Showing papers in "Criticism in 2011"

From Gaza to Warsaw: Mapping Multidirectional Memory

Abstract: What happens when different histories of extreme violence confront each other in the public sphere? Does the remembrance of one event erase others from view? When memories of colonialism, occupation, slavery, and the Holocaust bump up against one another in contemporary multi cultural societies, must a competition of victims ensue? Such questions of remembrance, justice, and comparison lie at the heart of any attempt to think through the topic of this special issue: transcultural negotiations of Holocaust memory. These questions have also oriented my attempt to construct a theory of multidirectional memory that focuses on exemplary sites of tension involving remembrance of the Nazi genocide of European Jews in order to offer an alternative framework for thinking about and confronting the recent and ongoing "memory wars."1 In Multidirectional Memory (2009), I make three moves toward a new account of transcultural remembrance. First, I argue against a logic of competitive memory based on the zero-sum game, which has dominated many popular and scholarly approaches to public remembrance. Accord ing to this understanding, memories crowd each other out of the pub lic sphere—for example, too much emphasis on the Holocaust is said to marginalize other traumas, or, inversely, adoption of Holocaust rhetoric to speak of those other traumas is said to relativize or even deny the Holo caust's uniqueness. To be sure, political, economic, and cultural forms of power contour the circulation of memories in the public sphere, but a pre Foucauldian understanding of power as repressive cannot capture mem ory's relative autonomy from such forces. In contrast, I suggest, memory works productively: the result of memory conflict is not less memory, but more—even of subordinated memory traditions. For instance, I would argue that the result of the rise to prominence of Holocaust memory is not

International Human Rights and the Politics of Memory: Limits and Challenges

Abstract: Human rights as a transnational social movement, and memory dis courses in many different parts of the world, first emerged in the 1970s, gained steam in the 1980s, and together reached inflationary proportions by the 1990s. Both discourses were historically overdetermined and both are now increasingly being questioned about their hidden assumptions, their effectiveness, and their future prospects. In a recent book, Samuel Moyn interprets the human rights movement as a last Utopia after the col lapse of the earlier Utopias of the twentieth century such as communism and fascism, as well as modernization and decolonization.1 In my book Present Pasts, I argued analogously that the collapse of an earlier Utopian imagination was one condition that made it possible for the new memorial discourses to arise. I argued that the time consciousness of high modernity in the West tried to secure Utopian futures, whereas the time conscious ness of the late twentieth century involved the no less perilous task of taking responsibility for the past. The human rights movement, however, remains firmly oriented to the future goal of establishing an international, perhaps even global, rights regime. Here it is important to remember that the international human rights movement in its contemporary configura tion has as short a history as the current culture privileging a politics of memory. Of course, there always was a discourse of memory, and rights discourse itself does indeed have a deeper history. Greek tragedy provides many insights into the links between memory, justice, and the law. From the American and French Revolutions through decolonization, rights and memory were always umbilically linked to state and nation, to citizenship issues and the invention of national traditions. And yet, the current inter national human rights movement and the transnational flows of memory politics since the 1990s represent a fundamentally new conjuncture. This leads me to a simple question that defies easy answers: What do rights have to do with memory in the first place? At the most simple

Traumatic Mirrorings: Holocaust and Colonial Trauma in Michael Chabon's the Final Solution

Abstract: Michael Chabon’s novella The Final Solution (2004), which first appeared in the Paris Review in 2003 with the subtitle A Story of Detection, lends itself to being interpreted as an allegory of man’s futile quest for understanding of the Holocaust. In this reading, the detective story that the novella recounts against the background of the Nazi extermination of the Jews illustrates the inaccessibility of the unspeakable horror of the Holo caust to rational inquiry. The Final Solution can thus be seen to abide by the demands of what Gillian Rose has called Holocaust piety; that is, devotion to the idea that the Nazi genocide is a radically unique event outside of human history, ineffable, beyond comprehension, and impervious to analysis. Our reading of The Final Solution, however, supplements and complicates the standard interpretation of the novella as an exercise in Holocaust piety by focusing on an “impious” subtext that appears to contradict some of the text’s more overt assumptions. We argue that the novella challenges the dominant conception of the Holocaust as an incomprehensible, ineffable, sacred event by returning the Nazi genocide to the realm of history—more specifically, the history of a colonizing Western modernity. The Final Solution breaks with Holocaust piety, we contend, through the proliferation of mirroring effects that suggest continuities and parallels between the Third Reich and the European colonial empires and between the plights of their respective victims.

Contemporary Bildungsromans and the Prosumer Girl

Abstract: Jfoanne] K. Rowling's Harry Potter franchise set a powerful new distribu tion model for cross-marketing cultural content spanning a variety of age, race, and gender demographics. Hot across Potter's jugular, the coming of-age novel series Twilight continues to drive the young adult market, selling a combined total of just under 26.5 million copies in 2009.2 The first book alone has sold 25 million copies worldwide and been translated into thirty-seven languages.3 The Twilight Saga, a series of film adaptations of the novels, earns loyal fans and revenue returns totaling $389 million so far for just the first three films.4 While the sales and earnings do not come close to the Potter empire,5 they are remarkable insofar as girls drive the Twilight phenomenon, a demographic once ignored as mere sidekick to the primacy of the men-in-training youth market.6 The consumption of Twilight on such a huge scale and the Zeitgeist of girl desire articulated through hundreds of pages catapult it to the top of the contemporary bil dungsroman for girls, offering plot cues and character subreferences that permeate girl culture and popular culture at large. While Twilight is no table for making novel reading trendy among girl nonreaders and read ers alike, its most significant effect lies in the proliferation of fan texts, taking reader response to a whole new level of self-actualization. Girl prosumers (producers/consumers) deploy technological savvy and criti cal aesthetic acumen to generate a host of responses to Twilight, which they then publish on the Internet. The key difference for the Twilight phenomenon is that the bildungsroman as enculturation narrative now requires the production of new texts—texts based upon the original but that operate outside the purview of previous reader/text response. The prosumption of Twilight illustrates one of a number of vectors through which girls enculture and produce one another, actualizing one or any number of selves online.

Toward an Open Source Poetics: Appropriation, Collaboration, and the Commons

Abstract: Software programmers first introduced the term open source to describe a model of peer production in which users are free to access, modify, and collaborate on software code. Programmer and open source advocate Eric S. Raymond offers a useful analogy: whereas software had been previ ously built like cathedrals, "carefully crafted by individual wizards . . . working in splendid isolation," open source methods "seemed to resemble a great babbling bazaar of differing agendas and approaches."3 The term has since entered the lexicons of innumerable cultural disciplines to denote the permissible appropriation and modification of any technique, object, or model—both in digital environments and in tangible ones. Elements of this commons-based method of production can be found in Wi^ipedia, MIT's OpenCourseWare, Anonymous, urban communal garden proj ects, Ensembl's [sic| genome database, the BioBricks Foundation, and a host of nonprofit organizations4—leading Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri to call for "an open-source society" of shared social programming.5 Applied to literature, the term evocatively brings into focus a number of issues relating to authorship and intertextuality, "intellectual property" and the public domain, poetic license and collective artistic production. One might speak of an open source poetics or commons-based poetics based on a decentralized and nonproprietary model of shared cultural codes, networks of dissemination, and collaborative authorship.

Collyer Curiosa: A Brief History of Hoarding

Abstract: It's the stuff of legend and the legend of stuff. With a front-page head line heralding "Homer Collyer, Harlem Recluse, Found Dead at 70," the New Yor\ Times reported on 22 March 1947, that "the circumstances sur rounding the death of 70-year-old Homer, blind as the poet he was named for, were as mysterious as the life the two eccentric brothers lived on the unfashionable upper reaches of Fifth Avenue, in the middle of Harlem."1 Tipped by an anonymous phone caller the day before, police found Col Iyer's emaciated corpse in his Harlem brownstone located on the corner of Fifth Avenue and 128th Street. Days later, officers discovered the rotting body of his brother, Langley, lying several feet from where Homer had died. Buried beneath mountains of material, Langley had been crushed to death by fallen stacks of bundled newspapers, one of the many booby traps that he had rigged to ward off priers. Their bodies included, over one hundred tons of material ranging from several grand pianos to scads of pinup posters were excavated from the dilapidated mansion. Con demned as unsafe, the house was razed, and the city would later dedicate the lot as Collyer Brothers Park. This sensational story of two elderly white men living and dying in a predominantly black neighborhood has sparked fascination and anxiety from the mid-1930s to the present day, and the following pages argue that the Collyers were pivotal in advancing a sea change in a curious identity category—the hoarder—that proved inextricable from their "mysterious" household effects as well as the "unfashionable" district of Harlem. I'll

What Is New Media? Ten Years after The Language of New Media

Abstract: A frank assessment to begin: There are very few books on new media worth reading.1 Just when the nay-sayers decry the end of the written word, bookstore shelves still overflow with fluff on digital this and digital that. And even as a countervailing chorus emerged that was more skeptical of the widespread adoption of new media--in France Jacques Chirac once spoke disparagingly about “that Anglo-Saxon network” (for, as anyone knows, in the beginning there was Minitel)--it was evident that the Internet revolution had already taken place in the US, in Europe, and elsewhere. Like it or not the new culture is networked and open source, and one is in need of intelligent interventions to evaluate it. In the years since its original publication in 2001, Lev Manovich's The Language of New Media has become one of the most read and cited texts on the topic.2 It is a key entry in the disciplines of poetics and cultural aesthetics, and has helped define the new field of software studies. The book is not without its limitations, however, and perhaps today one may begin to look again on the text with the fresh eyes of historical distance, and through it reassess the rampant open-sourcing of all aspects of cultural and aesthetic life, from our tools to our texts, from our bodies to our social milieus.

The Holocaust as a Paradigm for the Congo Atrocities: Adam Hochschild's King Leopold's Ghost

Abstract: As is now generally accepted, memory affects our moral criticisms, politi cal analyses, and affective responsiveness to the past in the present. Yet, although few people in this post-Holocaust age would doubt the moral obligation to remember past catastrophes, there seems to be far less agree ment on how precisely they should be remembered. Eclectic as they are in ideological and philosophical terms, postcolonial theories, on the one hand, and trauma theory and Holocaust studies, on the other, are among the fields of knowledge that put questions of remembrance, forgetting, and particularly the representational modes these could take, on the table. Although both fields have paid particular attention to the ways in which literature could offer particular modes of understanding and responding to catastrophic events and histories, they have often done so in parallel and disparate ways. For instance, narrative acts and discourses of witness ing have formed an important topic of both postcolonial and Holocaust discussions, yet these discussions have developed in strikingly dissimilar ways, with visible variations in emphasis and differences in theoretical concepts of violence, victimhood, and agency. Recently, a number of fruit ful attempts have been made to build bridges between theoretical dis courses of postcolonialism and the Holocaust in mutually productive ways, as well as to theorize the interconnectedness of distinct forms of violence.

The Beautiful, Horrifying Past: Nostalgia and Apocalypse in Don DeLillo’s Underworld

Abstract: In a New Yor\ Times article published shortly before Underworld (1997), Don DeLillo claims, "The novel is the dream release, the suspension of reality that history needs to escape its own brutal confinements."1 He then provocatively invokes Aristotle's distinction between history and po etry, favoring the latter for its transformative powers. At its best, in other words, the historical novel becomes poetic exactly as a way of suspending history in order to comprehend it. The writer's task, DeLillo contends, is to fight through language "the vast and uniform Death that history tends to fashion as its most enduring work."2 DeLillo's 11th novel, Underworld, engages in such a struggle. The notion of history in Underworld has been most often analyzed through tropes of commodification or paranoia in the context of the 1950s Cold War.3 Apocalypse and nostalgia—the focal points of this essay that are approached in relation to the (post—)Cold War era—have not been in the center of critical attention even though they were associated with the questions of historical memory and the fear induced by the Cold War.4 I argue, however, that the critical attention to the themes of nostalgia and apocalypse provides a new insight into the novel and the historical moment upon which it concentrates. But the nostalgic and apocalyptic themes of the novel are not projected into the past or the future; instead, they exist within the present. In that sense, nostalgia and apocalypse are correctives to the contemporary moment. Even more importantly, the focus on nostalgia and apocalypse reveals the characters' discomfort in their own present; the characters long for the moments when history was horrifying and the days in which they dreaded the apocalypse. They are nostalgic—despite all of the attempts of denial—because the approaching end of the world seemingly stabilizes in their view the global order. In other words, they are nostalgic for the time during which they dreaded the apocalypse.

Pale Fire and Johnson's Cat: The Anecdote in Polite Conversation

Abstract: The speaker quoted is Samuel Johnson. Johnson was the London lexi cographer and conversationalist who came, in the words of his contem poraries, to exemplify a certain grandeur of style, masculine sensibility, and intellectual firmness; Boswell, his biographer and protege, composed, in the aftermath of Johnson's death, the monument to Johnson's conver sational style, which he called The Life of Johnson (1791).2 Characteristic of the literary form Boswell adopts for the Life, the compact narrative episode I quote above is braced between similar moments, one among a series of anecdotes first related by the living Johnson as he held court in his Literary Club, and later recorded by Boswell for posterity.3 As Boswell recalls it, Johnson summons up an anecdote about a young gentleman by way of clinching a dissertation on ethics. But while Johnson summons up an anecdote in order to provide force to a moral argument, the effect is more than he bargains for. His rhetorical turn to an historical event reminds him of the very real and vulnerable body of his own cat, a tabby named Hodge. And so the deaths of a number of cats in London's West End return, in a real way, to kill the conversation that they enabled.

When a chance came for everything to change: Messianism and Wilderness in Kim Stanley Robinson's Abrupt Climate Change Trilogy

Abstract: is inundated by raging storms, with wild weather erupting everywhere in between. Of course, ecological themes are not unfamiliar to Robinson's readers, as the physical environment is always present in his work, even if that presence sometimes seems secondary to issues of Utopian politics. But by centering this narrative on ecological disaster, the Abrupt Climate Change (ACC) trilogy finally brings the environment decisively to the forefront.

Revolution, Counterrevolution, and Natural Law in Billy Budd, Sailor

Abstract: Hans Morganthau [sic]: What are you? Are you a conserva tive? Are you a liberal? Where is your position within the contemporary possibilities? [Hannah] Arendt: I don't know. I really don't know and I've never known. And I suppose I never had any such po sition. You know the left think that I am a conservative, and the conservatives sometimes think I am left or I am a maverick or God knows what. And I must say I couldn't care less. I don't think that the real questions of this century will get any kind of illumination by this kind of thing.1

"Read Mr. Sacher-Masoch": The Literariness of Masochism in the Philosophy of Jacques Lacan and Giles Deleuze

Abstract: Tim Dean has recently observed that "Lacanians have plenty to say about perversion, though often it remains unclear where they get their informa tion."1 The obvious reply is that they tend to work through the theories of Jacques Lacan—they are Lacanians, after all. But where did Lacan get his information about perversion? His commentaries on sadism in "Kant with Sade" (1963) and Seminar VII (1959-60) are well known. Masochism is a topic much less associated with Lacan. He discusses it periodically, especially in his middle seminars, but these discussions are scattered and remain mostly unpublished. Still, Lacan considers masochism "the most radical of. . . perverse positions of desire" and recommends that it "serve us as a pole for [our] approach to perversion" generally.2 So where does Lacan get his information about masochism? Intrigu ingly, his work on masochism is never rooted in clinical practice, nor usu ally even in Freudian theory: instead, he refers us directly to the novels of Leopold von Sacher-Masoch. "Read Mr. Sacher-Masoch," he prom ises in Seminar VII, "and you will see . . . [that] the perverse masochist [harbors] the desire to reduce himself to this nothing that is the good, to this thing that is treated like an object, to this slave whom one trades back and forth and whom one shares."3 Lacan particularly emphasizes the aesthetic dimension of Sacher-Masoch's work, praising "the true mas ochist, Sacher-Masoch himself' for "the florid, the beautiful" qualities of his writing.4 Lacan construes masochism as a phenomenon that can best be comprehended through the techniques of reading and interpretation. When asked about the subject's arrival into masochism, he elegantly notes that "desire is its interpretation.'"' The notion that masochism can best be understood by a return to the novels of Sacher-Masoch is one more often associated with Lacan's

Against the "Networked Information Economy": Rethinking Decentralization, Community, and Free Software Development

Abstract: The free, libre, and open source software (FLOSS) movement is often cited as an example of fundamental changes in production associated with the rise of information networks. Don Tapscott and Anthony D. Williams see it as an example of wi\inomics, a powerful new form of eco nomic production based on sharing and self-organization.1 Yochai Benk ler argues that the form of social or peer production evident in FLOSS can compete with or even displace traditional forms of capitalist organi zation and sees it as a symptom of the "networked information economy," replacing the "industrial information economy," which has been in force since the late-nineteenth century.2 The main feature of this networked information economy is the much greater role within it for decentralized individual action?

Unexpected Cosmopolitans: Media and Diaspora in J. M. Coetzee's Summertime

Abstract: by any standard, his first novel, Dusklands, was published in 1974 by Peter Randall's antiapartheid Ravan Press, a publisher based in Johannesburg that printed books targeting the nations white minor ity. In three years, Randall's civil rights would be suspended by the state for his antiapartheid activities; it would take eight years for Dusk lands to be reprinted by a London press, Seeker and Warburg, and nine for Coetzee to publish a novel, Life and Times of Michael K (1983), set in a recognizable, contemporary South Africa. The opening gambit of Coetzee's Summertime (2009), in contrast, pitches the reader a short series of notebook fragments dated 1972—75 that are as saturated with

The Paterian Bildungsroman Reenvisioned: "Brain-Building" in Alison Bechdel's Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic

Abstract: In Walter Pater's imaginary portrait" "The Child in the House," the material decor of the childhood home is so fundamental to the protago nist's inner development that its influence is literalized in the interweav ing of external material surfaces with the internal consciousness of the protagonist, Florian Deleal. Pater's semiautobiographical narrative is a compressed example of a particular strain of the Late Victorian Bildung sroman in which the childhood home is figured as a primary force in the development of the child's aesthetic awareness, a trope that has reemerged more recently in Alison Bechdel's graphic memoir Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic,3 While Bechdel's thoroughly postmodern memoir would at first seem an unlikely venue for the resurfacing of Late Victorian literary forms, as we shall see, the hybrid nature of comics, which itself effects an interweaving of the external spatial world with the internal thoughts of the protagonist into an "inextricable texture," is a fitting medium for representing contemporary forms of aesthetic education. Insofar as Fun Home maps chronologically the formation of the art ist/author's aesthetic and intellectual sensibilities, we might say that Bechdel's autobiography follows the traditional narrative trajectory of

Haunted History and the Birth of the Republic in Middleton's Ghost of Lucrece

Abstract: [To the most chaste and pure Ghost of Lucrece: Thomas, in a moderate and weighty voice, cries out the first "Arise." O thou, the image of chas tity, arise! Acknowledge Tarquin, branded with the mark of Phlegethon! Favour these my beginnings (which have transformed both you and him)! In this the world's worst age, launch my tireless poetry against his crime. Totally devoted to your most chaste ghost, T.M.1]

With Hegel Beyond Hegel

Abstract: The Hegel Variations: \"On the Phenomenology of the Spirit\" by Fredric Jameson. London: Verso, 2010. pp. 144. $24.95 cloth. The essayistic nature of Fred ric Jameson's short new book on G. W. F. Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit should not blind us to the fact that the book offers a system atic interpretation of the entire inner structure of Hegel's first masterpiece. Although The Hegel Variations comes from someone for

The New American Temporality Studies: Narrative and National Times in the Nineteenth Century

Abstract: this temporal turn and affect stud ies, Dana Luciano's Arranging Grief, winner of the Modern Lan guage Association Prize for a First Book, mines a prodigious archive to analyze the development in the nineteenth century of an "affective chronometry: the deployment of the feeling body as the index of a temporality apart from the linear paradigm of'progress'"; that is, uses of the body as a "timepiece" (1). She argues that emotional embodiment provided a slower, nonlinear time in contrast to national time: "As a

Memory's Future

Abstract: and John Sutton's Memory Studies series for Palgrave, reminds the field that the future is as important as the past and the present. Because its guiding spirits are young sociol ogists who—rightly—are most in terested in praxis, there is less philosophical reflection about tem porality than one might have ex pected. This is hardly a drawback, however, as ultimately the reader wants empirically based and viv idly conveyed case studies that bear out the central points made by the editors in their lucid introduction. As the subtitle indicates, these points emerge from a shared con cern with transnationality, multi disciplinarity, and temporality. In the main, the chapters ges ture to these themes in their own

What Is Holding Societies Together?: On Culture Forms, World Models, and Concepts of Time

Abstract: What is holding societies together? The question is curiously moving. Do societies fall apart, then? And if they do, what do their parts fall into, if not once again into what we call society? So is the question redundant? Or is it just being put the wrong way? Should we perhaps start out by say ing that they do hold together while falling apart, or even that what keeps them together is, in fact, that they fall apart, and vice versa? It makes you think of Plato, driven by his normative concern over the just society and all the while living in a society that was, clearly, if we believe his own description of the lively doings in the city, anything but threatened as regards its empirical coherence.2 We can also think of Aristotle, who advocates for the just mean in opposition to a society that certainly had no idea how to maintain this but was obviously functioning downright vigorously, all the same.3 Philosophers have good reason to be concerned. Yet what stands out, and is a common premise among sociologists, is that concern about society happens in societies, which have found their own patterns of reproduction, mostly regardless of this concern, and know how to maintain them. Sociologists, like Gabriel Tarde, Georg Simmel, Max Weber, and even Emile Durkheim, when he is not busy thinking like a pedagogue, therefore assume that conflict within society is as fun damental to its cohesion as the situation that all its parts, individuals and institutions alike, are imperfect and so need something added to them.4 In what follows, it is not a question of denying that society was and is in a somewhat lamentable state, viewed historically as well as currently. Violence and environmental destruction, social injustice and psychic deg radation, are clear enough testimony to that. However, this conclusion

Postscript on Contribution Societies

Abstract: For a New Critique of Political Economy by Bernard Stiegler Translated by Daniel Ross Cambridge, MA: Polity, 2010 Pp 154 $1495 paper Surveying the landscape of mid century industrial society, Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer ob served the strange role of variety in consumer and cultural goods The techniques of mass production in the factories and studio system had, oddly enough, managed to produce not a surface of sameness, but a great diversity of things On the one hand, however, the diver sity of goods that faced consumers was merely apparent, decipherable as false by "any child with a keen interest in variety" On the other hand, the variety of offerings on the market was functional and ef fective at securing the social order "Something is provided for all," Adorno and Horkheimer gloom ily observed, "so that none may escape"1 If the Frankfurt school theorists could peer into contempo rary culture, they would observe a stunning intensification of variety, as well as a search engine-opti mized system for identifying and catering to niche desires that would make their imagined color-coded advertising maps seem quaint by comparison The difference be tween the cultural consumption analyzed by Adorno and Hork heimer and today's practices is not the variety, which has only prolifer ated Rather, it is the unidirectional character of being provided for The subject of the industrial society is positioned as passive in this regard, whereas the consuming subject today is active and productive: the

Know the Enemy

Abstract: the enemy" no doubt inspired con servatives to purchase—if not read—The Coming Insurrection, radical leftists and intellectuals may have been tempted by the timely arrest of its supposed authors, the Tarnac 9, and the petition signed by a number of big-name theorists for their release (e.g., Giorgio Agam ben, Alain Badiou, Judith Butler, Jean-Luc Nancy, Jacques Ranciere, Slavoj Zizek).3 Indeed, it sold even though free translations of the book have been circulating online since its publication. All of this doubt less added to the aura of the book, which was being typecast as a dan gerous, anarchist manifesto. Lacking the no-press-is-bad press endorsements of The Coming Insurrection, Introduction to Civil War (2010)4 is a more anomalous text, setting out, in aphoristic and impressionistic snippets, what ap pears to be the conceptual and theoretical foundation of the for