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Abstracts

Volume 12, Number 2
January, 2002

    Scott Michaelsen and Scott Cutler Shershow, Practical Politics at the Limits of Community: The Cases of Affirmative Action and Welfare

    • Abstract: In the wake of a number of studies of the relationship between post-structuralism and the "political," this article demonstrates how a post-structuralist Marxism can be applied to particular instances of politico-economic decision-making. Through an examination of U.S. court cases that address affirmative action and welfare, the authors reveal the limits of both "left" and "right" versions of these policies and show how the entire spectrum of conventional opinion unites around (and remains unable to escape) certain founding assumptions. In particular, the traditional conceptualizations of affirmative action and welfare reach their limit in the figures of mandated white supremacy and enforced economic inequality. The authors also suggest that it is precisely at these limits that another form of politics emerges--one influenced in particular by a broadly Marxian/Derridean trajectory and Jean-Luc Nancy's work on community. This form of politics involves what the authors call "calculation in order to end calculation," by which all conventional notions of giving or sharing must be radically reconfigured at the limit of identity itself. Such a politics would produce an "affirmative action" policy not strictly affirmative of anything, not even "diversity," a policy whose goal would be absolute deracialization; and a "welfare" policy no longer founded in exclusion and the preservation of scarcity, but re-conceived as an expenditure without reserve: an offering or sharing of well-being to an "all" that remains forever open.--sm and scs

    Samir Dayal, Inhuman Love: Jane Campion's The Piano

    • Abstract: Jane Campion's The Piano has been praised as a film about a woman's self-assertion against an oppressive patriarchal and colonial economy which defines a woman's place ultimately within the institution of bourgeois marriage. Ada McGrath, the protagonist, is championed for her moving, if ironic, self-assertion: she chooses not to speak, but lets her piano express her innermost feelings. And yet, viewers have also felt disappointed and troubled because Ada appears to accede to a demeaning self-prostitution to win back her piano, a "bargain" that Campion apparently "resolved" by marrying her to the man who seduces her. How then could Ada be an exemplar of feminist resistance? This essay argues that this disappointment is not only unwarranted but obscures the film's power and insights into desire and psychic drive. Ada's resistance must be understood in its colonial and feminist dimensions. But the film's true richness lies in its exploration of desire, its rendering of Ada's self-assertion as a kind of inhuman love. The film demonstrates an extraordinary understanding of desire as crucial to subjectivity and of jouissance as the subject's impossible goal. Ada's pursuit of desire and jouissance comes to a crisis in her near self-annihilation. The essay develops some insights of Lacanian psychoanalytic theory to show that the film merits renewed and deeper theoretical analysis as a representation of a kind of love that challenges the categories of conventional love and highlights its misfirings, but by the same token illuminates insights into this most universal and defining human experience.--sd

    Brian Donahue, Marxism, Postmodernism, Zizek

    • Abstract: This article addresses some of the challenges to Marxism posed by the conditions of late capitalism and by the theoretical discourses of postmodernism, and makes a case for the continued relevance and value of Marxist theory for an ostensibly post-Marxist, would-be post-ideological period. The developments in the theory of ideology advanced in Slavoj Zizek's work, focusing on the role of psychology in the functioning of ideology under conditions of late capitalism, are then taken as valuable criticisms and revisions of the Marxist tradition that open useful avenues for critically understanding American culture and society in recent decades. Two of Zizek's key--and related--insights are then examined in relation to two well-known American films: the first, that the dominant subjective structure of postmodern society is that of the "pathological narcissist," is developed through a reading of Citizen Kane, particularly in light of Zizek's assessment of the role of the "maternal superego" in this subjective structure; and the second, that the breakdown between the simulacrum and the Real in postmodern society must be understood in terms of the attenuation of the Symbolic order, is developed through a reading of Pulp Fiction, framed in terms of the often-repeated concern about "desensitization" toward violence in a society in which the simulacrum is alleged to have usurped the Real. The essay concludes with a claim that Zizek should be understood not as a cynical, apolitical ironist, as some have critically read him, but rather as a "late Marxist" in the Jamesonian sense.--bd

    Jim Hicks, "What's It Like There?": Desultory Notes on the Representation of Sarajevo

    • Abstract: In the prologue to his influential, now perhaps infamous, Balkan Ghosts, Robert D. Kaplan asks, and answers, the following question: "What does the earth look like in the places where people commit atrocities?" A similar inquiry seems implicit in my own titular question and probably lurks behind the readerly glance of almost anyone who chooses to write, or peruse, an essay like mine. Part autobiography, part photographic essay, part critique, part anecdote, parable, and comedy of errors, my text offers, more than anything else, a note of caution. What is it we see, if we see? After the original, oral presentation of this essay, one audience member described it as an attempt to walk the line between a necessary silence and the obligation to witness. My own sense of it is that the essay wanders around more than most and isn't all that certain of what it finds. Doing so is an attempt to do justice to the Benjaminian sense of experience--events for which categories are lacking--and thus to counteract, in some small fashion, our all-too-common, post-Eliot sense of ourselves as born-again Tiresians (we've seen it all, and can do nothing). If such an excursion can be said to have a purpose, it is to induce at least a suspicion of something that, for several years now, has been my own answer to the Kaplans of this earth. All appearances asides, what Sarajevo most feels like is home.--jh

    Thomas Swiss and Seb Chevrel, The Narrative You Anticipate You May Produce

    • Abstract: This piece is a collaborative experiment in New Media Poetry combining text, images, and sound. Following the artist Christo's work ("wrapped" objects like Running Fence, Wrapped Pont Neuf, etc.), the collaborators on this piece developed one answer to the question: what might "wrapped" language look like in a digital environment? It is "interactive," requiring the reader/viewer to locate and click on bits of language (phrases, lines) as they appear on the screen. Before the piece begins, the order of the pages is randomly shuffled. The resulting order is represented by the serial number (in red) at the top of the screen. The backgrounds and animations on each page are randomly drawn. Finally, the reader's interaction with the screen is what sets the words in their final states.--ts and sc

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