Showing papers in "Substance in 1994"

Art and the Public Sphere

Abstract: What is the fate of art in an age of publicity? How has the role of traditional public (i.e., government-owned) art changed in contemporary culture, and how have changing conditions of public space and mass communications altered the whole relationship between art and its potential audiences? With contributions from the arts, philosophy, criticism, and the law, the thirteen essays in this volume explore the aesthetic, social, and political dynamics that make contemporary public art so controversial, and that that have placed recent art work at the center of public debates. Contributors include Vito Acconci, "Public Space in a Private Time"; Agnes Denes, "The Dream"; W. J. T. Mitchell, "The Violence of Public Art: "Do the Right Thing""; Ben Nicholson, "Urban Poises"; Michael North, "The Public as Sculpture: From Heavenly City to Mass Ornament"; Barbara Kruger, in an interview with W. J. T. Mitchell; Barbara Hoffman, "Law for Art's Sake in the Public Realm"; Richard Serra, "Art and Censorship"; James E. Young, "The Counter-Monument: Memory Against Itself in Germany Today": Charles Griswold, "The Vietnam Veterans Memorial and the Washington Mall: Philosophical Thoughts on Political Iconography"; John Hallmark Neff, "Daring to Dream"; and David Antin and Virginia Maksymowicz. Presenting a balance of theoretical and performative essays by both critics and artists, this book will provide deep and discordant analyses of contemporary public art for general readers, as well as students and scholars of art, architecture, and public policy related to the arts. Most of these articles originally appeared in the journal "Critical Inquiry."

The Fiction of Translation: Abdelkebir Khatibi's "Love in Two Languages"

Abstract: Ce qui semblait nous unir itait une extraordinaire traduction. Je veux dire . . . que j'6tais moi-meme transpose, transplante dans ma parole maternelle en un simulacre si fantastique qu'elle ne pouvait concevoir, A son tour, que comme une grande fiction. J'aurai donc parld dans l'abime de ce ricit, si bien qu'elle fut irrisistiblement ce personnage de roman qui m'avait si merveilleusement s6duit.

The Self-Deconstruction of Convention

Abstract: IN ATTEMPTING TO STRADDLE THE CHASM between the humanities, seemingly dominated by Parisian thought, and American "scientific" philosophy and social science, I find my own situation as an academic commuting between Paris and Stanford has given me certain insights. From this rather unique point of view, here is what I observe (and this is hardly a caricature): on one side, literature students, initiated into the mysteries of French structuralism and its deconstruction by the numerous disciples of Jacques Derrida, celebrate the death of the human subject, and repeat ad infinitum that man is not his own master, that the awareness he may have of his own affairs is bounded by a sort of unconsciousness. On the other side, their colleagues in the economic, political or cognitive sciences learn to reduce social institutions to voluntary agreements between fully conscious, free individuals. It is perhaps fortunate that these students practically never meet-no more, in fact, than do their professors. However, I believe that it is possible to avoid juxtaposing the worst in French and American thought, and to try to combine harmoniously what is best in each.

Relations of the Real in Lacan, Bataille and Blanchot

Abstract: THE REAL IS A SLIPPERY THING. That is, if it "is" in the first place, and if it "is" a "thing" in the second. Lacan's "Real" is no less slippery. Frequently discussed as the Real, or elevated to the status of concept-"the Real Order," its definite place or theoretical definition rather goes against its elusive and apparently indeterminable nature. Indeed, the irony of using the definitive article with a capitalized noun for something that seems so utterly indefinite and undefinable broaches the paradoxical situation of the real and the slides into paradox that mark encounters with writings about the real. Encounters with the real itself, that is if there is a real "itself," or if those encounters were not always affected by the language in which the subject is necessarily constructed, would not be paradoxical since the real is just there, "there" not functioning as a demonstrative but representing the unrepresentable beyond of systems of reference, designation and signification. Quite simply, the real remains what is, an unspeakable is, an impossible, inexpressible, ineffable and undifferentiated space outside language. The real, then, lies beyond systems of signification; it ex-ists outside Lacan's symbolic order. It is defined as that which cannot be defined, that which is alien to or resists signification, that which exceeds symbolization. Utterly Other, the real is Other to subjects of language but has immense effects in its unpresentable in/difference. In psychoanalysis, the missed encounter with the real recalls the effects of trauma, a trauma inassimilable to consciousness, forming the lost origin of neurosis and the basis of neurotic repetition. Every day the real exceeds systems of signification, generating an excess or a remainder in relation to which desire inscribes its object. Irrupting into and from within symbolic boundaries, the real evinces the "extimacy," the "intimate exteriority" that Lacan associates with the Thing (1992: 139). Exceeding symbolic boundaries, the real intimates an alterity that is simultaneously absolute difference and total indifference, a doubleness echoed in Freud's account of the unconscious's disrespect for

Violence and Sacrifice in Modern War Narratives

Abstract: IN CIVILIZATION AND ITS DISCONTENTS, FREUD SPECULATES that the "human instinct of aggression and self-destruction" (92) could not be explained merely as a response to thwarted erotic satisfaction. He advanced this hypothesis of an aggressive instinct (Thanatos) independent of the libido (Eros) after becoming aware of the horrors of the First World War. It is not surprising that those exposed to the Western Front commemorated their experiences by expressing incomprehension and dismay at an unleashing of violence that struck them as incommensurate with the values of

Body Work: Objects of Desire in Modern Narrative

Abstract: Uncovering the body in order to know it has been the quest of narrative since the 18th century. In this tour through art and literature - from Rousseau, Flaubert, and Manet at the origins of modernism to Duras and Mapplethorpe in our own time - Peter Brooks sees the dynamic of narrative as propelled by desire to expose truth that can be found inscribed in the flesh. Animating the modern imagination we find a drive to bring the body into language, and to write stories on the body. Discussing dozens of the most familiar stories and images of modernism - including the retold myth of Pygmalion and Galatea, Gauguin's Tahitian nudes, Mary Shelley's "Frankenstein", Zola's "Nana", Manet's "Olympia", George Eliot's "Daniel Deronda", Henry James's "The Sacred Fount", Kafka's penal colony, and the homoerotic photographs of Robert Mapplethorpe - Brooks describes how narrative works as a striptease, a progressive unveiling that promises revelation in carnal knowledge. Illustrated throughout, "Body Work" weaves its examples of carnal intrigue on a framework of anthropological, literary, and psychoanalytic theory. Why, Brooks asks, is curiosity so relentlessly directed at the female body? How does the body provide the building blocks of symbolism, and eventually of language itself? Is all desire essentially longing for the absent mother's body? What are voyeurism, privacy, pornography? Theorists from Melanie Klein to Georges Bataille inform Brooks's exploration of these and other pressing questions. Brooks attempts to uncover how and why the female body has become the field upon which the aspirations, anxieties, and contradictions of a whole society are played out. He aims to show us modernism, and our postmodern selves, afresh.

"Getting It": Ashbery and the Avant-Garde of Everyday Language

Abstract: COLLOQUIAL LANGUAGE WOULD HAVE IT that anomia is a common condition, so common in fact as to be almost unremarkable. Consider the expression "I lost it" as used in circumstances that make it clear we are not referring to any fungible thing. A popular catchphrase in the United States at least since the early 1980s, "I lost it" is said of an extremely upsetting event and the response occasioned by it. But what is it one claims to have lost? Although it may have been derived from expressions such as "I lost my temper" and "I lost control," "I lost it" is more than a reformulation of them; it in this instance does not simply refer to one's own being, possessions, or circumstances. Although it partakes of all these, "loosely referring" to them, as we might say, it insists on turning beyond them. It is something else: a coherence as precisely unnameable as it is presumptively familiar and vital to whatever it is we call communication. It is like the

Agonies of the Intellectual: Commitment, Subjectivity, & the Performative in the 20th Century French Tradition

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Issue 74: Special Issue: Between Science & Literature || Chance, Complexity, and Narrative Explanation

Abstract: Human activities might be classified according to the number of words that they require; the more words there are, the worse case their character is in. All the knowledge by means of which our species has advanced from dressing in skins to flying through the air--with its proofs, all complete-would fill no more than the shelves of a small reference library, whereas a bookcase the size of the earth itself would be utterly insufficient to hold all the rest, quite apart from the very extensive discussion that has been conducted not with the pen but with chains and the sword. Robert Musil, The Man Without Qualities (Part I, chapter 61)

Statistical Thinking in Balzac : Le Cousin Pons

Abstract: Men, like planets, have both a visible and an invisible history. The astronomer threads the darkness with strict deduction, accounting so for every visible arc in the wanderer's orbit; and the narrator of human actions, if he did his work with the same completeness, would have to thread the hidden pathways of feeling and thought which lead up to every moment of action, and to those moments of intense suffering which take the quality of action. --George Eliot, Daniel Deronda

Chaos and Beckett's "Core of Murmurs": Toward a Contemporary Theoretical Structure

Abstract: The Unnamable, the final book of Samuel Beckett's trilogy of novels, presents paradox in the moment-to-moment duration of experiential time, rather than as a contradiction in the realm of logic. The book remains engaged in the paradoxical, is "at grips with impossibility"1 (Blanchot 147, my emphasis). Beckett gives us paradox as a mode or aspect of reality. This is the reality which Georges Bataille has described in Beckett's work as

Knowing and Believing: A Dialogue

Abstract: "The market economy, as an efficient and supple network, with connectors and interconnections, works like a big computer-it accomplishes, organizes and foresees everything. The market is always right, even in its destructiveness," says Pantope. "It is an invisible god whose unseen hand knows nothing of Providence nor consolation. We are victims of its fate," sighs Pia. "As a network even more strongly connected than the market economy, the living and physical worlds function together like a giant computer," continues Pantope, "They intervene in the patient timespan of evolution, to kill and create beings." "This is a blind god, with neither gentleness nor forgiveness," Pia laments.

"L'Entre-deux," A Bridging Concept for Literature, Philosophy, and Science

Abstract: THE NOTION OF "ENTRE-DEUX" caught my attention in 1989, when I read and heard about it in two completely different contexts. The first was in a text by Laurent Jenny, Professor of French Literature at the University of Geneva, "L'Ev6nement figural," published in the journal Poesie No. 40 (1987).' The second was in a seminar entitled "Cognitive Sciences and the Human Experience," given at the CREA by Biologist Francisco Varela, who is also a professor of epistemology at the Fondation de France.2 Both Jenny and Varela made up this hyphenated word for a concept which has the quality of an image. Both referred, implicitly or explicitly, to MerleauPonty's work: La Prose du monde in the case of Laurent Jenny, and La Phinomenologie de la perception in the case of Francisco Varela. The term "Entre-deux" does not appear in La Phinometnologie de la perception, as far as I know, but the notion is ever-present, and underlies the whole phenomenological project. This notion is common to various twentieth-century theories in the field of literature and philosophy (Bakhtine, Blanchot, Merleau-Ponty, Lotman), as well as biophysics (Henri Atlan) epistemology (Michel Serres, Jean-Pierre Dupuy, Edgar Morin), biology (Varela) and mathematics, with the concept of fractal dimension developed by Benoit Mandelbrot. It is also the seed for all the theories that have developed over the last twenty years in the areas of complexity (Atlan, Morin, Lotman) order and disorder (Dupuy, Hayles) third-space or third-place (Serres), and it seems only right to give it the recognition it deserves.

The invention of forms: Perec's Life A User's Manual and a virtual sense of the real

Abstract: Georges Perec's Life A User's Manual (La Vie mode d'emploi) has been hailed since its inception as a unique achievement, primarily because of its incredible formal conception and the sprawling range of its contents. The daunting set of arbitrary rules and self-imposed constraints that stipulate the text's raw materials catch the writer up in what strikes one as a neurotic net, an intricate artifice that stretches his intelligence to its ludic limits. Seemingly disinterested in re-presenting any single situation or extant state of things, Perec uses a "hyperstructural conception" to weave a text out of components existing in a "universe of lists" (Hartje, Magn6 and Neefs 30). From this standpoint, Life A User's Manual is an emphatically anti-mimetic text. Yet this self-contained literary invention generates a distinctive texture; by a kind of exfoliation, from a text determined by these lists and plans there emerges a visceral feeling for the little things in life. This pre-text or user's manual of life does not represent life; rather, it instantiates the real. Instead of reflecting the world by imitation, Perec manufactures the sense of the real by copying, generating in the process a form of what I will call second-order mimesis, an entirely different register of realism in literature.

What guarantees a text? authorship, competence and imitation

Abstract: IN THE LAST TWENTY-FIVE YEARS, CRITICAL THEORIES OF READING have brought about a reexamination of the status and reach of authorship.Implicit in this was the metacritical issue of the apodixis, or certainty, of authorial intentionality. The author, it was maintained, traditionally had been understood as a kind of omnipotent dispenser of meaning who, through his or her intention made word, could fix the meaning of the text as if in cement. Consequently, the critical reevaluation of authorship entailed the radical calling into question of the author, and, specifically, the author's intention, as a source of the text's synthetic unity and fixity of meaning. Implicitly if not explicitly, the critical reevaluation of authorship promulgated a questioning of the very being and function of the designated subjectivity charged with holding the text together, and providing the basis for its particular identity. In the paragraph above, I relied on the past tense, because I believe it fair to say that the poststructuralist critique of the author is now a part of the past; the basic questions have been formulated, and the answers, tentative though they may be, have been offered. Whether or not this critique's characterization of authorial omnipotence corresponded to attitudes toward authorship that people actually held,2 there is no doubt that a legitimate issue had been raised. I do not wish, however, to critique these critiques here. I simply wish to acknowledge them as having played a role in setting the terms of debate over the category of the author. The specific issue I would like to examine here is: "What sort of (implicit) guarantee about the text is conveyed by the notion of authorship?" It is worth noting that this question implies at least one important assumption: the reality of intentionality,3 or at least its possibility. For it is only on the basis of the latter that a guarantee can be made in anything approaching good faith, or that will stand a reasonable chance of being fulfilled. Intentionality, in other words, underwrites whatever guarantee might be offered, and this remains true even--perhaps especially-if such