Using data generated from participant observation and semistructured interviews, I consider the ways in which nightlife, or what might be imagined as the nightly round—a process encompassing the so

The Nightly Round: Space, Social Capital, and Urban Black Nightlife

The Concept of Utopia in the Work of Fredric Jameson

This research project explores the creative and critical functions of editing in art, film and writing. The written component analyses the histories and discourses of 'cutting and splicing' to examine their various roles in processes of signification. The artistic practice uses more speculative and open-ended methods to explore the social 'languages' that inform our inter-subjective experiences. This project argues that editing is a creative methodology for making meaning, because it allows existing symbolic systems to be appropriated, revised and rewritten. By emphasising the operations of spacing, questioning and play, it also identifies editing as an essential tool for critically engaging with the potentials of art and theory.

The space of editing : playing with difference in art, film and writing

Theoretical Tailspins: Reading "Alternative" Performance in Spin Magazine

Marxism, Morality, and the Politics of Desire: Utopianism in Fredric Jameson's The Political Unconscious

Imagine Fredric Jameson—the world’s foremost Marxist critic—kidnapped and taken on a joyride through the cultural ephemera, generational hype, and Cold War fallout of our post-post-contemporary landscape. In The Jamesonian Unconscious , a book as joyful as it is critical and insightful, Clint Burnham devises unexpected encounters between Jameson and alternative rock groups, new movies, and subcultures. At the same time, Burnham offers an extraordinary analysis of Jameson’s work and career that refines and extends his most important themes.

In an unusual biographical move, Burnham negotiates Jameson’s major works—including Marxism and Form , The Political Unconscious , and Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism —by way of his own working-class, queer-ish, Gen-X background and sensibility. Thus Burnham’s study draws upon an immense range of references familiar to the MTV generation, including Reservoir Dogs , theorists Slavoj Zizek and Pierre Bourdieu, The Satanic Verses , Language poetry, the collapse of state communism in Eastern Europe, and the indie band Killdozer. In the process, Burnham addresses such Jamesonian questions as how to imagine the future, the role of utopianism in capitalist culture, and the continuing relevance of Marxist theory.

Through its redefinition of Jameson’s work and compelling reading of the political present, The Jamesonian Unconscious defines the leading edge of Marxist theory. Written in a style by turns conversational, playful, and academic, this book will appeal to students and scholars of Marxism, critical theory, aesthetics, narratology, and cultural studies, as well as the wide circle of readers who have felt and understood Jameson’s influence.

Clint Burnham

Papers

The Jamesonian unconscious