Atari Democrats, though also by leftist thinkers such as Andre Gortz, Rudolf Bahro, and Alain Touraine)--much more popular, for example, than the tradition of centralized technocratic planning espoused by the left under the Fordist model of mass production and consumption.^24^ Against the postindustrialists' millenarian picture of a postscarcity harmony, in which citizens enjoy decentralized, access to free-flowing information, it is necessary, however, to emphasise how and where actually existing cybernetic capitalism presents a gross caricature of such a postscarcity society. [33] One of the stories told by the critical left about new cultural technologies is that of monolithic, panoptical social control, effortlessly achieved through a smooth, endlessly interlocking system of networks of surveillance. In this narrative, information technology is seen as the most despotic mode of domination yet, generating not just a revolution in capitalist production but also a revolution in living--"social Taylorism"--that touches all cultural and social spheres in the home and in the workplace.^25^ Through routine gathering of information about transactions, consumer preferences, and creditworthiness, a harvest of information about any individual's whereabouts and movements, tastes, desires, contacts, friends, associates, and patterns of work and recreation becomes available in the form of dossiers sold on the tradable information market, or is endlessly convertible into other forms of intelligence through computer matching. Advanced pattern recognition technologies facilitate the process of surveillance, while data encryption protects it from public accountability.^26^ [34] While the debate about privacy has triggered public consciousness about these excesses, the liberal discourse about ethics and damage control in which that debate has been conducted falls short of the more comprehensive analysis of social control and social management offered by left political economists. According to one marxist analysis, information is seen as a new kind of commodity resource which marks a break with past modes of production and that is becoming the essential site of capital accumulation in the world economy. What happens, then, in the process by which information, gathered up by data scavenging in the transactional sphere, is systematically converted into intelligence? A surplus value is created for use elsewhere. This surplus information value is more than is needed for public surveillance; it is often information, or intelligence, culled from consumer polling or statistical analysis of transactional behavior, that has no immediate use in the process of routine public surveillance. Indeed, it is this surplus, bureaucratic capital that is used for the purpose of forecasting social futures, and consequently applied to the task of managing the behavior of mass or aggregate units within those social futures. This surplus intelligence becomes the basis of a whole new industry of futures research which relies upon computer technology to simulate and forecast the shape, activity, and behavior of complex social systems. The result is a possible system of social management that far transcends the questions about surveillance that have been at the discursive center of the privacy debate.^27^ [35] To further challenge the idealists' vision of postindustrial light and magic, we need only look inside the semiconductor workplace itself, which is home to the most toxic chemicals known to man (and woman, especially since women of color often make up the majority of the microelectronics labor force), and where worker illness is measured not in quantities of blood spilled on the shop floor but in the less visible forms of chromosome damage, shrunken testicles, miscarriages, premature deliveries, and severe birth defects. In addition to the extraordinarily high stress patterns of VDT operators, semiconductor workers exhibit an occupational illness rate that even by the late seventies was three times higher than that of manufacturing workers, at least until the federal rules for recognizing and defining levels of injury were changed under the Reagan administration. Protection gear is designed to protect the product and the clean room from the workers, and not vice versa. Recently, immunological health problems have begun to appear that can be described only as a kind of chemically induced AIDS, rendering the T-cells dysfunctional rather than depleting them like virally induced AIDS.^28^ In corporate offices, the use of keystroke software to monitor and pace office workers has become a routine part of job performance evaluation programs. Some 70 percent of corporations use electronic surveillance or other forms of quantitative monitoring on their workers. Every bodily movement can be checked and measured, especially trips to the toilet. Federal deregulation has meant that the limits of employee work space have shrunk, in some government offices, below that required by law for a two-hundred pound laboratory pig.^29^ Critics of the labor process seem to have sound reasons to believe that rationalization and quantification are at last entering their most primitive phase. [36] These, then, are some of the features of the critical left position--or what is sometimes referred to as the "paranoid" position--on information technology, which imagines or constructs a totalizing, monolithic picture of systematic domination. While this story is often characterized as conspiracy theory, its targets--technorationality, bureaucratic capitalism--are usually too abstract to fit the picture of a social order planned and shaped by a small, conspiring group of centralized power elites. Although I believe that this story, when told inside and outside the classroom, for example, is an indispensable form of "consciousness-raising," it is not always the best story to tell. [37] While I am not comfortable with the "paranoid" labelling, I would argue that such narratives do little to discourage paranoia. The critical habit of finding unrelieved domination everywhere has certain consequences, one of which is to create a siege mentality, reinforcing the inertia, helplessness, and despair that such critiques set out to oppose in the first place. What follows is a politics that can speak only from a victim's position. And when knowledge about surveillance is presented as systematic and infallible, self-censoring is sure to follow. In the psychosocial climate of fear and phobia aroused by the virus scare, there is a responsibility not to be alarmist or to be scared, especially when, as I have argued, such moments are profitably seized upon by the sponsors of control technology. In short, the picture of a seamlessly panoptical network of surveillance may be the result of a rather undemocratic, not to mention unsocialistic, way of thinking, predicated upon the recognition of people solely as victims. It is redolent of the old sociological models of mass society and mass culture, which cast the majority of society as passive and lobotomized in the face of the cultural patterns of modernization. To emphasize, as Robins and Webster and others have done, the power of the new technologies to despotically transform the "rhythm, texture, and experience" of everyday life, and meet with no resistance in doing so, is not only to cleave, finally, to an epistemology of technological determinism, but also to dismiss the capacity of people to make their own uses of new technologies.^30^ [38] The seamless "interlocking" of public and private networks of information and intelligence is not as smooth and even as the critical school of hard domination would suggest. In any case, compulsive gathering of information is no _guarantee_ that any interpretive sense will be made of the files or dossiers, while some would argue that the increasingly covert nature of surveillance is a sign that the "campaign" for social control is not going well. One of the most pervasive popular arguments against the panoptical intentions of the masters of technology is that their systems do not work. Every successful hack or computer crime in some way reinforces the popular perception that information systems are not infallible. And the announcements of military-industrial spokespersons that the fully automated battlefield is on its way run up against an accumulated stock of popular skepticism about the operative capacity of weapons systems. These misgivings are born of decades of distrust for the plans and intentions of the military-industrial complex, and were quite evident in the widespread cynicism about the Strategic Defense Initiative. Just to take one empirical example of unreliability, the military communications system worked so poorly and so farcically during the U.S. invasion of Grenada that commanders had to call each other on pay phones: ever since then, the command-and- control code of Arpanet technocrats has been C5-- Command, Control, Communication, Computers, and Confusion.^31^ It could be said, of course, that the invasion of Grenada did, after all, succeed, but the more complex and inefficiency-prone such high-tech invasions become (Vietnam is still the best example), the less likely they are to be undertaken with any guarantee of success. [39] I am not suggesting that alternatives can be forged simply by encouraging disbelief in the infallibility of existing technologies (pointing to examples of the appropriation of technologies for radical uses, of course, always provides more visibly satisfying evidence of empowerment), but technoskepticism, while not a _sufficient_ condition of social change, is a _necessary_ condition. Stocks of popular technoskepticism are crucial to the task of eroding the legitimacy of those cultural values that prepare the way for new technological developments: values and principles such as the inevitability of material progress, the "emancipatory" domination of nature, the innovative autonomy of machines, the efficiency codes of pragmatism, and the linear juggernaut of liberal Enlightenment rationality--all increasingly under close critical scrutiny as a wave of environmental consciousness sweeps through the electorates of the West. Technologies do not shape or determine such values. These values already exist before the technologies, and the fact that they have become deeply embodied in the structure of popular needs and desires then provides the green light for the acceptance of certain kinds of technology. The principal rationale for introducing new technologies is that they answer to already existing intentions and demands that may be perceived as "subjective" but that are never actually within the control of any single set of conspiring individuals. As Marike Finlay has argued, just as technology is only possible in given discursive situations, one of which being the desire of people to have it for reasons of empowerment, so capitalism is merely the site, and not the source, of the power that is often autonomously attributed to the owners and sponsors of technology.^32^ [40] In fact, there is no frame of technological inevitability that has not already interacted with popular needs and desires, no introduction of new machineries of control that has not already been negotiated to some degree in the arena of popular consent. Thus the power to design architecture that incorporates different values must arise from the popular perception that existing technologies are not the only ones, nor are they the best when it comes to individual and collective empowerment. It was this kind of perception--formed around the distrust of big, impersonal, "closed" hardware systems, and the desire for small, decentralized, interactive machines to facilitate interpersonal communication--that "built" the PC out of hacking expertise in the early seventies. These were as much the partial "intentions" behind the development of microcomputing technology as deskilling, monitoring, and information gathering are the intentions behind the corporate use of that technology today. The growth of public data networks, bulletin board systems, alternative information and media links, and the increasing cheapness of desktop publishing, satellite equipment, and international data bases are as much the result of local political "intentions" as the fortified net of globally linked, restricted-access information systems is the intentional fantasy of those who seek to profit from centralised control. The picture that emerges from this mapping of intentions is not an inevitably technofascist one, but rather the uneven result of cultural struggles over values and meanings. [41] It is in this respect--in the struggle over values and meanings--that the work of cultural criticism takes on its special significance as a full participant in the debate about technology. In fact, cultural criticism is already fully implicated in that debate, if only because the culture and education industries are rapidly becoming integrated within the vast information service conglomerates. The media we study, the media we publish in, and the media we teach within are increasingly part of the same tradable information sector. So, too, our common intellectual discourse has been significantly affected by the recent debates about postmodernism (or culture in a postindustrial world) in which the euphoric, addictive thrill of the technological sublime has figured quite prominently. The high-speed technological fascination that is characteristic of the postmodern condition can be read, on the one hand, as a celebratory capitulation on the part of intellectuals to the new information technocultures. On the other hand, this celebratory strain attests to the persuasive affect associated with the new cultural technologies, to their capacity (more powerful than that of their sponsors and promoters) to generate pleasure and gratification and to win the struggle for intellectual as well as popular consent. [42] Another reason for the involvement of cultural critics in the technology debates has to do with our special critical knowledge of the way in which cultural meanings are produced--our knowledge about the politics of consumption and what is often called the politics of representation. This is the knowledge which demonstrates that there are limits to the capacity of productive forces to shape and determine consciousness. It is a knowledge that insists on the ideological or interpretive dimension of technology as a culture which can and must be used and consumed in a variety of ways that are not reducible to the intentions of any single source or producer, and whose meanings cannot simply be read off as evidence of faultless social reproduction. It is a knowledge, in short, which refuses to add to the "hard domination" picture of disenfranchised individuals watched over by some by some scheming panoptical intelligence. Far from being understood solely as the concrete hardware of electronically sophisticated objects, technology must be seen as a lived, interpretive practice for people in their everyday lives. To redefine the shape and form of that practice is to help create the need for new kinds of hardware and software. [43] One of the latter aims of this essay has been to describe and suggest a wider set of activities and social locations than is normally associated with the practice of hacking. If there is a challenge here for cultural critics, then it might be presented as the challenge to make our knowledge about technoculture into something like a hacker's knowledge, capable of penetrating existing systems of rationality that might otherwise be seen as infallible; a hacker's knowledge, capable of reskilling, and therefore of rewriting the cultural programs and reprogramming the social values that make room for new technologies; a hacker's knowledge, capable also of generating new popular romances around the alternative uses of human ingenuity. If we are to take up that challenge, we cannot afford to give up what technoliteracy we have acquired in deference to the vulgar faith that tells us it is always acquired in complicity, and is thus contaminated by the poison of instrumental rationality, or because we hear, often from the same quarters, that acquired technological competence simply glorifies the inhuman work ethic. Technoliteracy, for us, is the challenge to make a historical opportunity out of a historical necessity. _______________________________________________________ NOTES 1. Bryan Kocher, "A Hygiene Lesson," _Communications of the ACM_, 32.1 (January 1989): 3. 2. Jon A. Rochlis and Mark W. Eichen, "With Microscope and Tweezers: The Worm from MIT's Perspective," _Communications of the ACM_, 32.6 (June 1989): 697. 3. Philip Elmer-DeWitt, "Invasion of the Body Snatchers," _Time_ (26 September 1988); 62-67. 4. Judith Williamson, "Every Virus Tells a Story: The Meaning of HIV and AIDS," _Taking Liberties: AIDS and Cultural Politics_, ed. Erica Carter and Simon Watney (London: Serpent's Tail/ICA, 1989): 69. 5. "Pulsing the system" is a well-known intelligence process in which, for example, planes deliberately fly over enemy radar installations in order to determine what frequencies they use and how they are arranged. It has been suggested that Morris Sr. and Morris Jr. worked in collusion as part of an NSA operation to pulse the Internet system, and to generate public support for a legal clampdown on hacking. See Allan Lundell, _Virus! The Secret World of Computer Invaders That Breed and Destroy_ (Chicago: Contemporary Books, 1989), 12-18. As is the case with all such conspiracy theories, no actual conspiracy need have existed for the consequences--in this case, the benefits for the intelligence community--to have been more or less the same. 6. For details of these raids, see _2600: The Hacker's Quarterly_, 7.1 (Spring 1990): 7. 7. "Hackers in Jail," _2600: The Hacker's Quarterly_, 6.1 (Spring 1989); 22-23. The recent Secret Service action that shut down _Phrack_, an electronic newsletter operating out of St. Louis, confirms _2600_'s thesis: a nonelectronic publication would not be censored in the same way. 8. This is not to say that the new laws cannot themselves be used to protect hacker institutions, however. _2600_ has advised operators of bulletin boards to declare them private property, thereby guaranteeing protection under the Electronic Privacy Act against unauthorized entry by the FBI. 9. Hugo Cornwall, _The Hacker's Handbook_ 3rd ed. (London: Century, 1988) 181, 2-6. In Britain, for the most part, hacking is still looked upon as a matter for the civil, rather than the criminal, courts. 10. Discussions about civil liberties and property rights, for example, tend to preoccupy most of the participants in the electronic forum published as "Is Computer Hacking a Crime?" in _Harper's_, 280.1678 (March 1990): 45-57. 11. See Hugo Cornwall, _Data Theft_ (London: Heinemann, 1987). 12. Bill Landreth, _Out of the Inner Circle: The True Story of a Computer Intruder Capable of Cracking the Nation's Most Secure Computer Systems_ (Redmond, Wash.: Tempus, Microsoft, 1989), 10. 13. _The Computer Worm: A Report to the Provost of Cornell University on an Investigation Conducted by the Commission of Preliminary Enquiry_ (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University, 1989). 14. _The Computer Worm: A Report to the Provost_, 8. 15. A. K. Dewdney, the "computer recreations" columnist at _Scientific American_, was the first to publicize the details of this game of battle programs in an article in the May 1984 issue of the magazine. In a follow-up article in March 1985, "A Core War Bestiary of Viruses, Worms, and Other Threats to Computer Memories," Dewdney described the wide range of "software creatures" which readers' responses had brought to light. A third column, in March 1989, was written, in an exculpatory mode, to refute any connection between his original advertisement of the Core War program and the spate of recent viruses. 16. Andrew Ross, _No Respect: Intellectuals and Popular Culture_ (New York: Routledge, 1989), 212. Some would argue, however, that the ideas and values of the sixties counterculture were only fully culminated in groups like the People's Computer Company, which ran Community Memory in Berkeley, or the Homebrew Computer Club, which pioneered personal microcomputing. So, too, the Yippies had seen the need to form YIPL, the Youth International Party Line, devoted to "anarcho- technological" projects, which put out a newsletter called TAP (alternately the Technological American Party and the Technological Assistance Program). In its depoliticised form, which eschewed the kind of destructive "dark-side" hacking advocated in its earlier incarnation, _TAP_ was eventually the progenitor of _2600_. A significant turning point, for example, was _TAP_'s decision not to publish plans for the hydrogen bomb (which the _Progressive_ did)--bombs would destroy the phone system, which the _TAP_ phone phreaks had an enthusiastic interest in maintaining. 17. See Alice Bach's _Phreakers_ series, in which two teenage girls enjoy adventures through the use of computer technology. _The Bully of Library Place_, _Parrot Woman_, _Double Bucky Shanghai_, and _Ragwars_ (all published by Dell, 1987-88). 18. John Markoff, "Cyberpunks Seek Thrills in Computerized Mischief," _New York Times_, November 26, 1988. 19. Dennis Hayes, _Behind the Silicon Curtain: The Seductions of Work in a Lonely Era_ (Boston, South End Press, 1989), 93. One striking historical precedent for the hacking subculture, suggested to me by Carolyn Marvin, was the widespread activity of amateur or "ham" wireless operators in the first two decades of the century. Initially lionized in the press as boy-inventor heroes for their technical ingenuity and daring adventures with the ether, this white middle-class subculture was increasingly demonized by the U.S. Navy (whose signals the amateurs prankishly interfered with), which was crusading for complete military control of the airwaves in the name of national security. The amateurs lobbied with democratic rhetoric for the public's right to access the airwaves, and although partially successful in their case against the Navy, lost out ultimately to big commercial interests when Congress approved the creation of a broadcasting monopoly after World War I in the form of RCA. See Susan J. Douglas, _Inventing American Broadcasting 1899-1922_ (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1987), 187-291. 20. "Sabotage," _Processed World_, 11 (Summer 1984), 37-38. 21. Hayes, _Behind the Silicon Curtain_, 99. 22. _The Amateur Computerist_, available from R. Hauben, PO Box, 4344, Dearborn, MI 48126. 23. Kevin Robins and Frank Webster, "Athens Without Slaves...Or Slaves Without Athens? The Neurosis of Technology," _Science as Culture_, 3 (1988): 7-53. 24. See Boris Frankel, _The Post-Industrial Utopians_ (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1987). 25. See, for example, the collection of essays edited by Vincent Mosco and Janet Wasko, _The Political Economy of Information_ (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1988), and Dan Schiller, _The Information Commodity_ (Oxford UP, forthcoming). 26. Tom Athanasiou and Staff, "Encryption and the Dossier Society," _Processed World_, 16 (1986): 12-17. 27. Kevin Wilson, _Technologies of Control: The New Interactive Media for the Home_ (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1988), 121-25. 28. Hayes, _Behind the Silicon Curtain_, 63-80. 29. "Our Friend the VDT," _Processed World_, 22 (Summer 1988): 24-25. 30. See Kevin Robins and Frank Webster, "Cybernetic Capitalism," in Mosco and Wasko, 44-75. 31. Barbara Garson, _The Electronic Sweatshop_ (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1988), 244-45. 32. See Marike Finlay's Foucauldian analysis, _Powermatics: A Discursive Critique of New Technology_ (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1987). A more conventional culturalist argument can be found in Stephen Hill, _The Tragedy of Technology_ (London: Pluto Press, 1988). 10-Oct-90 18:17:03-GMT,1519;000000000001 Received: from aramis.rutgers.edu by klinzhai.rutgers.edu (5.59/SMI4.0/RU1.4/3.08) id AA25157; Wed, 10 Oct 90 14:17:02 EDT Received: by aramis.rutgers.edu (5.59/SMI4.0/RU1.4/3.08) id AA16504; Wed, 10 Oct 90 14:16:58 EDT Resent-Message-Id: <9010101816.AA16504@aramis.rutgers.edu> Received: from ncsuvm.ncsu.edu by aramis.rutgers.edu (5.59/SMI4.0/RU1.4/3.08) id AA01604; Tue, 9 Oct 90 21:14:43 EDT Message-Id: <9010100114.AA01604@aramis.rutgers.edu> Received: from ncsuvm.ncsu.edu by ncsuvm.ncsu.edu (IBM VM SMTP R1.2.2MX) with BSMTP id 8335; Tue, 09 Oct 90 21:15:04 EDT Received: from NCSUVM.BITNET by ncsuvm.ncsu.edu (Mailer R2.07) with BSMTP id 8333; Tue, 09 Oct 90 21:15:01 EDT Date: Tue, 9 Oct 90 21:09:14 EDT Reply-To: PMC-Talk Sender: PMC-Talk From: Editors of PmC Subject: Political slant To: Multiple recipients of list PMC-TALK Resent-To: mcgrew@darkstar.rutgers.edu Resent-Date: Wed, 10 Oct 90 14:16:55 EDT Resent-From: Charles Mcgrew From: Joe McMahon To open a can of hornets (or to stir up a nest of worms): It seemed to me that there was little in the way of analysis and much too much political rhetoric in the postings. I very much admired the piece on the political body/the body politic, but I still didn't finish it. Is it impossible to observe the post-modern viewpoint without wholly embracing its politics? --- Joe M. 15-Oct-90 23:29:22-GMT,2089;000000000001 Received: from aramis.rutgers.edu by klinzhai.rutgers.edu (5.59/SMI4.0/RU1.4/3.08) id AA12097; Mon, 15 Oct 90 19:29:20 EDT Received: by aramis.rutgers.edu (5.59/SMI4.0/RU1.4/3.08) id AA02440; Mon, 15 Oct 90 19:29:18 EDT Resent-Message-Id: <9010152329.AA02440@aramis.rutgers.edu> Received: from ncsuvm.ncsu.edu by aramis.rutgers.edu (5.59/SMI4.0/RU1.4/3.08) id AA26080; Mon, 15 Oct 90 18:13:17 EDT Message-Id: <9010152213.AA26080@aramis.rutgers.edu> Received: from ncsuvm.ncsu.edu by ncsuvm.ncsu.edu (IBM VM SMTP R1.2.2MX) with BSMTP id 9245; Mon, 15 Oct 90 18:12:16 EDT Received: from NCSUVM.BITNET by ncsuvm.ncsu.edu (Mailer R2.07) with BSMTP id 9242; Mon, 15 Oct 90 18:12:14 EDT Date: Mon, 15 Oct 90 18:09:32 EDT Reply-To: PMC-Talk Sender: PMC-Talk From: Editors of PmC Subject: Definition(s) To: Multiple recipients of list PMC-TALK Resent-To: mcgrew@darkstar.rutgers.edu Resent-Date: Mon, 15 Oct 90 19:29:17 EDT Resent-From: Charles Mcgrew Date: Monday, 15 Oct 1990 12:49:10 EDT From: "Patrick J. O'Donnell" Subject: definitions A comment for PMC-Talk: definitions are fine and useful and we need them, but perhaps it should be kept in mind that postmodernism is a dynamic rather than stable entity, and part of its agenda is to continually critique, limn, and transform its own boundaries, assumptions, definitions. I see nothing glib about this, though there is definitley someting slippery about it. For postmodernism, it's always a question of putting the slipper(y) on the wrong foot. This leads to some interesting argumentative strategies and terminologies, but they too--while, perhaps, at times impacted and recondite--are hardly glib. So let a thousand definitions bloom, just as long as we don't get stuck with any single one of them, and just as long as we realize that each carries its own ideological baggage. Having mixed enough metaphors for one message, I'll sign off. Pat O'Donnell 16-Oct-90 17:33:14-GMT,5038;000000000000 Received: from aramis.rutgers.edu by klinzhai.rutgers.edu (5.59/SMI4.0/RU1.4/3.08) id AA25839; Tue, 16 Oct 90 13:33:07 EDT Received: by aramis.rutgers.edu (5.59/SMI4.0/RU1.4/3.08) id AA20503; Tue, 16 Oct 90 13:33:02 EDT Resent-Message-Id: <9010161733.AA20503@aramis.rutgers.edu> Received: from ncsuvm.ncsu.edu by aramis.rutgers.edu (5.59/SMI4.0/RU1.4/3.08) id AA08592; Mon, 15 Oct 90 20:43:17 EDT Message-Id: <9010160043.AA08592@aramis.rutgers.edu> Received: from ncsuvm.ncsu.edu by ncsuvm.ncsu.edu (IBM VM SMTP R1.2.2MX) with BSMTP id 1056; Mon, 15 Oct 90 20:42:01 EDT Received: from NCSUVM.BITNET by ncsuvm.ncsu.edu (Mailer R2.07) with BSMTP id 1042; Mon, 15 Oct 90 20:41:58 EDT Date: Mon, 15 Oct 90 20:39:15 EDT Reply-To: PMC-Talk Sender: PMC-Talk From: Editors of PmC Subject: Definitions To: Multiple recipients of list PMC-TALK Status: O Resent-To: mcgrew@darkstar.rutgers.edu Resent-Date: Tue, 16 Oct 90 13:32:58 EDT Resent-From: Charles Mcgrew Date: Mon, 15 Oct 90 20:03:47 -0400 From: gxs11@po.CWRU.Edu (Gary Stonum) Subject: daffy definitions and kute korrespondences Hmmm, we're so soon into worrying about defining PMC . . . well, good pedagogue that I be, who would rather be reductive than right, let me play a preemptive hand and offer the net a definition that I'm not yet ready to commit to print. Not that it's so all-fired original, but it may help make some sense. Whether construed as the internal development of some semi-autonomous activity (architecture, Western fiction, pop music, studio filmmaking et al.), as a global phenomenon driven by the necessities of late (but not late enough?) capitalism, as an consequence of the continuing supersession of an ideological superstructure by an information+image one, or as a figment of the intellectual class, the postmodern predicament seems still to boil down to a single site. I can describe it best--and feel most confident about--with reference to literary history. There the postmodern is High Modernism with a guilty conscience, in bad faith, and with tongue in cheek, just as it has often been said to be. For the following reason: Aware of and ambivalent about High Modernism's cult of the Artist and the Work, particularly HM's recurring belief in art as the only transcendence of The Mess and the artist as the only whole Man (sometimes, but not often, the only whole Person), we or thee of the PMC can't in good conscience emulate that Grand Illusion or replace it with something more than for a moment satisfactory. One solution is parody and pastiche, obviously a major resource for but also not the thing itself. For the more fundamental quarrel isn't with style or even Artistic Purpose, but historicity as such. The HMs could belive themselves in and/or just about to wake from history; the belief most memorably expresses itself in the romantic imperative to make it new. (This is what de Man rightly emphasizes, the contradictory nature of modernism as an historical and a history-abolishing thing.) The PMCeers have in various ways lost faith in any historical teleology, including Art as the Way Out that gives Hegelian comeuppance to temporality. That's OK, because historically the epoch of historicity aint been that long anyway. But the problem comes in the seeming tasklessness of life outside History. Because despite frequent appearances, protests, and uneasiness, the PMC has not given up faith in Man, human action, the self and all them other supposedly scattered and divided loci. Or rather it literally cannot imagine anything else, for from every trial balloon there pops up some familiar breath of hot human air. It (History or comparable terms for an engine or guarantee or ground of Value above the immanent and obvious) was for so long all in all to us (them? who? me?) that it is hard not to want to keep cuddling up and/or rebelling in some way patently complicit with the object of rebellion. Described in this way, the postmodern predicament is an effect of consciousness and thus at least somewhat voluntary. One doesn't have to accept it. Biology might not be destiny. Capital isn't quite so simply an agency anymore (!) And it isn't (more importantly and probably also more plausibly) the only way to go in these days of afteryore. One doesn't have to be so hung up on Value and Depth that one can gleefully keep ePatering with Scandal and Surface. But if one does, then one does feel beyond the meaningfulness of History without a substitute Daddy and without any possibility of imagining serious human intentionality in non-Oedipal terms. Now, if you'll buy this much, I got another bridge to sell also, but I'll shut up here, at the point of proclaiming (my definition of) postmodernity as the last (most recent?) gasp of Humanism. Gary Lee Stonum CWRU, Cleveland gxs11@po.cwru.edu 16-Oct-90 17:52:52-GMT,12978;000000000000 Received: from aramis.rutgers.edu by klinzhai.rutgers.edu (5.59/SMI4.0/RU1.4/3.08) id AA26157; Tue, 16 Oct 90 13:52:51 EDT Received: by aramis.rutgers.edu (5.59/SMI4.0/RU1.4/3.08) id AA22404; Tue, 16 Oct 90 13:52:47 EDT Resent-Message-Id: <9010161752.AA22404@aramis.rutgers.edu> Received: from ncsuvm.ncsu.edu by aramis.rutgers.edu (5.59/SMI4.0/RU1.4/3.08) id AA26490; Tue, 16 Oct 90 00:35:02 EDT Message-Id: <9010160435.AA26490@aramis.rutgers.edu> Received: from ncsuvm.ncsu.edu by ncsuvm.ncsu.edu (IBM VM SMTP R1.2.2MX) with BSMTP id 3074; Tue, 16 Oct 90 00:33:37 EDT Received: from NCSUVM.BITNET by ncsuvm.ncsu.edu (Mailer R2.07) with BSMTP id 3070; Tue, 16 Oct 90 00:33:34 EDT Date: Tue, 16 Oct 90 00:32:00 EDT Reply-To: PMC-Talk Sender: PMC-Talk From: Editors of PmC Subject: Definitions (4 items) To: Multiple recipients of list PMC-TALK Status: O Resent-To: mcgrew@darkstar.rutgers.edu Resent-Date: Tue, 16 Oct 90 13:52:45 EDT Resent-From: Charles Mcgrew Definitions (cont.): 1) Shinto and Pomo 2) Cultural Work, Chaos 3) Modernism, History 4) Slippers 1)-------------------------------------------------------------- Date: Mon, 15 Oct 90 21:20 EST From: Mark Shechner Subject: Re: Definition(s) Patrick O'Donnell's definition, or non-definition, of postmodernism as a dynamic rather than an entity is a hard thing for an average western mind to come to grips with, but not I think for certain non-western mentalities. I'm thinking of the Japanese religion of Shinto, which is a religion without dogmas, without beliefs, and without even presiding deities who necessarily outrank other deities in matters of power or influence. (Forget the state Shinto that reigned briefly from the era of Emperor Meiji until the end of WWII, which was an aberration and had more to do with the consolidation of power than with the historical Japanese religion.) In its native form, Shinto is defined as whatever customs the local Shinto temple happens to follow. It is, if not a dynamic, then a relationship with divine forces and beings that is open to virtually infinite variation. It is all Shinto, but there is no reason why my Shinto has to be the same as your Shinto. So open to possibility is it that you can be Shinto and Buddhist or Shinto and Christian. (Christian Churches in Japan have proven to be remarkably adaptable to this spirit.) In America you would be thought a hypocrite to consider yourself, say, a Catholic and Jew or a Muslim and a Presbyterian, whereas in Japan, under the spirit of Shinto, you could define yourself that way if you liked. It is hard for most of us westerners to get our minds around a concept that is so intentionally elusive, because we like our concepts to stand still, to exclude rival concepts, and to be operational. So, if postmodernism can't have the contours and firm moral definitions of a Catholicism or a Methodism, maybe it is destined to be our Shinto, with a thousand definitions and a thousand churches, none of which can really contradict any of the others and all of which contribute in their own ways to the enrichment of the spiritual relationship in general. But still, Shinto has a spiritual core, however doctrinally indeterminate it may be, and that spiritual core is a faith in an animate universe. The details can be worked out later. I'm just a newcomer to this discussion and have obviously missed a lot, but it seems to me that postmodernism can do without firm boundaries and rugged doctines if it has a spiritual (hate that word, but there it is) center, in light of which all the variations bear a certain family resemblance. I don't know where this goes: just throwin' into the pot for the flavor. Mark Shechner SUNY, BUFFALO 2)-------------------------------------------------------------- Date: Mon, 15 Oct 90 19:47:58 CDT From: Jacques Servin Subject: Re: Definition(s) Thank you, Pat O'Donnell. Impacted and recondite I too can deal with if need be. Here's a humble reply to Kessler: First, let me offer a definition of "word-slinging": "Using words imprecise-ly and without due target." In that light my "assertive (and bemusing) glibness of... word(-)slinging" doesn't bother me much, since the reference seems to bend back on itself and self-destruct. Retracting the stinger: the "massive cultural work" is going on everywhere, isn't it? Perhaps "massive" was a little imprecise, but I felt it might convey the extent of the work, though obviously work has no weight. What work? Well, I guess there's a lot of trivial work going on too but I think putting it all together and mixing it up with the important work, whatever that is, we might have something we could call "massive cultural work." The "shield," again, I used in apposition to "umbrella." Perhaps pomo can function as a movement that has a common ideal and gives its members something with which to justify their impulses to, for example, publishers who must have a theoretical backing to any work lest it be thought invalid (a ridiculous notion, validity, as post-modern seems to be saying--which is why it may be okay to use postmodern this way)--see in this matter Kathy Acker's wonderful piece and think about the publishers she accurately portrays in it. As for the way I use the word "chaos"- -I do not see it as a problem, chaos I mean. It may be trendy, however, so let's find another word. "Our cultural situation" is no more "chaotic" than before, but our manner of seeing it is-- see Morley's excellent definition of it in POMO DEF-1. "The dissolution of distinctions"--this is a chaotic mode of vision he's talking about, obviously. The problem seems to be that many people cannot think of chaos as something quite positive and necessary for any real order to ever occur. There may someday be a new order but there certainly has to be real chaos first--if we keep clutching the outworn linkages of past terminologies we won't get anywhere, we'll become the worst connotations of "academic." If post- modernism goes against modernism as described at the beginning of POMO DEF-1, then it goes against direction--which means it's pro- chaos. Again, perhaps the reason it has trouble being defined is that chaos is such an unsatisfactory notion to most people--but chaos is what pomo is all about. Chaos, too, is a mode that can be opposed to the mode of compulsive organizing. Yes, chaos may be "a reflex to the immanent terrorism of our Western situation in 1990," if our Western situation is indeed terroristic (?), meaning I guess that it feels as if it were about to explode--yes, the persistent feeling of being about to explode may have led people to think about reordering everything and thus have given them the notion of starting from scratch, a notion that would lead to believing in chaos. Certainly that seems to be the way it worked in physics, the seeming origin of the notion--all traditional directions of thought having reached nonsense and only nonsense at the extremes of inquiry. Or perhaps I don't quite understand what you mean by "immanent terrorism." Another possible rewording of "massive cultural work"-- "thought." Christopher Amirault too seems to be seeing "chaos" as problem only--"the issue of its own chaos" doesn't need to be an issue, I don't think, that "massive cultural work" needs to grapple with--it needs to grapple with what it's grappling with and to feel justified and validated in doing so. Again, that's a possible value of postmodern(ism): to shield anyone who wants an aegis for her/his work when it can't have another. It's a logical function, since postmodernism apparently means post- modernism, what comes after the period in which there's a (apparently) clear direction--it's the rejection of clear and unified direction. So any artistic impulse that can find its justification in it should be able to--which is saying that any artistic impulse that tends toward chaos and cannot claim an agenda or strong basis in established procedure should be supported by PM--as in, again, the situation Acker describes. (Though PM doesn't work for Capitol there because the publishers aren't well enough versed in the theory of appropriation.) About "critical, methodological, and political pluralism" becoming "the means and the end" of PM, or "the means and the end" period, I think it almost does. Let me rephrase your reframe: "chaos" becomes "the mode." It's only a means insofar as it allows chaos to flourish, and it's not really an end, it's just a necessity, as I suggested in my reply to Kessler. It's a mode, a milieu, and a medium. I think Cliff Staples is right, that "postmodern (is) what happens a few years after cultural relativism makes everyone dizzy"--postmodernists are throwing up their hands in despair at not being able to make sense of the incredible variegation of realities that Foucault, for one, was laying open by suggesting that every kind and species of knowledge was socially and politically specific and was thus totally and utterly relative-- which means that any means of examining all of that is not absolute and is thus, by "modernist" standards (that demand direction), useless... though the realities continue to exist and the only thing we can do is take looks however we can and not worry too much about delineating the overall system... i.e. we can accept chaos. 3)-------------------------------------------------------------- Date: Mon, 15 Oct 90 21:24:15 CDT From: Jacques Servin Subject: Re: Definitions Question to Gary Stonum: I see how PM is rebelling against the High Modernist idea of escape from history, and I see it potentially embracing history in history's absurd confusion--cuddling up against human aspirations, presumably the object of rebellion--but how is it High Modernist itself? The "last gasp of Humanism," I can see-- as it tries to keep from sinking into total denial of historical order... I guess I just don't see the problem you're pointing out. It seems to me that PM doesn't need to have trouble with the "tasklessness of life outside human history," or that it needs to go beyond human history at all. By accepting a multiplicity of voices within human history (balloons sent up long ago and autonomously and releasing puffs or gales at every moment), PM can be incredibly rich, so long as it doesn't cling to what you are perhaps calling its High Modernism--its search for a grand design of some sort. Does PM really try to go beyond human history? Should it? Why? Is such a goal even remotely realistic? Seriously, is it one of PM's goals? 4)-------------------------------------------------------------- Date: Mon, 15 Oct 90 21:46:38 CDT From: Jacques Servin Subject: Re: Definition(s) Again in response to Gary Stonum: The fact that PM is being used as a realm free from stable definitions, boundaries, and assumptions (paraphrased from Pat O'Donnell's response) shows that it is alive and well as something beyond modernism and, at least in its stability-free realm, is independent of humanism, etc. It isn't perfect--it's incomplete as even a method of incompleteness and could stand to connect a bit more with streams of thought quite similar to it that it hardly ever refers to--perhaps because they're a little further along. (Their "problem" (to PMists) is that they don't have a rubric,having gotten beyond the need for one (after "Panique's" attempt to have one, etc.--interesting that they're French as well).) To Pat O'Donnell: The slipper-on-the-wrong-foot metaphor seems excellent for what's going on with much of PM. Having glimpsed, perhaps in an ancient dream, a vision of something perfect, PM is trying to match its memory to each possible vision. In this aspect it differs from modernism only in that it hasn't found its form-- doesn't pledge itself to newness as romantic modernism did (Slonum). As long as it doesn't find the right foot PM will remain PM--but there's something potentially fascistic about it. Instead of trying to find the real legitimate daughter (legitimacy being a potentially fascistic notion), PM should try to see all daughters as legitimate... Perhaps then the panoply of scholars will return to the academy to find a zillion glass slippers of which each will load a few thousand into his/her pickup truck and, each overturning by the levee while trying to avoid a fox, will sow the hamlets with the stuff by which each peasant will find his/her counterpart... That's a sick twisting of a perfectly good tale. I guess there can be no tale (universalizing model) for a (potential) really useful PM. 12-Oct-90 18:54:24-GMT,2502;000000000001 Received: from aramis.rutgers.edu by klinzhai.rutgers.edu (5.59/SMI4.0/RU1.4/3.08) id AA19064; Fri, 12 Oct 90 14:54:10 EDT Received: by aramis.rutgers.edu (5.59/SMI4.0/RU1.4/3.08) id AA06122; Fri, 12 Oct 90 14:54:08 EDT Resent-Message-Id: <9010121854.AA06122@aramis.rutgers.edu> Received: from ncsuvm.ncsu.edu by aramis.rutgers.edu (5.59/SMI4.0/RU1.4/3.08) id AA20221; Wed, 10 Oct 90 20:43:00 EDT Message-Id: <9010110043.AA20221@aramis.rutgers.edu> Received: from ncsuvm.ncsu.edu by ncsuvm.ncsu.edu (IBM VM SMTP R1.2.2MX) with BSMTP id 0876; Wed, 10 Oct 90 20:43:40 EDT Received: from NCSUVM.BITNET by ncsuvm.ncsu.edu (Mailer R2.07) with BSMTP id 0874; Wed, 10 Oct 90 20:43:38 EDT Date: Wed, 10 Oct 90 20:41:56 EDT Reply-To: PMC-Talk Sender: PMC-Talk From: Editors of PmC Subject: Political Slant To: Multiple recipients of list PMC-TALK Status: O Resent-To: mcgrew@darkstar.rutgers.edu Resent-Date: Fri, 12 Oct 90 14:54:07 EDT Resent-From: Charles Mcgrew ======================================================================== From: syusim@bcm.tmc.edu (Solomon Yusim) What are the politics of the post-modern viewpoint? ======================================================================== From: "Patrick J. O'Donnell" Joe McMahon seems to make the assumption in his question that aesthetics can be separated from ideology (i.e., that we could observe the post-modern viewpoint without wholly embracing its politics). First, there is implicit in this question the idea that there is _a_ postmodern viewpoint, and hence, politics that goes along with it. But a reading of the articles from the first issue of PMC easily shows that postmodernism is comprised of a multiplicity of viewpoints which often challenge the inherent epistemology of the viewpoint. Secondly, many of the essays do share the concept that aesthetics and ideology are wedded, but that is just the point: asking postmodernism to sheer off its politics from its epistemology or aesthetics is asking it to become something else altogether (for many, a retrogradation back into high modernism). In my opinion, if postmodernism has a constant to it, it is the conflation of politics, epistemology, and aesthetics, so to ask it not to be ([word(s) missing--ed.] in the Guattarian/Deleuzian sense) is to ask for something else altogether. Pat O'Donnell 12-Oct-90 20:39:07-GMT,2727;000000000001 Received: from aramis.rutgers.edu by klinzhai.rutgers.edu (5.59/SMI4.0/RU1.4/3.08) id AA19763; Fri, 12 Oct 90 16:39:06 EDT Received: by aramis.rutgers.edu (5.59/SMI4.0/RU1.4/3.08) id AA15325; Fri, 12 Oct 90 16:39:04 EDT Resent-Message-Id: <9010122039.AA15325@aramis.rutgers.edu> Received: from ncsuvm.ncsu.edu by aramis.rutgers.edu (5.59/SMI4.0/RU1.4/3.08) id AA00324; Wed, 10 Oct 90 23:43:29 EDT Message-Id: <9010110343.AA00324@aramis.rutgers.edu> Received: from ncsuvm.ncsu.edu by ncsuvm.ncsu.edu (IBM VM SMTP R1.2.2MX) with BSMTP id 4658; Wed, 10 Oct 90 23:43:34 EDT Received: from NCSUVM.BITNET by ncsuvm.ncsu.edu (Mailer R2.07) with BSMTP id 4655; Wed, 10 Oct 90 23:43:32 EDT Date: Wed, 10 Oct 90 23:40:49 EDT Reply-To: PMC-Talk Sender: PMC-Talk From: Editors of PmC Subject: Ellipsis in O'Donnell To: Multiple recipients of list PMC-TALK Status: O Resent-To: mcgrew@darkstar.rutgers.edu Resent-Date: Fri, 12 Oct 90 16:39:04 EDT Resent-From: Charles Mcgrew Date: Wednesday, 10 Oct 1990 23:33:48 EDT From: "Patrick J. O'Donnell" Subject: Political Slant To Gary and others on the list, some words got left out of my response to Joe McMahon (I'm still learning how to input into the network) so that two different sentences got jambed together. Gary, rightly, picked up the absurdity of the point as stated, which ended up being a strange conflation of two different points. Primarily, I was trying to suggest that many postmodernisms insist on the overlapping of aesthetics and politics, so that one cannot be separated from the other: the content of postmodernism (or a postmodernism) already implies specific ideological consequences: to ask such discourse not to be political (a contradiction in terms) is to ask for a return to a never-was, illusory state where we could talk just art without politics. I threw in Guattari and Deleuze to suggest that they had advanced a politics of radical multiplicity as the condition of postmodernism: their version of postmodernism is that there are multiple intersecting (and always mobile) discourses that never rest in any given position (I'm putting this badly, but I hope you get the idea), but nomadism is, to be sure, not apolitical: it underwrites a politics of the non-hierarchical or the non-linear, a politics of deterritorialization. Thus, they advance the position of a mobile, postmodern aesthetics conflated with fairly clear political agendas and positions. That's what I meant to say, which doesn't at all mean that it's not worth disagreeing with. Elliptically, Pat O'Donnell 14-Oct-90 2:56:14-GMT,2062;000000000001 Received: from aramis.rutgers.edu by klinzhai.rutgers.edu (5.59/SMI4.0/RU1.4/3.08) id AA28794; Sat, 13 Oct 90 22:56:12 EDT Received: by aramis.rutgers.edu (5.59/SMI4.0/RU1.4/3.08) id AA14798; Sat, 13 Oct 90 22:56:09 EDT Resent-Message-Id: <9010140256.AA14798@aramis.rutgers.edu> Received: from ncsuvm.ncsu.edu by aramis.rutgers.edu (5.59/SMI4.0/RU1.4/3.08) id AA08712; Thu, 11 Oct 90 19:31:45 EDT Message-Id: <9010112331.AA08712@aramis.rutgers.edu> Received: from ncsuvm.ncsu.edu by ncsuvm.ncsu.edu (IBM VM SMTP R1.2.2MX) with BSMTP id 6808; Thu, 11 Oct 90 19:32:15 EDT Received: from NCSUVM.BITNET by ncsuvm.ncsu.edu (Mailer R2.07) with BSMTP id 6805; Thu, 11 Oct 90 19:32:12 EDT Date: Thu, 11 Oct 90 19:27:08 EDT Reply-To: PMC-Talk Sender: PMC-Talk From: Editors of PmC Subject: Political Slant To: Multiple recipients of list PMC-TALK Resent-To: mcgrew@darkstar.rutgers.edu Resent-Date: Sat, 13 Oct 90 22:56:08 EDT Resent-From: Charles Mcgrew Date: Thu, 11 Oct 90 12:42:46 EDT From: Joe McMahon Subject: Political Issues The points made by others are quite good, and in fact I agree with them. The situation influences the observer and the observer's own mindset will of course influence the observer's thoughts, ideas, and opinions concerning the situation. However, is the total exclusion of other equally valid viewpoints in favor of a personal political agenda valuable other than it informs us of the observer's politics? Is it valid to invoke the postmodern label for such writings? Or should a postmodern piece be a Hunter S. Thompsonesque screed concerning whatever topic? I'm asking these questions partly to encourage more discussion, and partly because I'm feeling pretty dense about this. I assume it is because I haven't fully grasped the implications of postmodern thought. Or do I just not agree with them? :-) Confused, but enjoyably so, --- Joe M. 14-Oct-90 3:29:06-GMT,3781;000000000001 Received: from aramis.rutgers.edu by klinzhai.rutgers.edu (5.59/SMI4.0/RU1.4/3.08) id AA29018; Sat, 13 Oct 90 23:29:05 EDT Received: by aramis.rutgers.edu (5.59/SMI4.0/RU1.4/3.08) id AA17733; Sat, 13 Oct 90 23:29:03 EDT Resent-Message-Id: <9010140329.AA17733@aramis.rutgers.edu> Received: from ncsuvm.ncsu.edu by aramis.rutgers.edu (5.59/SMI4.0/RU1.4/3.08) id AA05583; Fri, 12 Oct 90 20:34:27 EDT Message-Id: <9010130034.AA05583@aramis.rutgers.edu> Received: from ncsuvm.ncsu.edu by ncsuvm.ncsu.edu (IBM VM SMTP R1.2.2MX) with BSMTP id 3955; Fri, 12 Oct 90 20:34:43 EDT Received: from NCSUVM.BITNET by ncsuvm.ncsu.edu (Mailer R2.07) with BSMTP id 3950; Fri, 12 Oct 90 20:34:41 EDT Date: Fri, 12 Oct 90 20:30:28 EDT Reply-To: PMC-Talk Sender: PMC-Talk From: Editors of PmC Subject: Political Slant To: Multiple recipients of list PMC-TALK Resent-To: mcgrew@darkstar.rutgers.edu Resent-Date: Sat, 13 Oct 90 23:29:02 EDT Resent-From: Charles Mcgrew Date: Thu, 11 Oct 90 23:44:50 CDT From: Jacques Servin Subject: Re: Political Slant Joe, Maybe the only value of "postmodern" is that it provides a shield (as distinct from umbrella) for thoughts that can't coalesce into a real agenda but are still forceful, purposeful and perhaps even bullheaded. Dada and surrealism were creations of people with distinct political/ cultural purposes in a world that had less immediate hostility to organization, I suspect, than the present one, and they flourished as forces with only minimal protection. Today, however, with energetic thought more craved than ever before, protection needs to be much broader-- even academic. Or: only something like "postmodern," distanced from any significance by the silence of the word itself and by the lack of anyone who would shout it anyhow, can survive now. "Panique" failed, even that--attempt to deny all structure or lack of it, but vehemently in a way, trying to keep the comfort of the literary movement (which was perhaps a French invention, deduce what you like...)... Over here, "language poetry" refuses to have a rallying cry, essentially basing itself in chaos (reasonably). Besides chaos, only something completely vague and without an agenda anyone could call an agenda can survive as protection for ideas now ("agenda" having been so thoroughly discredited by racism). I think that's when PM is valid, and only then--as a shield that will allow the massive cultural work going on to go on without fear of being chaotic... It will slough off when chaos is fully accepted as our only possible mode, or when a real movement emerges (which doesn't seem likely soon given the stability of our muddle). So for what it's worth, my opinion on the questions you raised is that "postmodern" is valid ONLY because and when it allows voices their maximum diversity and allows them to carry on in or with their personal political agendas whether or not they make the forgivable error of thinking them to be the only ones. Otherwise "postmodern" imposes its forgivable error of thinking equanimity the only mode and becomes useless, not to mention, an agenda. Anyone agree, or is it so banal everyone does? I haven't heard the first part of the discussion so I may be off the wall. Also I'm not sure I understand what people mean by "postmodern"--this is just a guess. My impression is that everyone means something different--and no one's trying too hard to get it all aligned, fortunately. Someone tell me if I'm wrong. Confused and enjoyably so, perhaps along with everyone else struggling under "postmodern," Jacques S. 14-Oct-90 3:33:27-GMT,4398;000000000001 Received: from aramis.rutgers.edu by klinzhai.rutgers.edu (5.59/SMI4.0/RU1.4/3.08) id AA29047; Sat, 13 Oct 90 23:33:26 EDT Received: by aramis.rutgers.edu (5.59/SMI4.0/RU1.4/3.08) id AA18041; Sat, 13 Oct 90 23:33:24 EDT Resent-Message-Id: <9010140333.AA18041@aramis.rutgers.edu> Received: from ncsuvm.ncsu.edu by aramis.rutgers.edu (5.59/SMI4.0/RU1.4/3.08) id AA20296; Sat, 13 Oct 90 16:54:06 EDT Message-Id: <9010132054.AA20296@aramis.rutgers.edu> Received: from ncsuvm.ncsu.edu by ncsuvm.ncsu.edu (IBM VM SMTP R1.2.2MX) with BSMTP id 2326; Sat, 13 Oct 90 16:54:32 EDT Received: from NCSUVM.BITNET by ncsuvm.ncsu.edu (Mailer R2.07) with BSMTP id 2324; Sat, 13 Oct 90 16:54:31 EDT Date: Sat, 13 Oct 90 16:44:13 EDT Reply-To: PMC-Talk Sender: PMC-Talk From: Editors of PmC Subject: Political Slant To: Multiple recipients of list PMC-TALK Resent-To: mcgrew@darkstar.rutgers.edu Resent-Date: Sat, 13 Oct 90 23:33:23 EDT Resent-From: Charles Mcgrew From: Christopher Amirault Subject: Re: Political Slant Date: Sat, 13 Oct 90 11:57:31 CDT I have to admit to a certain anxiety regarding this conversation, in that we seem to be making that familiar move away from the text, but what the hell.... > From: Jacques Servin > Subject: Re: Political Slant > (Pardon the abridgment.... The reference is to language poets and chaos.) > Besides chaos, only something completely vague and without an > agenda anyone could call an agenda can survive as protection for ideas now > ("agenda" having been so thoroughly discredited by racism). I think > that's when PM is valid, and only then--as a shield that will allow > the massive cultural work going on to go on without fear of being chaotic... > It will slough off when chaos is fully accepted as our only possible mode, > or when a real movement emerges (which doesn't seem likely soon given the > stability of our muddle). Perhaps, then, the question becomes, to what extent does "chaos" become a problem in itself, either methodologically or administratively? Often, the "massive cultural work going on" appears to most to be chaotic, or at the very least without focus, and that work doesn't seem to want to grapple with the issue of its own chaos. This, it seems to me, provides a distinction between post-modernism as a "movement," shall we say, and feminism, which grappled (maybe excessively) with its political, academic, and methodological diversity for decades, and continues to do so. But maybe that is, as Wilfred Brimley would say, the right thing to do. So, in short, what does the shield of PM shield, and whom from it? > So for what it's worth, > my opinion on the questions you raised is that "postmodern" is valid ONLY > because and when it allows voices their maximum diversity and allows them > to carry on in or with their personal political agendas whether or not they > make the forgivable error of thinking them to be the only ones. Otherwise > "postmodern" imposes its forgivable error of thinking equanimity the only > mode and becomes useless, not to mention, an agenda. > Anyone agree, or is it so banal everyone does? I guess I'm not sure that I do. Let me reframe the question: in this definition of PM, does critical, methodological, and political pluralism become the means and the end (I think it usually does)? And is that bad (I think it usually is)? At this point, if the editors would entertain this suggestion, I'd like to see the posting from a few months ago regarding a definition of PM; it might be worth seeing again in this context. Clearly, we aren't going to settle into some standard definition for the term, but we might as well get something quasi-solid, perhaps jello-like, that we can use. BTW, editors, are the authors on-line? [Editor's note: Of the authors represented in the first issue, only English, Schultz, and Larsen are currently on-line. We hope to drag the rest into the e-mail world before too long, and we hope that comments on their work will provide an incentive for them. As for re-posting the preliminary definition of postmodernism, we'd be glad to if it is of interest: send your vote to pmc@ncsuvm (or on Internet, pmc@ncsuvm.ncsu.edu). --John Unsworth] 15-Oct-90 15:04:43-GMT,8493;000000000001 Received: from aramis.rutgers.edu by klinzhai.rutgers.edu (5.59/SMI4.0/RU1.4/3.08) id AA07374; Mon, 15 Oct 90 11:04:41 EDT Received: by aramis.rutgers.edu (5.59/SMI4.0/RU1.4/3.08) id AA20437; Mon, 15 Oct 90 11:04:37 EDT Resent-Message-Id: <9010151504.AA20437@aramis.rutgers.edu> Received: from ncsuvm.ncsu.edu by aramis.rutgers.edu (5.59/SMI4.0/RU1.4/3.08) id AA00387; Sun, 14 Oct 90 21:01:09 EDT Message-Id: <9010150101.AA00387@aramis.rutgers.edu> Received: from ncsuvm.ncsu.edu by ncsuvm.ncsu.edu (IBM VM SMTP R1.2.2MX) with BSMTP id 2577; Sun, 14 Oct 90 21:01:33 EDT Received: from NCSUVM.BITNET by ncsuvm.ncsu.edu (Mailer R2.07) with BSMTP id 2576; Sun, 14 Oct 90 21:01:31 EDT Date: Sun, 14 Oct 90 20:57:20 EDT Reply-To: PMC-Talk Sender: PMC-Talk From: Editors of PmC Subject: Slant, Definition To: Multiple recipients of list PMC-TALK Resent-To: mcgrew@darkstar.rutgers.edu Resent-Date: Mon, 15 Oct 90 11:04:35 EDT Resent-From: Charles Mcgrew 1) Political Slant (Kessler vs. Amirault) 2) Political Slant (Kessler vs. Severin) 3) Definition? (Staples) 4) Re-posting of definition 1)-------------------------------------------------------------- Date: Sat, 13 Oct 90 18:24 PDT From: KESSLER Subject: Political Slant [in re: Amirault --ed.] Dear John Unsworth: I am sorry to learn that PM, the Post- Modern, which I take has always meant the period without a name, because it succeeds what is now agreed to have been the Modern (Until 1945?), is also thought of as an -ism. Perhaps that is where the confusion seems to originate, those who call themselves Postmodernism-ists, and take the whole field to be what they think and say, being by their own definition what it is, the ism, I mean. so I should like to see what is being referred to as a (manifestoed?) definition. Kessler 2)-------------------------------------------------------------- Date: Sat, 13 Oct 90 18:30 PDT To: PMC-Talk From: KESSLER Subject: Political Slant [in re: Severin --ed.] It would be interesting to me to learn why "massive cultural work" (Yes? what and where?) should need a shield, and from whom? what is meant by this use of the trendy word chaos? Is our cultural situation chaotic? Is it a cultural situation? Is there a culture? What and where and whose? Or is chaos a reflex to the immanent terrorism of our Western situation in 1990? I am bemused by the assertive glibness of the word slinging. Kessler 3)-------------------------------------------------------------- From: cliff staples Subject: Political Slant To: PMC-Talk Here's one vote for posting the definition, any definition for that matter. I have next to no idea what you people are talking about (yet). How about playing "label that philosopher." This Foucault fellow (I seem to have some small grasp of what he was up to), was he postmodern? He struck me (a sociologist) as a supercharged Karl Mannheim, in that his whole project was predicated on a the view that knowledge (and all that goes along with it, language-games and now, I suppose, discourses) was socially and politically structured. Is postmodern what happens a few years after cultural relativism makes everyone dizzy? Cliff Staples 4)--------------------------------------------------------------- [Editor's note: The following is a re-posting of a message submitted to PMC-Talk by John Smurthwaite in June of this year. For future reference, I will file this on the PMC-Talk filelist under the name POMO DEF-1. Mr. Smurthwaite also submitted a preliminary bibliography of publications on postmodernism, available from the filelist under the name SMURTHWA BIB: additions to this bibliography are welcome. Finally, in June of 1990 PMC-Talk also distributed Tom Austenfeld's English translation of Michael Koehler's essay from _Amerikastudien_ 22.1 (1977), "'Postmodernismus': Einbegrifsgeschichtlicher Uberblick" ["Postmodernism: a Survey of its History and Meaning"]. This is also available from the PMC-Talk filelist, where it is held under the name KOEHLER TRANS. Use the GET command to retrieve any of these files--e.g., GET KOEHLER TRANS PMC-TALK (send your requests to the address LISTSERV@NCSUVM on Bitnet, or on Internet to LISTSERV@NCSUVM.NCSU.EDU).] Date: Sat, 23 Jun 90 18:10:00 EDT From: SMURTHWAI@HARTFORD.BITNET Subject: definition A definition of postmodernism? I have been in search of such a definition for quite some time now and have been dismayed and intrigued to find that there actually seem to be as many definitions or approaches to a definition as there are academically defined disciplines. For the sake of discussion, I submit a section from an interesting unpublished paper by Dr. James Morley, St. Joseph's College, West Hartford, CT. I think you will find it interesting: _What is postmodernism?_ Firstly, postmodernism was a movement in architecture that rejected the modernist, avant garde, passion for the new. Modernism is here understood in art and architecture as the project of rejecting tradition in favor of going "where no man has gone before" or better: to create forms for no other purpose than novelty. Modernism was an exploration of possibilities and a perpetual search for uniqueness and its cognate--individuality. Modernism's valorization of the new was rejected by architectural postmodernism in the 50's and 60's for conservative reasons. They wanted to maintain elements of modern utility while returning to the reassuring classical forms of the past. The result of this was an ironic brick-a-brack or _collage_ approach to construction that combines several traditional styles into one structure. As collage, meaning is found in combinations of _already_ created patterns. Following this, the modern romantic image of the lone creative artist was abandoned for the playful technician (perhaps computer hacker) who could retrieve and recombine creations from the past --data alone becomes necessary. This synthetic approach has been taken up, in a politically radical way, by the visual, musical, and literary arts where collage is used to startle viewers into reflection upon the meaning of reproduction. Here, pop-art reflects culture (American). Let me give you the example of Californian culture where the person--though ethnically European, African, Asian, or Hispanic--searches for authentic or "rooted" religious experience by dabbling in a variety of religious traditions. The foundation of authenticity has been overturned as the relativism of collage has set in. We see a pattern in the arts and everyday spiritual life away from universal standards into an atmosphere of multidimentionality and complexity, and most importantly--the dissolving of distinctions. In sum, we could simplistically outline this movement in historical terms: 1. premodernism: Original meaning is possessed by authority (for example, the catholic church). The individual is dominated by tradition. 2. modernism: The enlightenment-humanist rejection of tradition and authority in favor of reason and natural science. This is founded upon the assumption of the autonomous individual as the sole source of meaning and truth--the Cartesian cogito. Progress and novelty are valorized within a linear conception of history-- a history of a "real" world that becomes increasingly real or objectified. One could view this as a protestant mode of consciousness. 3. postmodernism: A rejection of the sovereign autonomous individual with an emphasis upon anarchic collective, anonymous experience. Collage, diversity, the mystically unrepresentable, dionysian passion are the foci of attention. Most importantly we see the dissolution of distinctions, the merging of subject and object, self and other. This is a sarcastic playful parody of western modernity and the "John Wayne" individual and a radical, anarchist rejection of all attempts to define, reify or re- present the human subject. >From James Morley, "Some Reflections on the Relationship between Phenomenology and Post-Modernity." Paper presented at the 8th Human Science Research Conference in Aarhus Denmark, August 1989. Morley is presently revising this for publication. 18-Oct-90 15:52:32-GMT,2161;000000000001 Received: from aramis.rutgers.edu by klinzhai.rutgers.edu (5.59/SMI4.0/RU1.4/3.08) id AA15982; Thu, 18 Oct 90 11:52:31 EDT Received: by aramis.rutgers.edu (5.59/SMI4.0/RU1.4/3.08) id AA23802; Thu, 18 Oct 90 11:52:29 EDT Resent-Message-Id: <9010181552.AA23802@aramis.rutgers.edu> Received: from ncsuvm.ncsu.edu by aramis.rutgers.edu (5.59/SMI4.0/RU1.4/3.08) id AA13782; Thu, 18 Oct 90 09:11:52 EDT Message-Id: <9010181311.AA13782@aramis.rutgers.edu> Received: from ncsuvm.ncsu.edu by ncsuvm.ncsu.edu (IBM VM SMTP R1.2.2MX) with BSMTP id 1725; Thu, 18 Oct 90 09:10:32 EDT Received: from NCSUVM.BITNET by ncsuvm.ncsu.edu (Mailer R2.07) with BSMTP id 1716; Thu, 18 Oct 90 09:10:28 EDT Date: Thu, 18 Oct 90 09:03:27 EDT Reply-To: PMC-Talk Sender: PMC-Talk From: Editors of PmC Subject: No definitions? To: Multiple recipients of list PMC-TALK Resent-To: mcgrew@darkstar.rutgers.edu Resent-Date: Thu, 18 Oct 90 11:52:27 EDT Resent-From: Charles Mcgrew Date: Wed, 17 Oct 90 20:09:51 EDT From: Dan Miller Subject: Definitions In our attempts to define postmodernism, it might be useful to keep in mind Stanley Fish's admonition that pure difference can be the basis of nothing or, paraphrased, that as much as we might want to invoke the values of multiplicity, fluidity, non-positionality, or even "no gods," we should be aware that absolute multiplicity is nothing in particular and that, in elevating something like "multiplicity" to the status of a defining feature, we thereby render it a very non-multiplicitous concept. Or, put another way, pure textuality doesn't and can't exist, and when it is asserted as a value, it becomes as essentialist as anything else. The Fishean position might also be set out this way: one can't have "no gods," and if one thinks one does, the name of one's god is "no gods." If our definition of postmodernism revolves around the simple rejection of definitions, we end up with a rather simple definition. Dan Miller DCMEG@NCSUVM.BITNET 23-Oct-90 16:29:59-GMT,2579;000000000001 Received: from aramis.rutgers.edu by klinzhai.rutgers.edu (5.59/SMI4.0/RU1.4/3.08) id AA13147; Tue, 23 Oct 90 12:29:56 EDT Received: by aramis.rutgers.edu (5.59/SMI4.0/RU1.4/3.08) id AA12962; Tue, 23 Oct 90 12:29:52 EDT Resent-Message-Id: <9010231629.AA12962@aramis.rutgers.edu> Received: from ncsuvm.ncsu.edu by aramis.rutgers.edu (5.59/SMI4.0/RU1.4/3.08) id AA19921; Tue, 23 Oct 90 00:25:47 EDT Message-Id: <9010230425.AA19921@aramis.rutgers.edu> Received: from ncsuvm.ncsu.edu by ncsuvm.ncsu.edu (IBM VM SMTP R1.2.2MX) with BSMTP id 5353; Tue, 23 Oct 90 00:24:19 EDT Received: from NCSUVM.BITNET by ncsuvm.ncsu.edu (Mailer R2.07) with BSMTP id 5351; Tue, 23 Oct 90 00:24:16 EDT Date: Tue, 23 Oct 90 00:13:59 EDT Reply-To: PMC-Talk Sender: PMC-Talk From: Editors of PmC Subject: PMC-TALK files To: Multiple recipients of list PMC-TALK Resent-To: mcgrew@darkstar.rutgers.edu Resent-Date: Tue, 23 Oct 90 12:29:48 EDT Resent-From: Charles Mcgrew The following is for the many people who have recently joined PMC-Talk; it describes the files archived on the PMC-Talk filelist, and how to get them. If you have something you would like to add to this list, send it to the journal's editorial address (PMC@NCSUVM on Bitnet, PMC@NCSUVM.NCSU.EDU on Internet). Files currently available from PMC-Talk: Filename Filetype Description POMO DEF-1 Preliminary definition of postmodernism ENZENS POEM Poem by Hans Magnus Enzensberger SMURTHWA BIB Preliminary bibliography of postmodernism HEIM PT1 Mike Heim, "Reflections," Part I HEIM PT2 Mike Heim, "Reflections," Part II HEIM PT3 Mike Heim, "Reflections," Part III WHOLE EARTH John Perry Barlow, "Crime and Puzzlement" KOEHLER TRANS Translation of essay by Michael Koehler on the history of the term "postmodernism" PMC-TALK GUIDE Instructions on how to retrieve the above Note: if you need PMC-TALK GUIDE and don't know how to get it, send the following command as a one-line mail message to the address LISTSERV@NCSUVM (Bitnet) or LISTSERV@NCSUVM.NCSU.EDU (Internet): GET PMC-TALK GUIDE PMC-TALK F=MAIL Note that there should be no blank lines before this command, and there should be no other lines in the mail. The instructions you will receive are the same as those distributed to new subscribers of _Postmodern Culture_, and will enable you to retrieve files on your own. 24-Oct-90 17:27:01-GMT,1923;000000000001 Received: from aramis.rutgers.edu by klinzhai.rutgers.edu (5.59/SMI4.0/RU1.4/3.08) id AA00291; Wed, 24 Oct 90 13:26:56 EDT Received: by aramis.rutgers.edu (5.59/SMI4.0/RU1.4/3.08) id AA14787; Wed, 24 Oct 90 13:26:54 EDT Resent-Message-Id: <9010241726.AA14787@aramis.rutgers.edu> Received: from ncsuvm.ncsu.edu by aramis.rutgers.edu (5.59/SMI4.0/RU1.4/3.08) id AA29805; Tue, 23 Oct 90 15:47:06 EDT Message-Id: <9010231947.AA29805@aramis.rutgers.edu> Received: from ncsuvm.ncsu.edu by ncsuvm.ncsu.edu (IBM VM SMTP R1.2.2MX) with BSMTP id 2981; Tue, 23 Oct 90 15:44:32 EDT Received: from NCSUVM.BITNET by ncsuvm.ncsu.edu (Mailer R2.07) with BSMTP id 2979; Tue, 23 Oct 90 15:44:28 EDT Date: Tue, 23 Oct 90 15:37:18 EDT Reply-To: Editors of PmC Sender: Postmodern Culture From: Editors of PmC Subject: peer-review To: Multiple recipients of list PMC-LIST Resent-To: mcgrew@darkstar.rutgers.edu Resent-Date: Wed, 24 Oct 90 13:26:54 EDT Resent-From: Charles Mcgrew PMC Peer-Review As part of its editorial process, _Postmodern Culture_ asks interested subscribers to nominate themselves to review manuscripts that are being considered for publication. We ask reviewers to return their comments within two weeks. If you would like to review one of the following manuscripts, please send a note to the editors at PMC@NCSUVM (Bitnet) or to PMC@NCSUVM.NCSU.EDU (Internet) explaining why you feel that you are qualified to review it. Manuscripts for review: a) "His Master's Voice: On William Gaddis's _JR_" b) "Incloser" [on the contemporary imagination of Puritan and 19th-century American literature] Note: this manuscript is only available in hard copy; if you ask to review it, please be sure to send us your postal address. 1-Nov-90 16:23:29-GMT,4291;000000000000 Received: from aramis.rutgers.edu by klinzhai.rutgers.edu (5.59/SMI4.0/RU1.4/3.08) id AA03758; Thu, 1 Nov 90 11:23:26 EST Received: by aramis.rutgers.edu (5.59/SMI4.0/RU1.4/3.08) id AA16633; Thu, 1 Nov 90 11:23:25 EST Resent-Message-Id: <9011011623.AA16633@aramis.rutgers.edu> Received: from ncsuvm.ncsu.edu by aramis.rutgers.edu (5.59/SMI4.0/RU1.4/3.08) id AA09461; Wed, 31 Oct 90 20:24:16 EST Message-Id: <9011010124.AA09461@aramis.rutgers.edu> Received: from ncsuvm.ncsu.edu by ncsuvm.ncsu.edu (IBM VM SMTP R1.2.2MX) with BSMTP id 3399; Wed, 31 Oct 90 20:22:29 EST Received: from NCSUVM.BITNET by ncsuvm.ncsu.edu (Mailer R2.07) with BSMTP id 3393; Wed, 31 Oct 90 20:22:26 EST Date: Wed, 31 Oct 90 20:19:38 EST Reply-To: PMC-Talk Sender: PMC-Talk From: Editors of PmC Subject: Definitions, Beverley To: Multiple recipients of list PMC-TALK Resent-To: mcgrew@darkstar.rutgers.edu Resent-Date: Thu, 1 Nov 90 11:23:23 EST Resent-From: Charles Mcgrew 1) Definitions & Kandell 2) Definitions & Kandell 3) Definitions & Kandell 4) Beverley essay & Handelman 1)-------------------------------------------------------------- Date: Wed, 31 Oct 90 12:54:17 CST From: ENSERV@LSUVM Subject: Definitions [& Kandell] I agree, but it might as well serve a purpose so long as it's walking around being full of shit, right? I was finding one. I figured that since so many people are into it it isn't going to die anytime soon. Scappy BM into PM scrap into something useful? Everything I've read about or in PM is goofy if not downright offensive, so I'm not defending the content, just the framework (or what that could be). [Jacques Servin] 2)-------------------------------------------------------------- Date: Tue, 30 Oct 90 22:24:38 EST From: johndan johnson-eilola Subject: Definitions [& Kandell] I guess it depends on how you view a glass of water: Working in a field where theories and definitions shift under your feet can either be construed as involving yourself in a field "full of shit," or participating in a space where problems and issues open up into exciting possibilities. On the other hand, you might want to look into studying Latin--I hear things there don't change very often. Where's "the rush" in repetition? --johndan 3)-------------------------------------------------------------- Date: Wednesday, 31 Oct 1990 09:15:17 EST From: "Patrick J. O'Donnell" Subject: Definitions [& Kandell] In response to Jonathan Kandell's remark: do you mean that PM is theoretically full of shit in the sense that it is full of shit in theory (as opposed to practice) or do you mean that its theories (there is not one, and if you think there is you ought to check out the Smurthwa bibliography available on this network) are shitty: either way, you need to explain. Also, what do you mean by a more workable theory? Although PM has a good deal to do with the abject (and, thus, shit) perhaps we ought, in theory at least, to keep the level of discussion on a plane where we can talk to each other, exchange ideas, challenge views, etc., rather than just asserting that someone or something is full of shit. On the other hand, if you want to do that I have no serious objection, but at least define the nature of the shit you're talking about. Pat O'Donnell 4)-------------------------------------------------------------- Date: Wed, 31 Oct 90 10:47:14 EST From: Joe McMahon Subject: Beverley essay [& Handelman] [Concerning Beverley's essay on postmodern music, Eliot Handelman said,] B. writes: "the position of the the Left today ... should be in favor of the broadest possible variety and proliferation of musics and related technologies of pleasure, on the understanding---or hope---that in the long run this will be deconstructive of capitalist hegemony. This is a postmodernist position ... The Left needs to defend the pleasure principle ("fun") ... " Or perhaps, this is a means of making the Right unpopular simply because "they aren't any fun"? 1-Nov-90 16:26:42-GMT,1076;000000000001 Received: from aramis.rutgers.edu by klinzhai.rutgers.edu (5.59/SMI4.0/RU1.4/3.08) id AA03782; Thu, 1 Nov 90 11:26:40 EST Received: by aramis.rutgers.edu (5.59/SMI4.0/RU1.4/3.08) id AA16802; Thu, 1 Nov 90 11:26:39 EST Resent-Message-Id: <9011011626.AA16802@aramis.rutgers.edu> Received: by aramis.rutgers.edu (5.59/SMI4.0/RU1.4/3.08) id AA16149; Thu, 1 Nov 90 11:17:41 EST Date: Thu, 1 Nov 90 11:17:39 EST From: Charles To: Chuck Hedrick Cc: watrous@cs.rutgers.edu, marantz@cs.rutgers.edu, mcgrew@cs.rutgers.edu Subject: Re: [Sholom Weiss : arc fpu] In-Reply-To: Your message of Wed, 31 Oct 90 15:22:21 EST Message-Id: Resent-To: mcgrew@darkstar.rutgers.edu Resent-Date: Thu, 1 Nov 90 11:26:36 EST Resent-From: Charles Mcgrew Well, we just got 1.3.1, but I haven't put it up yet. I'd say his fp chip is going south -- notice that it worked just fine on pyrite... Should I flag Ricky? Charles 1-Nov-90 16:28:26-GMT,4550;000000000000 Received: from aramis.rutgers.edu by klinzhai.rutgers.edu (5.59/SMI4.0/RU1.4/3.08) id AA03795; Thu, 1 Nov 90 11:28:25 EST Received: by aramis.rutgers.edu (5.59/SMI4.0/RU1.4/3.08) id AA16882; Thu, 1 Nov 90 11:28:24 EST Resent-Message-Id: <9011011628.AA16882@aramis.rutgers.edu> Received: from ncsuvm.ncsu.edu by aramis.rutgers.edu (5.59/SMI4.0/RU1.4/3.08) id AA05375; Sat, 27 Oct 90 10:04:03 EDT Message-Id: <9010271404.AA05375@aramis.rutgers.edu> Received: from ncsuvm.ncsu.edu by ncsuvm.ncsu.edu (IBM VM SMTP R1.2.2MX) with BSMTP id 4933; Sat, 27 Oct 90 10:02:13 EDT Received: from NCSUVM.BITNET by ncsuvm.ncsu.edu (Mailer R2.07) with BSMTP id 4931; Sat, 27 Oct 90 10:02:10 EDT Date: Sat, 27 Oct 90 09:55:26 EDT Reply-To: PMC-Talk Sender: PMC-Talk From: Editors of PmC Subject: Latin America To: Multiple recipients of list PMC-TALK Resent-To: mcgrew@darkstar.rutgers.edu Resent-Date: Thu, 1 Nov 90 11:28:23 EST Resent-From: Charles Mcgrew Date: Fri, 26 Oct 90 23:52 C From: "ERIC MITCHELL SABINSON (IEL/UNICAMP)" I have not finished reading the issue of PMC, but I do have a few comments on what I have read. The Larsen piece is a expression of faith at a time when a future of social justice in Latin American is beyond the imagination for all but the most religious. I am glad PMC published it. I would have it that Professor Larsen's Marxist faith be justified. I do, however, live in Latin America. Oligarchy is still the fashion here because the masses believe in it. It has, however, become a media product. As a modern capitalist sector of the economy, the media is quite as efficient in selling its product as is its North American equivalent. It was essential in electing a traditional oligarch from the under- industrialized northeast of Brazil, Fernando Collor de Mello. He does not dress for the part in traditional terms; no white linen for our president, although, with his slicked down hair, it would become him. Rather, the style is French suits and ties from Hermes. He jogs, waterskies, flies supersonic jets, jumps out of airplanes, races through the streets of Brasilia at a 130 kilometers an hour, laughing hysterically as journalists throw themselves out of harm's way, all of which makes excellent television entertainment. As it stands, the culture industry is the culture industry and postmodernism is postmodernism specifically because they collapse contradictions. Laclau and Mouffe just might stage a rapid conquest of the Latin American left intelligentsia the way Althusser did two decades ago. The stage is certainly set for it. This week the newspapers here in Sao Paulo were full of Althusser's death, two full pages in the Folha de Sao Paulo on Wednesday. They had some fun dribbling the corpse, playing soccer with his head. In the States, a similar, if less intellectual treatment was given to Abbie Hoffman. Meanwhile, the traditional game of influences goes on, business as usual, although over 1.200.000 children up to age five will die of diseases associated with hunger this year, and it is estimated that there are over 300.000 prostitutes under the age of 18. Do I need to cite my sources? UN documents, and local newspaper clippings if one cannot see it happening it the streets! The parents of the dying bless the promises of politicians on election day, while teen-age prostitutes dream of Brasilia's Prince Charming. Which brings me to my second point. If Professor Beverley wants to understand Adorno's rage, he might take a look at Michael Meyer's "A Reference in Music Commentary of Theodor W. Adorno: The Musicology of 'Volk' and Race," which was published with other articles on Adorno in Humanities in Society, Vol. 2, No. 4, Fall 1979. Stra