Showing papers in "Critical Inquiry in 2004"

Why Has Critique Run out of Steam? From Matters of Fact to Matters of Concern

Abstract: Wars. Somanywars.Wars outside andwars inside.Culturalwars, science wars, and wars against terrorism.Wars against poverty andwars against the poor. Wars against ignorance and wars out of ignorance. My question is simple: Should we be at war, too, we, the scholars, the intellectuals? Is it really our duty to add fresh ruins to fields of ruins? Is it really the task of the humanities to add deconstruction to destruction? More iconoclasm to iconoclasm?What has become of the critical spirit? Has it run out of steam? Quite simply, my worry is that it might not be aiming at the right target. To remain in the metaphorical atmosphere of the time, military experts constantly revise their strategic doctrines, their contingency plans, the size, direction, and technology of their projectiles, their smart bombs, theirmissiles; I wonder why we, we alone, would be saved from those sorts of revisions. It does not seem to me that we have been as quick, in academia, to prepare ourselves for new threats, new dangers, new tasks, new targets. Are wenot like thosemechanical toys that endlesslymake the samegesturewhen everything else has changed around them? Would it not be rather terrible if we were still training young kids—yes, young recruits, young cadets—for wars that are no longer possible, fighting enemies long gone, conquering territories that no longer exist, leaving them ill-equipped in the face of threats we had not anticipated, for whichwe are so thoroughlyunprepared? Generals have always been accused of being on the ready one war late— especially French generals, especially these days. Would it be so surprising,

Music: Drastic or Gnostic?

Abstract: What does it mean to write about performedmusic? About an opera live and unfolding in time and not an operatic work? Shouldn’t this be whatwe do, since we love music for its reality, for voices and sounds that linger long after they are no longer there? Love is not based on great works as unperformed abstractions or even as subtended by an imagined or hypothetical performance. But would considering actual performances simply involve concert or record reviews? And would musicology—which generally bypasses performance, seeking meanings or formal designs in the immortal musical work itself—find itself a wallflower at the ball? More than forty years ago, Vladimir Jankelevitch made what is still one of the most passionate philosophical arguments for performance, insisting that real music is music that exists in time, the material acoustic phenomenon. Metaphysical mania encourages us to retreat from real music to the abstraction of the work and, furthermore, always to see, as he put it, “something else,” something behind or beyond or next to this mental object. Yet, as he wrote, “composing music, playing it, and singing it; or even hearing it in recreating it—are these not three modes of doing, three attitudes that are drastic, not gnostic, not of the hermeneutic order of knowledge?”Musical sounds are made by labor. And it is in the irreversible experience of playing, singing, or listening that anymeanings summoned bymusic come into being. Retreating to the work displaces that experience, and dissecting the work’s technical features or saying what it represents reflects the wish

Criminal Obsessions, after Foucault: Postcoloniality, Policing, and the Metaphysics of Disorder

Abstract: 800 1. MichaelWilliams,The EighthMan (Oxford, 2002), p. 163.Williams is also the general manager of the Cape TownOpera at the Artscape Theater, one of Cape Town’s premier cultural centers. His detective novels, one of which has been dramatized for local schools, are published in the Oxford University Press Southern African Fiction series. 2. In our forthcoming study, Policing the Postcolony: Crime, the State, and theMetaphysics of Disorder (esp. chaps. 1 and 5), we interrogate patterns of crime and their representation in South Africa, past and present—and annotate, in detail, both primary and secondary data on the topic. Given constraints of space in this context, we are compelled to offer a relatively sketchy set of references in support of our statements here and below. For further relevant evidentiarymaterials, andmaterials on evidence, see theNedbank ISS Crime Index and the monographs published by the Institute of Security Studies; these are to be found on the web at www.iss.org.za Criminal Obsessions, after Foucault: Postcoloniality, Policing, and the Metaphysics of Disorder

The Time of Affect, or Bearing Witness to Life

Abstract: Upon entering the gallery, you catch sight of threewall-mountedplasma monitors, placed side-by-side, on which are displayed the faces of three middle-aged individuals: a woman on each side and in the middle, a man (fig. 1). You gradually approach this grouping of monitors until you are several feet away; you plant your feet and focus in on the face on the left, that of an Asian woman (fig. 2). You look intently at this image for perhaps a minute or so; as far as you can tell the face shows signs of some neutral emotional state, as if the woman, not quite certain of what she is looking at (is it meant to be you?), were struggling to get a fix on it. More striking than the expression itself, however, is the fact that it doesn’t seem to be changing in anyway, and, indeed, youfindyourself hard-pressed toperceive any movement whatsoever in this allegedly moving image. Somewhat befuddled, you step about a foot to the right and fix on the white, unshaven, slightly graying, male face in the middle. Like the woman you just encountered, this face displays a neutral expression; yet, in this case, it is one that indicates reflection about something personal and a certain obliviousness to its surroundings (fig. 3). Again, however, having registered the significance of the expression, you are struck by the odd stasis of the image; though it is clearly moving in time, as the occasional blink or twitch betrays, you can discern no other significant movement or change in the facial expression. Stepping still another foot to your right, you now fix on the second female face, a white, curly-haired woman (fig. 4). Not surprisingly, youundergo a similar experience, though this time you pay less attention to the neutral expression itself, to thewoman’s sideways glance and slightlypursed lips, and focus your attention ondiscerning even the slightest hintof change in the image. After intense concentration over the span of several minutes,

Transcendental Data: Toward a Cultural History and Aesthetics of the New Encoded Discourse

Abstract: 49 1. Suiting style to theme, I have used an incomplete,minimal set of XML tags to mark out the sections of this paper. 2. I use discourse in this essay to refer elastically to digitally born, transmitted, and/or received information that is mediated through the combination of databaseand XML-based technologies described below.While in its narrower sense discourse refers to language-based communication, the term is still apt in the age of multimedia.While a contemporary data streammay consist of digital image, video, or sound, for example, it is still discursive to the extent that its production, transmission, aggregation, and coordination—in a word, management—are increasingly controlled (in the database and XML system I outline) through such text-based standards as SVG and SMIL (XML-based standards applicable to multimedia). Transcendental Data: Toward a Cultural History and Aesthetics of the New Encoded Discourse

Type specimens and scientific memory

Abstract: 153 Unless otherwise specified, all translations are my own. My thanks to Benjamin Kristek for research assistance, to Jean-Marc Drouin for an enlightening conversation, and to Abigail Lustig and Staffan Muller-Wille for perspicacious comments. 1. See Umberto Eco, “Languages in Paradise,” Serendipities: Language and Lunacy, trans. WilliamWeaver (New York, 1998), p. 23. Type Specimens and Scientific Memory

Note Taking as an Art of Transmission

Abstract: Note taking constitutes a central but often hidden phase in the transmission of knowledge. Notes recorded from reading or experience typically contribute to one’s conversation and compositions, fromwhich others can draw in turn in their own thinking and writing, thus perpetuating a cycle of transmission and transformation of knowledge, ideas, and experiences. The transmission served by personal notes most often operates within one individual’s experience—from a moment of reading and note taking to a later moment when the notes are read and sometimes rearranged and used in articulating a thought. But personal notes can also be sharedwith others, on a limited scale with family and friends and on a wider scale through publication, notably in genres that compile useful reading notes for others. A history of note taking has significance beyond the study of individual sets of extant notes by shedding light on aspects of note taking that were widely shared, notably through being taught in schools or used in particular professional contexts. Notes can take many forms—oral, written, or electronic. At its deepest level, whatever the medium, note taking involves variations on and combinations of a few basic maneuvers, which I propose to identify as the four Ss: storing, sorting, summarizing, and selecting. Human memory is the storage medium with the longest history, and it remains crucial today despite our reliance on other devices, from ink on paper to computers. The range of storage media operative in different historical contexts includes the marked stone token, the clay tablet, the knotted cord or quipu, the pa-

The Memo and Modernity

Abstract: Bacon’s curious phrase “the Method of Tradition” probably does not suggest a precise meaning to modern readers. In his Of the Proficiency and Advancement of Learning, the expanded Latin version of the Advancement, Bacon rendered this phrase as “ars tradendi.” The Latin was retranslated into English again by Spedding andEllis in their nineteenth-centuryedition of Bacon’s work as the “art of transmission.” Returning to this somewhat arcane notion, the editors of the present volume evokewhat is now anenormous field of discourse about themeans andmodes of communication;but for Bacon, this discoursewas still waiting for an inquiry thatwouldestablish its basic principles. The “controversy” to which he alludes, perhaps the first attempt at formulating such principles, was initiated by Petrus Ramus, whose notorious “method” of transmitting knowledge by arrangement of concepts into dichotomies was embraced by some for its brevity and systematicity and rejectedbyothers, includingBacon, for itsoversimplification and specious rigor. Both Bacon and Ramus were concerned with trans-

Languages, Books, and Reading from the Printed Word to the Digital Text

Abstract: 133 1. Jorge Luis Borges, “El Congreso,” El libro de arena (Madrid, 1995), p. 35; hereafter abbreviated “EC”; trans. under the title “The Congress,”The Book of Sand, by Norman Thomas di Giovanni (New York, 1977), p. 33; hereafter abbreviated “C” (“un Congreso del Mundo que representaria a todos los hombres de todas las naciones”). Languages, Books, and Reading from the Printed Word to the Digital Text

Medium Theory: Preface to the 2003 Critical Inquiry Symposium

Abstract: On 11–12 April 2003 the editorial board of Critical Inquiry gathered in Chicago to discuss the future of the journal and of the interdisciplinary fields of criticism and theory that it addresses. Academic conferences are, as we all know, a dime a dozen; and the boardmeetings of academic journals are not usually reported (as this one was) in theNew York Times andBoston Globe. There was something different about thismeeting, something (if you will forgive a lapse from editorial neutrality) quite special, unique, even extraordinary. For one thing, no papers were delivered, only brief statements and questions. The entire conference consisted of dialogue, with the exception of a couple of ceremonial welcomes and a brief introductory statement by Fred Jameson. All of the written statements for the conferencewere submitted and circulated weeks in advance of the conference on the Critical Inquiry home page. For another thing, this group had never before convened in the entire thirty-year history of the journal. CI ’s nine-member editorial collective meets once amonth, but its editorial boardhadnever come togetherbefore, even though itsmembers are well known to each other and have oftenmade contributions to the journal in the form of advice, essays, and the guestediting of special issues. This was an event waiting to happen, and thanks to the generosity of the president of the University of Chicago,DonRandel, the director of the Franke Institute for the Humanities, Jim Chandler, and the chair of the Committee on Social Thought, Robert Pippin, wewere able to do it. Thanks to the able moderating of John Comaroff it had conversational coherence. Thanks to the intellectual inspiration of ArnoldDavidson it had substance. And thanks to the hard work of Jay Williams, Anne Stevens, Jeff Rufo, Sara Ritchey, and, especially, Michael Murphy, it went

Universities: Wet, Hard, Soft, and Harder

Abstract: 244 1. Ernst Robert Curtius, Europaische Literatur und lateinischesMittelalter (Bern, 1948), p. 62. 2. See Plato, Republic, 10.600a. 3. See for example Plato, Phaedrus, 60a, 116 a–b. 4. Compare FriedrichNietzsche, “Gotzen-DammerungoderWie manmit demHammer philosophirt,”Gotzen-Dammerung, inWerke: Kritische Gesamtausgabe, ed. Giorgio Colli and MazzinoMontinari, 9 vols. in 30 (Berlin, 1967), 6.3.120, §23: Universities: Wet, Hard, Soft, and Harder

Critical Inquiry, Affirmative Culture

Abstract: Many of our essayists fix on the senses as a revitalizingdomainwithwhich to chart theories and concepts of history, aesthetics, and experience. The words power and ideology don’t make it into these paradigms much, and questions shaped around social inequalities are either presumed or subsumed in these phrasings. Class inequality and labor-related subjectivities, for example, are now increasingly embedded in capitalismandglobalization; and, I think, but I’m not sure, critical race, feminist, and queer studies concerns are covered, covered over, or articulated in more general conceptualizations of embodiment, a term that designates the closeness to the body of social, experiential, and aesthetic affect. Because these sublimated categories of historical subordination were not formed as aesthetic events, and because they trouble the distance from the body that traditionally secures the prestige of critical thought, it is not surprising that a certaindisenchantment would fall upon Critical Inquiry’s writers and readers, motivating returns to the elegance of a greater distance, whether couched as the new aestheticism, a better empiricism, or rigorous theory. Were it not forMary Poovey’s and Teresa de Lauretis’s finely tuned statements, this shift would seem (among our essayists, anyway) to have happened without comment. De Lauretis argues that the ambitions of the new social movements were “sustained by a hope that today appears enmeshed in neoliberalism” (p. 366). Surely the uneven global history of liberalism’s incommensurateness with itself in theory and in practice requires a more dynamic perspective. I take that to be the promise of de Lauretis’s great phrase “the time for theory is always now” (p. 365). “Now,” though, is not merely the definitional province of theWorld Bank, the IMF, nor, really, the U.S. capitalist/Christian state and all its others. Critics and pundits alike

The Ongoing “Soft Revolution”

Abstract: What, however, if there is nopuzzled look, but enthusiasm,when theyuppie reads about impersonal imitation of affects, about the communication of affective intensities beneath the level of meaning (“Yes, this is how I design my advertisements!”), about exploding the limits of self-contained subjectivity and directly coupling man to a machine (“This reminds me of my son’s favorite toy, the Transformer, which can turn into a car or an action hero!”), or about the need to reinvent oneself permanently, openingoneself up to a multitude of desires that push us to the limit (“Is this not the aim of the virtual sex video game I amworking onnow? It is no longer aquestion of reproducing sexual bodily contact but of exploding the confines of established reality and imagining new, unheard-of intensive modes of sexual

Family Resemblances and Family Trees: Two Cognitive Metaphors

Abstract: 537 This a revised version of the paper I read in Berlin, Padua, and Chicago. Many thanks are due to Gian Antonio Danieli, Andrea G. De Marchi, and Giovanni Ricci for their helpful comments. 1. FriedrichNietzsche, “UberWahrheit und Luge im aussermoralischenSinne,”Werke: Kritische Gesamtausgabe, ed. Giorgio Colli andMazzinoMontinari, 9 vols. in 33 (Berlin, 1973), 3.2.374: “Was ist alsoWahrheit? Ein beweglichesHeer vonMetaphern,Metonymien.” See also Carlo Ginzburg,History, Rhetoric, and Proof (Hanover, N.H., 1999), p. 8.

Statement for the Critical Inquiry Board Symposium

Abstract: The way she spoke those lines, sort of flaunting them with a kind of faux naive provocation, suggested that she knew that Adrienne Rich poem, the one that ends with a young woman asking that very question. You know the poem I mean, the one about an older woman, somebody roughly our age, whose participation in themovements of the sixties or late eighties becomes part of her ethical mission in the classroom. The poem that starts with a woman thinking

Transmission of Archaic Greek Sympotic Songs: From Lesbos to Alexandria

Abstract: This inquiry centers on the transmission of sympotic songs attributed to Alcaeus of Mytilene, a city on the island of Lesbos. The starting point of transmission is the “original” setting of songs sung at symposia in Lesbos in the heyday of Alcaeus, around 600 BCE. Subsequent points include the “secondary” settings of (1) symposia in the city of Athens around the same time and thereafter; (2) revivalist educational contexts inAthensandLesbos during the 300s BCE; and (3) antiquarian academic contexts in Alexandria, center of Hellenistic scholarship during the 200s. The “original” setting of Alcaeus’s sympotic songs has been studied in an article byWolfgangRosler on the functionof thepoetic I inarchaicGreek songmaking. Elsewhere, I have studied the pertinence of Rosler’s work to the general question of genre and occasion and to the specific question of Pindar’s poetic I in his epinician or victory songs.Here I propose tonarrow and deepen my study of the general question and to switch directions by pursuing the specific question of the poetic I not in the epinician songs of Pindar but in the sympotic songs of Alcaeus and beyond. Rosler objects to what he calls an “immanentistic” interpretation of archaic songmaking traditions. From such an immanentistic point of view, references to the self are seen as exercises in creating a Rollencharakter, as if the poetic I were merely a function of poetic conventions. This “fictional I” is for Rosler the opposite of an “autobiographical I”—to which he also objects. As he navigates between these twoopposites, portraying themasScylla

The Arts of Contingency

Abstract: If we consider the present situation of the arts of transmission in the broad sense of the phrase as Francis Bacon used it—namely, as the whole of the procedures that circulate, record, and organize knowledge—wehave to admit to quite a discouraging condition for theoretical reflection.While there exist many techniques in the sense of technologies, machineries, and instruments, the ancient sense of art, as used by Bacon, has been lost. In this sense, art—the art of carpentry, for instance, or the art of navigation or persuasion—is something governed by rules that can be taught. These rules indicate what to do, how to do it, and for what purpose. On a conceptual level, there does not presently seem to be much to teach, in spite of incessant reflection on media and of the multiplication of theories about media. Technological development andmedia practice proceed quickly but also proceed independently of theoretical reflection. Theory seems rather to be concerned with integrating mostly uninterpreted new developments: chat rooms rather than virtual reality (which was much theorized but quickly faded from general interest), the internet explosion instead of interactive television (which failed because of a lack of interest rather than because of technological difficulties), very intelligent video games rather than (often quite stupid) artificial intelligence. We lack autonomous theoretical categories that can deal with these developments. Instead of surprising and informing the development of technology, theory seems to be continuously surprised by the evolution of technology. Media theory seems to be suffering from a kind of interpretive inadequacy. Inmedia analysis, for instance, theory tends topresuppose adubious

Staging the Asian Modern: Cultural Fragments, the Singaporean Eunuch, and the Asian Lear

Abstract: 771 An early version of this essay was presented at the International ConsumAsian Workshop on Intra-Asian Cultural Traffic, University of Western Sydney, Australia, 24–26 February 2000. Thanks to Beth Helsinger, Dipesh Chakrabarty, Chris Connery, Lee Weng Choy, Chua Beng Huat, Tay Tong, Lee Chee Keng, Lucy Davis, the late Kuo Pao Kun, Ong Keng Sen, Ray Langenbach, Arjun Appadurai, Jean Comaroff, Tay Tong, Uchino Tadashi, and Charlene Rajendran for responses to the essay, and also to Ien Ang and the workshop’s participants. General discussions with Aihwa Ong, Don Nonini, and Pheng Cheah also helped. Krishen Jit and Marion d’Cruz maintain an enlightening and ongoing discussion on Malaysian and Singapore theater. Thanks too to Traslin Ong and Lucilla Teoh at TheatreWorks (Singapore) Ltd., and also to Wong Yen Yen of the Practice Performing Arts School. Finally, thanks to Brenda S. A. Yeoh and the staff at the former Centre for Advanced Studies, National University of Singapore, where the initial research was undertaken. A note on the usage of Japanese and Chinese names in the article: by and large, I put the family name first, following the custom of both cultures. The exception will be when a writer is better known by the inverted use of their names or when their publications use that order. Staging the Asian Modern: Cultural Fragments, the Singaporean Eunuch, and the Asian Lear

Reflections on Historical Time

Abstract: As an epilogue to “Uber die vier Meister von Reims,” a study attempting to assert a new chronology for the four master builders of the cathedral at Reims published in 1927 in the Jahrbuch fur Kunstgeschichte, Erwin Panofskywrote a short theoretical text on the problem of historical time. These theoretical reflections were reprinted as “Zum Problem der historischen Zeit” in a collection of Panofsky’s German essays of the nineteen-tens and twenties published in 1980. More recently the entire study has been reprinted as part of a new collection containing all of Panofsky’s German writings. These theoretical reflections were never meant to stand alone and are actually an epilogue to the appendix in which he addresses the chronology of the sculpture adorning the cathedral. Panofsky developed this chronology in the process of trying to reconstruct the building history because he found it necessary to use the stylistic attributes of the sculpture and sculptural decoration and their position on the building to determine when certain architectural elements were put in place. In attempting to connect the stylistic development of the sculpture to the building history, Panofsky discovered that there were limitations to applying stylistic change in establishing chronology because the presence of disparate styles in the same period of time seemed to contradict the possibility of drawingparallels between stylistic and historical developments. This study was written at a time when Panofsky was working through the theoretical issues that would underlie the art historical methodology he would later develop in the United States after leaving Germany in 1933. For this rea-

Symptoms of Theory or Symptoms for Theory

Abstract: The notion of an end of theory has been accompanied by announcements of the end of all kinds of other things, which have not been particularly accurate. Let me begin by outlining my conception of what theory is. I believe that theory begins to supplant philosophy (andotherdisciplines as well) at the moment it is realized that thought is linguistic or material and that concepts cannot exist independently of their linguistic expression. That is something like a philosophical “heresy of paraphrase,” and it atonce excludes and forestalls a great deal of philosophical and systematic writing organized around systems or intentions, meanings and criteria of truth and falsity. Now critique becomes a critique of language and its formulations, that is to say, an exploration of the ideological connotations of various formulations, the long shadow cast by certain words and terms, the questionable worldviews generated by the most impeccable definitions, the ideologies seeping out of seemingly airtight propositions, themoist footprints of error left by the most cautious movements of righteous arguments. This is to say that theory—as the coming to terms with materialist language— will involve something like a language police, an implacable search and destroy mission targeting the inevitable ideological implications of our language practices; it remains only to say that for theory all uses of language, including its own, are susceptible to these slippages and oilspills because there is no longer any correct way of saying it, and all truths are at best momentary, situational, and marked by a history in the process of change and transformation. Youwill already have recognized deconstruction inmy description, and some will wish to associate Althusserianismwith it aswell. We can indeed formulate something like an aesthetic of such writing (provided aesthetic is understood as a rigorous canon of taboos and conven-

Romantic Archives: Literature and the Politics of Indentity in Bengal

Abstract: 654 Versions of this paper were presented as the Mary Keating Das lecture (2003) at Columbia University, at a meeting of the South Asian Studies Group in Melbourne, and at the Center for Studies in Social Sciences, Calcutta. I am grateful for audiences at these meetings and to James Chandler, Gautam Bhadra, Rochona Majumdar, Muzaffar Alam, Bill Brown, Tom Mitchell, Gauri Viswanathan, Kunal Chakrabarti, Sheldon Pollock, Clinton Seely, Carlo Ginzburg, and Biswajit Roy for comments on an earlier draft. Special thanks to Anupam Mukhopadhyay in Calcutta and Rafeeq Hasan in Chicago for assistance with research. 1. Raghab Bandyopadhayay, letter to author, 26 June 2002. Romantic Archives: Literature and the Politics of Identity in Bengal

The Limits of the Universal Knowledge Project: British India and the East Indiamen

Abstract: 183 1. SeeMary Poovey,AHistory of theModern Fact: Problems of Knowledge in the Sciences of Wealth and Society (Chicago, 1998). 2. “The universalist project . . . hurtled itself against an insuperable barrier in colonialism” (Ranajit Guha,Dominance without Hegemony: History and Power in Colonial India [Cambridge, Mass., 1997], p. 19). The Limits of the Universal Knowledge Project: British India and the East Indiamen

Where Is the Now

Abstract: I want to speak to two concerns that are visible inmany of the comments circulated: the tendency to understand the present as a guide to the future— a historicizing endeavor—and the concern about being political (that is, working out the social purpose of criticism). Robert Pippin quotes Hegel’s Philosophy of Right: “‘Philosophy is its own time comprehended in thoughts’” (p. 425). Criticism is not the same as rigorous philosophy. But it is, in our case, infected with the spirit of that statement fromHegel. Criticism must reflect its own time. It has to both interpret and speak to the world. That is the condition for effective critique. Critique has to figure out the now. “To live in and work for our century,” is how Catharine Stimpson puts it (p. 436). Our commentators share a concern about being able to name, designate, and describe the time or period we are passing through. Most of the comments assume a certain definitionof thepresent. Science and technology are critical to this definition. Tom Mitchell’s provocative opening questions set the tone: has “theory” become “therapeutic” and timid faced with “rapid transformations” in the media, biotechnology, and in the logic of capitalism itself (pp. 330, 331)? Whether or not theory has become timid, many commentators agree withMitchell’s understandingof the present. Hansen points to the conditions created by “theunprecedented acceleration of circulation and technological innovation with the advent of digitality” inwhich “consciousness ismore than ever inadequate to the state of technological development, its power to destroy and enslave” (p. 394). Jerome McGann, Elizabeth Abel, Lorraine Daston, Stimpson, J. Hillis Miller, and others advocate engagement on the part of the humanities with these new developments in science and communications technology and

A Note on the Current State of Humanities Scholarship

Abstract: A widespread malaise has been notable in our discipline for more than a decade, particularly among those heavily invested in humanities research education. One of the sources of thismalaise—it hasmany—was addressed in a special letter sent to the members of the MLA in May 2002 by Stephen Greenblatt, the organization’s president. Greenblatt pointed to publishing conditions that make it difficult or even impossible for young scholars to meet current standards for tenure in research departments of literature.He called the problem, correctly, a systemic one. For many years, a network of relations has bound together the work of scholarship, academic appointment, and paper-based—in particular, university press—publishing. This network has been breaking up, or down, for many years, and the pace of its unraveling has recently accelerated. In a grotesque inversion of our most basic goals, near-term economics, not long-term scholarship, has been a serious factor in humanities research for some time. Just try to find a publisher for primary documentary materials or for any basic research that doesn’t come labeled for immediate consumption—sell this by such and such a date, before it spoils. Do you see a digital savior waiting to descend? Do you think I see this redeemer?Well, I don’t. But because these broad institutional problems intersect with the emergence of digital technology, we won’t usefully address the former unless we come to terms with the latter. Consider this. For as long as I’ve been an educator a system of apartheid has marked literary and cultural studies. On one hand, we have editing and textual studies, on the other, theory and interpretation. I don’t have to tell you which of these two classes of work has been regarded asmenial if somehow also necessary. And like any systemof apartheid, bothgroupshavebeen

Why Media Aesthetics

Abstract: When Colin Powell went before the United Nations on 5 February 2003 to make his case for war against Iraq, instructions were given to cover Picasso’s Guernica, usually displayed at the entrance of the Security Council, with a blue cloth; this cover-up was in turn to be covered up with a display of the council’s flags. According to U.N. diplomats, the picture would have sent too much of a “mixed message”; quipped Maureen Dowd in theNew York Times, “Mr. Powell can’t very well seduce the world into bombing Iraq surrounded on camera by shrieking and mutilated women, men, children, bulls and horses.” What does this cover-up indicate? The reach ofWhiteHouse image control? anticipatory obedience on the part of U.N. bureaucrats? the power of art? the persistent ability of modernism to give offense? Perhaps a bit of all of the above, but we need to take a closer look. The Guernica displayed at the Security Council is obviously not the original that, if memory serves, has been returned to Spain by theMuseumofModernArt.Nor is it a replica that pretends to look like the original oil painting. It is a tapestry reproduction, we learn from the New York Times, contributed by Nelson Rockefeller. We are so far into the decline of the aura of the work of art in the age of technological reproduction flagged by Walter Benjamin that the opposition between the original and its mass production no longer seems to grasp the conundrum posed here. For one thing, the painting’s reproduction in the U.N. is not a mass-produced object. It is a unique, privately commissioned, transposition of Picasso’s image into another material— onewithmedievalist connotations at that—which themodernistdictionary would probably classify under the heading of kitsch. What nonetheless lends the object cultural cachet, one might argue, is the symbolic value of

Research Universities, Periodical Publication, and the Circulation of Professional Expertise: On the Significance of Middlebrow Authority

Abstract: 203 This essay is a shortened and revised version of a much longer chapter on the history of learned and literary culture in the United States from 1880 to 1915 in Carl Kaestle and Janice Radway, Print in Motion: The Expansion of Publishing and Reading in the United States, 1880– 1945, volume 4 of A History of the Book in America, ed. David Hall and Hugh Armory (Worcester, Mass., forthcoming). I am grateful to David Hall, the American Antiquarian Society, and Cambridge University Press for permission to publish this essay. Research Universities, Periodical Publication, and the Circulation of Professional Expertise: On the Significance of Middlebrow Authority