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Showing papers in "Cultural Critique in 1991"


Journal Article•DOI•
TL;DR: A group of Native Canadian writers decided to ask Cameron to, in their words, "move over" on the grounds that her writings are disempowering for Native authors as mentioned in this paper.
Abstract: dian women. She writes them in first person and assumes a Native identity. At the 1988 International Feminist Book Fair in Montreal a group of Native Canadian writers decided to ask Cameron to, in their words, "move over" on the grounds that her writings are disempowering for Native authors. She agrees.' 2. After the 1989 elections in Panama are overturned by Manuel Noriega, President Bush of the United States declares in a public address that Noriega's actions constitute an "outrageous fraud" and that "the voice of the Panamanian people has spoken." "The Panamanian people," he tells us, "want democracy and not tyranny, and want Noriega out." He proceeds to plan the invasion of Panama.

1,683 citations



Journal Article•DOI•
TL;DR: In his 1984 essay "Postmodernism or the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism," Fredric Jameson compares two paintings to provide a now-familiar pair of synecdoches for the modern and postmodern cultural moments.
Abstract: In his 1984 essay "Postmodernism, or the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism," Fredric Jameson compares two paintings to provide a now-familiar pair of synecdoches for the modern and postmodern cultural moments. Vincent van Gogh's modernist painting Peasant Shoes, Jameson argues, provided us with a hermeneutic depth, an invitation to reconstruct some raw material truth about the world (such as the miserable poverty of peasant life) that it has reworked or transformed. In contrast, Andy Warhol's Diamond Dust Shoes allows us no comparable opportunity to restore its flattened postmodern images to some larger lived context, a politically disturbing fact for Jameson given how Warhol's work turns centrally around commodification. In the cultural shift from the modernism of middle capitalism to the postmodernism of late capitalism, Jameson detects the abolition of critical distance as "aesthetic production today has become integrated into commodity production generally" (56).1

28 citations


Journal Article•DOI•
TL;DR: The authors argue that Gulliver is no more than an inconsistently used vehicle for satire, a mere mask to be dropped and reassumed at the whim of the author, and argue that his outlook is disturbingly unstable.
Abstract: A cluster of related questions haunts the commentary on Gulliver's Travels. There has been frequent debate about whether or not Gulliver is a genuine character who undergoes conflict and change. Gulliver has many of the trappings of "character"'-a proper name, an obtrusively present physique, a family of middling status, a particularized education and profession, national pride, traits of curiosity and wanderlust, an idiosyncratic and unfailing gift for languages-and yet his outlook is disturbingly unstable. Challengers of Gulliver's personhood thus argue that "Gulliver" is no more than an inconsistently used vehicle for satire, a mere mask to be dropped and reassumed at the whim of the author.2 A significant domain of interpretation is at stake: for if Gulliver is not seen as a "character"-and if Gulliver is thus not read both with

28 citations


Journal Article•DOI•
TL;DR: In The Body in Pain this paper, Scarry argues that the more accurately the nature of war is described, the more likely the chances that it will one day be displaced by a structural surrogate.
Abstract: In The Body in Pain, her 1985 study of the ontological structure of war, Elaine Scarry writes, "the more accurately the nature of war is described, the more likely the chances that it will one day be displaced by a structural surrogate" (143). The aim and function of military censorship and discursive control over the information and knowability of the recent Persian Gulf War-considered unprecedented in modern times-has seemingly reversed Scarry's hope, and reinstated an acceptability of modern warfare once shaken by the nuclear terrors surrounding the Cold War and sobered by the military and political uncontrollability of Vietnam. But its limited duration and intense self-reflexivity make the Persian Gulf War and its discursive manipulation and control an excellent case for exploring the interrelationship between policies and practices of knowledge control and the production of authorizations and legitimations by which a polity makes decisions according to specific fictions of its own self-image. In the case of warfare, this interrelationship of discourse and power-which we situate at the heart of ideology-crucially mobilizes the essentially

26 citations


Journal Article•DOI•
TL;DR: This paper examined the function of the rhetoric of "the rape of Kuwait," its connections to U.S. mythologies, and its role in the determination of citizenship in the new world order.
Abstract: Tr he rape of Kuwait" may be the most frequently used phrase to describe the Persian Gulf War. From Margaret Thatcher to Newsweek to George Bush to Canadian diplomats to Hank Williams, Jr., to Jean Sasson's best-selling book, "the rape of Kuwait" has stood as a shorthand referent for a summary of alleged Iraqi atrocities in Kuwait. There are only a few permutations-"Iraq's rape of Kuwait," "Kuwaiti rape"-the most popular of which links the "rape of Kuwait" directly to Saddam Hussein, marking him not only as a national but as a personal perpetrator: "Saddam Hussein rapes Kuwait" (Commentary, March 3, 1991); "his [Saddam's] rape of Kuwait" (Daily Telegraph, March 1, 1991; Los Angeles Times, August 13, 1990); "Mr. Hussein continues to rape Kuwait" (New York Times, August 27, 1990). In this essay, I want to examine briefly the function of the rhetoric of "the rape of Kuwait," its connections to U.S. mythologies, and its role in the determination of citizenship in the "new world order." Just before the air war started, George Lakoff identified two scenarios that were in play to justify a U.S. presence in the Gulf:

23 citations


Journal Article•DOI•
TL;DR: A colony is to the mother country as a member to the body, deriving its action and its strength from the general principle of vitality; receiving from the body and communicating to it, all the benefits and evils of health and disease; liable in dangerous maladies to sharp applications, of which the body however must partake the pain; and exposed if incurably tainted, to amputation, by which a body likewise will be mutilated.
Abstract: A colony is to the mother-country as a member to the body, deriving its action and its strength from the general principle of vitality; receiving from the body, and communicating to it, all the benefits and evils of health and disease; liable in dangerous maladies to sharp applications, of which the body however must partake the pain; and exposed if incurably tainted, to amputation, by which the body likewise will be mutilated.

22 citations


Journal Article•DOI•
TL;DR: For instance, the authors argues that content-based motifs such as the valorization of a Fuhrer or leader figure, the exaltation of nature, the glorification of the military and of death, or the negative portrayal of "racial" groups are present in National Socialist culture.
Abstract: n labeling a text "Nazi" or "fascist," critics often restrict their criteria (to the extent these are articulated at all) to contentbased motifs such as the valorization of a Fiihrer or leader figure, the exaltation of nature, the glorification of the military and of death, or the negative portrayal of "racial" (especially Jewish) groups. Although these motifs clearly pervade National Socialist culture, one can question whether, on the one hand, they are present in all of Nazi culture, and whether, on the other hand, they are unique to that culture. Already in the thirties and forties Bertolt Brecht and Walter Benjamin offered analyses of Nazi culture that went a step further by concentrating on structural as well as thematic tendencies of fascism. Both thinkers address Nazism's

15 citations


Journal Article•DOI•
TL;DR: In this paper, the authors distinguish five different contexts in which the U.S. war effort in the Middle East can be analyzed and critiqued: 1. Long-term power politics and imperial objectives of domination including military intervention in the Third World to secure strategically and economically important resources.
Abstract: t is useful to distinguish among five different contexts in which the U.S. war effort in the Middle East can be analyzed and critiqued: 1. Long-term U.S. power politics and imperial objectives of domination, including military intervention in the Third World to secure strategically and economically important resources. Publications by Noam Chomsky and Joel Beinin may very well be the best-known and most effective among these critiques. 2. Inconsistencies and hypocrisies in the official "moral" legitimation of the war, raising questions such as the following: If U.S. foreign policy is guided by morality, why does the U.S. not intervene-even diplomatically-when thousands are murdered by a Suharto in Last Timor or a Pinochet in Chile? Does it not give pause that the images, for example, of gassed Kurdish children, that are used to demonstrate Hussein's disdain for human life, largely date back to a time when he was the "friend" of the United States against the then-popular tyrant, Khomeini? Why weren't these images disseminated in the media earlier? Why does the

14 citations


Journal Article•DOI•
TL;DR: In the Gulf war and its aftermath, U.S. national identity has been revitalized and repackaged in an American flag-bumper stickers, windshield decals, flags on car antennae, porches, office buildings.
Abstract: T hroughout the Gulf war and its aftermath, U.S. national identity has been revitalized and repackaged in an American flag-bumper stickers, windshield decals, flags on car antennae, porches, office buildings. One man in Los Angeles painted his entire house red, white, and blue. Businesses large and small cashed in on the patriotic fervor with strategies that collapsed categories of gender, technology, and the nation in juxtapositions

11 citations


Journal Article•DOI•
TL;DR: The media manipulation of the Willie Horton case during the last elections might perhaps be indexed as the culmination of a racist resurgence during the Reagan ascendancy that, as far as I can judge, has not yet subsided.
Abstract: The media manipulation of the Willie Horton case during the last elections might perhaps be indexed as the culmination of a tidal wave of racist resurgence during the Reagan ascendancy that, as far as I can judge, has not yet subsided. Its effects have been registered in latent and manifest forms: witness the proliferating incidents of racist harassment and violence on college campuses, epitomized by the case (27 October 1986) of the notorious white mob of three thousand students at the University of Massachusetts chasing and beating anyone who was black. I won't remind you any further of the Goetz shooting incident in New York City nor of Purdy's massacre of Indo-Chinese schoolchildren in Stockton, California, as well as many other more recent occurrences. Can we describe these incidents as problems of ethnicity and deviance, or mere dysfunctional symptoms of cultural pluralism?

Journal Article•DOI•
TL;DR: In this article, a renewed interest in the concept of nature as a critical category in the face of impending ecological decimation, on the one hand, and the threat of sheer biological extermination on the other.
Abstract: Recent criticism from the Left, in both Europe and America, has generated-almost inevitably, in retrospect-a renewed interest in the concept of nature as a critical category in the face of impending ecological decimation, on the one hand, and the threat of sheer biological extermination, on the other. Such literal global crisis has created for criticism a situation in which the urgency to reconjugate nature as a theoretical term whose significance rivals that of class, gender, and race is matched only by the difficulties of doing so.' "Inside" theory, as it were, this dilemma is nowhere more evident than in that criticism whose point of departure is, to oversimplify for a moment, the articulation of natural difference as a critical category-I'm referring, of course, to feminist theory-and here the manifold dangers of "biologism" or "essentialism" have been admirably confronted if not altogether avoided.2 Indeed, biologism or "reductive naturalism" is that particular theoretical sin of which no one wants to be guilty (better "scientism" than that). In fact, the various strategies for avoiding it have become in themselves signs of methodological, if not the-

Journal Article•DOI•
TL;DR: This article proposed a discourse theoretical understanding of the enemy image, which is viable considering discourse theory's interdisciplinarity and its compatibility with other approaches such as psychoanalysis and social psychology.
Abstract: would like to begin with a few brief reflections on the term enemy image, which takes on a number of different meanings in various disciplines. My personal orientation is toward a discourse theoretical understanding of the term, which I believe is viable considering discourse theory's interdisciplinarity and its compatibility with other approaches such as psychoanalysis and social psychology. As a means of explaining the delimited and operative concept of the enemy image I am proposing, I will recall a point Heinrich Boll made in a well-known speech on political imagery. Boll maintained that the minute we start referring to "national traits," we conjure images that we generally can neither correct nor control.

Journal Article•DOI•
TL;DR: Benjamin this paper described a system of mirrors created by a little hunchback who was an expert chess player sat inside and guided the puppet's hand by means of strings, which made the illusion that the table was transparent from all sides.
Abstract: board placed on a large table. A system of mirrors created the illusion that this table was transparent from all sides. Actually, a little hunchback who was an expert chess player sat inside and guided the puppet's hand by means of strings. One can imagine a philosophical counterpart to this device. The puppet called "historical materialism" is to win all the time. It can easily be a match for anyone if it enlists the services of theology, which today, as we know, is wizened and has to keep out of sight. -Walter Benjamin, "Theses on the Philosphy of History"


Journal Article•DOI•
TL;DR: For example, the slogan "We Support Our Troops" as mentioned in this paper was used by the U.S. military in the first week of the ground war in Iraq to declare that the antiwar movement had systematically discouraged, even demoralized, combat troops in Vietnam.
Abstract: eporting to the Congress our military success in the Persian Gulf, President Bush declared on March 3: "We have finally kicked the Vietnam syndrome." Asked about the possibility of deploying U.S. troops to protect Kurdish refugees in northern Iraq, the president insisted in his April 14 press conference that we would not be drawn into another "quagmire" in Iraq. The words hardly needed to be uttered; from the beginning of our military involvement in the Persian Gulf, "Vietnam" has been a constant historical referent. The slogan "We Support Our Troops" helped forge a patriotic consensus (eighty-five percent according to most opinion polls taken in the first week of the ground war) unmatched in U.S. history. That slogan referred explicitly to the Vietnam War and the cultural "memory" that the antiwar movement had systematically discouraged, even demoralized, U.S. combat troops in Vietnam. There is little in the actual history of the antiwar movement to support this remembrance, which, like most historical reconstructions, conflates different historical moments. The slogan's implicit negative, "We did not support our troops in Vietnam," refers less to isolated incidents of

Journal Article•DOI•
TL;DR: The Durassian oeuvre is the prototype of such writing where madness emerges completely rationally, and meaning and feelings coalesce in trivia and profundity "without tragedy or enthusiasm" "in the frigid insignificance of a psychic torpor-the minimal, but also the ultimate sign of grief and ravishment".
Abstract: T he Kristevan critique of postmodernity sees literature as having become-at the level of style-a minimal, colorless writing, where death is the same as life and opposites generally slide into one another with complete indifference. The Durassian oeuvre is the prototype of such writing where madness emerges completely rationally, and meaning and feelings coalesce in trivia and profundity "without tragedy or enthusiasm" "in the frigid insignificance of a psychic torpor-the minimal, but also the ultimate sign of grief and ravishment" (Kristeva, Soleil noir 236).1 Here, the "eros" of poetic language-the "music in letters," as our epigraph says-has evaporated and given way to "a whiteness of meaning" (264). Does this Kristevan assessment truly capture something fundamental in the West's postmodern fin de siecle? This question serves as the focus of the reflection in the following pages. But rather than giving an answer to it, I intend to begin sketching out the dynamics of the issues surrounding it.

Journal Article•DOI•
TL;DR: For instance, this paper pointed out that the sign of a poem's cultural power lay not in its widespread acclaim, as it does today, but instead in the critical conflict it provoked.
Abstract: t is an instructive paradox that in the divisive milieu of the Depression era, the sign of a poem's cultural power lay not in its widespread acclaim, as it does today, but instead in the critical conflict it provoked. Indeed, entire careers of this period record in their twists and turns the historical pressures that writers were compelled to negotiate. Most notably, of course, Archibald MacLeish went the full gamut of interbellum political life. Graduating from Harvard Law School in the early 1920s, he was throughout the next two decades alternately vilified and valorized by such writers on the left as Mike Gold, Stanley Burnshaw, Malcolm Cowley, Rolfe Humphries, and Carl Sandburg. With the publication of "Invocation to the Social Muse" in 1932, the year he was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Conquistador, MacLeish became something of a lightning rod for the period's turbulent intellectual tempests. His anti-Semitic and anti-proletarian stereotypes portrayed in poems such as "Frescoes for Mr. Rockefeller's City" and "Comrade Levine" drew heavy fire from leftist poets and intellectuals at the time.1 Yet in only one short year, as the Com-

Journal Article•DOI•
TL;DR: The Third World War: August 1985 as mentioned in this paper, a novel that vividly describes a Soviet air and land attack on Western Europe and naval battles in the North Atlantic, ends with a complete Western victory.
Abstract: In 1978, General Sir John Hackett, former commander in chief of the British Army of the Rhine and NATO's Northern Army Group, joined forces with six other leading British generals and admirals. Together they wrote The Third World War: August 1985, a novel that vividly describes a Soviet air and land attack on Western Europe and naval battles in the North Atlantic.' Both the Soviet attack and NATO's response remain below the "nuclear threshold," until the Soviets destroy Birmingham, England, killing 300,000 people and wounding an additional 250,000. In retaliation, NATO launches four nuclear missiles at Minsk. Its destruction sparks national liberation movements throughout Eastern Europe and the non-Russian republics of the Soviet Union, and leads to a coup in the Kremlin. According to Hackett et al., WW III lasts eighteen days and ends with a complete Western victory. The Third World War received rave reviews in England. In the United States, New York Times military correspondent Drew Middleton described it as a "compelling account of the utmost seriousness, fascination, realism, readability, and relevance." By 1979

Journal Article•DOI•
TL;DR: In this article, the main function of this "exterministic war logic" is to give future potential "troublemakers" in the Third World an extremely drastic preventive "lesson."
Abstract: ver since President Mitterrand remarked during the first phase of the so-called "Gulf crisis" of 1990 that we were immersed "in a logic of war," his catchy phrase has been a favorite of the media. Despite its popularity, however, Mitterrand's phrase is much too unhistorical, too abstract in implying the existence of a universal and transhistorical "war logic" ("logique de guerre") that would be equally valid for Old Testament, Napoleonic, and contemporary wars. In fact, the real challenge of this war has from the start been to recognize and formulate its particular new character, which more than likely will be typical for future wars. I regard two aspects as critical: first, we are dealing with the "logic" of an "exterministic" war; second, the main function of this "exterministic war logic" is, among other things, to give future potential "troublemakers" in the Third World an extremely drastic preventive "lesson."


Journal Article•DOI•
TL;DR: For instance, the logic of martial "glory" despises the body (which it must use) and loves the monument that inscribes a nationalist text of masculine self-presence as mentioned in this paper.
Abstract: N o guts, no glory-yet the logic of martial "glory" despises the body (which it must use) and loves the monument that inscribes a nationalist text of masculine self-presence. At least until the dedication of the Vietnam Memorial in 1982, U.S. war monuments such as the Saint-Gaudens memorial to Colonel Robert Gould Shaw and the Massachusetts Fifty-fourth Regiment (which plays a key structuring role in Edward Zwick's Glory and in Emile

Journal Article•DOI•
TL;DR: The statement of Isis as mentioned in this paper is a statement of truth, the essence of divinity, that which is unrevealable, and has always been treated as a model esoteric statement.
Abstract: nlike the words of Moses, the statement of Isis is constative, not prescriptive. It speaks Mystery itself and has always been treated as a model esoteric statement. This is why it received such attention near that end of the Enlightenment which is marked by Masonic mysticism, from Hamann to Hegel or from Schlegel to the Novalis of The Disciples of Sais. Abstracted from the basic metaphor that sustains it, this constative is a statement of truth: it speaks the truth, the essence of divinity, that which is unrevealable. It matters little that Kant gave it a "rationalist" interpretation, that he transformed it (Isis became "Mother Nature"), that he thus treated it like a sort of personification of nature: the stated truth remains fundamentally the same, its mystical import unaffected. Inscribed in the frontispiece of a book by Segner, it fills the reader "with such a holy awe as would dispose his mind to serious attention" (Kant 179). One can easily see how this mystery allowed Kant to hyperbolically associate Isis with the Biblical Law: the statement of Isis is similarly concerned with the unpresen-

Journal Article•DOI•
TL;DR: The role of environmental issues in the U.S.-Iraq War has been discussed in this paper, with the focus on the preservation of historic and cultural monuments, the presence of coalition media personnel in Iraq subsequent to the outbreak of hostilities, and the real-time transmission of images and sound from the theater of operations.
Abstract: everal aspects of the representation of the U.S.-Iraq War arrest my attention. These are (1) the role of environmental issues, (2) the concern for historic and cultural monuments, (3) the presence of coalition media personnel in Iraq subsequent to the outbreak of hostilities, and (4) the "real-time" transmission of images and sound from the theater of operations, transforming the battlefield into a theater. I believe these phenomena are without precedent in war and therefore deserve special consideration. The oil spill in the Persian Gulf was presented by the Bush administration as a deliberate sabotage of nature by Saddam Hussein. Rather than an accident of the shipping industry or a hazard of petroleum technology, this spill was attributed to the maniacal intentions of a despot. Suddenly a new criterion was imposed on the conduct of war: the preservation of the environment. War, considered the ultimate state of the polis at least since Plato, the true test of the moral fiber of the community, has become, by dint of U.S. administration spokesmen, a limited action, one carried out with constraints imposed by "higher" considerations, such as the environment. When the U.S. Air Force destroyed one-third of the forests of Vietnam by defoliants, napalm, and assorted chemi-


Journal Article•DOI•
TL;DR: In this article, a new accounting procedure for the economies of war is proposed, a new costbenefit analysis that will carefully balance not only the actual and potential transfers of material wealth that cause such wars but also the exchange of symbolic or moral value that is inevitably involved.
Abstract: ne cannot help thinking, as we contemplate the "cost" of the swift and furious execution of the war in the Persian Gulf by the United States, that we need to develop a new accounting procedure for the economies of war, a new cost-benefit analysis that will carefully "balance" not only the actual and potential transfers of material wealth that cause such wars but also the exchange of symbolic or moral value that is inevitably involved. While few will dispute the notion that these wars are fought over material resources like oil, we have yet to develop an articulate analysis of how symbolic or moral value is extracted in the course of these wars and is then transformed and reaccumulated as moral capital and eventually circulated and reinvested so that it can accrue further moral profit. In short, the production of moral surplus value is as crucial a function of these wars as is the transfer of material

Journal Article•DOI•
TL;DR: In the first volume of his work on sexuality, Foucault has proposed that sexuality could be studied as a "political economy" of a will to knowledge as discussed by the authors, which would account for the deployment of pleasure across a differential matrix of social sites without relying on what he perceives as the central fallacy in prior theories dealing with the relationship between power and pleasure.
Abstract: In the first volume of his work on sexuality, Foucault has proposed that sexuality could be studied as a "'political economy' of a will to knowledge" (73). Hopefully, such an analysis would account for the deployment of pleasure across a differential matrix of social sites without relying on what he perceives as the central fallacy in prior theories dealing with the relationship between power and pleasure: what he terms "the repressive hypothesis." Foucault's critique of the repressive hypothesis is a corollary of his antihumanism, which, in turn, is a crucial feature of the anti-imperialist and antitotalitarian politics that motivates his work. Foucault needs to free pleasure from any notion of a repressed nature that might be liberated by an external and totalizing force. This brings him instead to see pleasure as "the positive product of power" (Power/Knowledge 120). This essay will not attempt to judge Foucault's success in balancing his political responsibilities with the determinism that seems to accompany the abandonment of the politically useful notion of repression, nor will it look at the specific strategies of resistance to power Foucault employs, which range from the pro-

Journal Article•DOI•
TL;DR: For instance, Heidegger points out that space and time are a frame, an ordering realm, with the help of which we establish and indicate the place and time point of particular things.
Abstract: f, as Charles Olson says, "SPACE [is] the central fact to man born in America" (11), one might proceed to ask, How and where does this space begin and end? Who inhabits it? What lies beyond it? In short, let us dissolve the supposed self-evidence of "space" in a series of pragmatic questions. For notwithstanding the fabulous dramas of discovery making up American myth and history (has any nation so confused the two?), American space has never simply been there, never just accommodatingly presented itself to be found, founded, and settled. Space is not a place or a happening or an extension, but rather the condition of them, their determination as spatial, physical. Heidegger points the way beyond regarding space as either a natural given or "a system of co-ordinates" by claiming, "Space and time are a frame, an ordering realm, with the help of which we establish and indicate the place and time point of the particular things" (What Is a Thing? 17). Space and time are the possibility of "things," the "frame" within which "things" emerge as such.