Pub Date : 2001-07-01DOI: 10.1080/14797580109367237
Torbjörn Wandel
Abstract The debate that contrasts Marxism and the work of Michel Foucault often overlooks that both projects share a political and ethical commitment. Both have moreover engaged that commitment by challenging what Marx called ‘traditional ideas’, viewing them as historically compilcit with the exercise of power. This ‘radical rupture’ with traditional ideas has been the hallmark of the critical theory project since The Communist Manifesto. By challenging traditional notions of power and language, however, Michel Foucault went further than the Marxist tradition in carrying out the critical theory project. Foucault's alternative ideas of discourse/practice and of power as ‘positive’ are moreover intricately linked in a way that has not been sufficiently appreciated. This is evident in a genealogy of Foucault's early work, where neither notion is able to take hold in the absence of the other. It only after The Archaeology of Knowledge, where Foucault rethought the relationship of language to reality, that he was able to formulate the notion of power as positive in works to come. This link should cause us to rethink our relationship to Foucault's work, of it to Marxism, and of the critical theory project to the power.
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Pub Date : 2001-07-01DOI: 10.1080/14797580109367234
M. Featherstone
Abstract ‘Economies of Sacrifice’ compares Girard's (1987) Hegelian inter‐dividualism to the Cartesian notion of the cogito and the Freudian theory of the unconscious in order to show how the monadic identity position violates the communicative balance of the self‐other bind. By looking at how both these thinkers constitute an identity category through the concept of sacrifice, the paper refers to the Girardian (1986) and Bataillean (1990) theories of violence and recognition in search of an alternative stance that may provide a more balanced view of human sociability. With regard to Bataille's theory of radical difference we can see how the idea which seeks to attack monadic individualism by destroying all identity advocates a principle of amoralism which views equality as ‘the generalisation of expendability’. As such, through reference to the work of Goux (1998) and O'Neill (2000) the article shows how the Bataillean thesis may pre‐empt the emergence of the post‐modern political economy. In light of this realisation the paper looks beyond both the Bataillean attempt to collapse identity, by exposing humanity to the total violence of the state of nature/post‐modern economic system, and the solipsistic theories of Descartes and Freud, which emphasis the centrality of the self at the cost of an acceptance of otherness, and towards Girard's theory of social justice as a communicative attempt to re‐state the importance of Hegelian recognition and human sociability.
{"title":"Economies of sacrifice: Recognition, monadism, and alien‐ation","authors":"M. Featherstone","doi":"10.1080/14797580109367234","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/14797580109367234","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract ‘Economies of Sacrifice’ compares Girard's (1987) Hegelian inter‐dividualism to the Cartesian notion of the cogito and the Freudian theory of the unconscious in order to show how the monadic identity position violates the communicative balance of the self‐other bind. By looking at how both these thinkers constitute an identity category through the concept of sacrifice, the paper refers to the Girardian (1986) and Bataillean (1990) theories of violence and recognition in search of an alternative stance that may provide a more balanced view of human sociability. With regard to Bataille's theory of radical difference we can see how the idea which seeks to attack monadic individualism by destroying all identity advocates a principle of amoralism which views equality as ‘the generalisation of expendability’. As such, through reference to the work of Goux (1998) and O'Neill (2000) the article shows how the Bataillean thesis may pre‐empt the emergence of the post‐modern political economy. In light of this realisation the paper looks beyond both the Bataillean attempt to collapse identity, by exposing humanity to the total violence of the state of nature/post‐modern economic system, and the solipsistic theories of Descartes and Freud, which emphasis the centrality of the self at the cost of an acceptance of otherness, and towards Girard's theory of social justice as a communicative attempt to re‐state the importance of Hegelian recognition and human sociability.","PeriodicalId":296129,"journal":{"name":"Cultural Values","volume":"185 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2001-07-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"131916809","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2001-06-05DOI: 10.1080/14797580109367242
Iain Wilkinson
Abstract This article provides a critical review of literature on ‘social suffering’. Analytical attention is focused upon the ways in which writers struggle to bring ‘meaning’ to this topic. All sense that there is always something in events of extreme suffering that resists conceptualisation and defies analysis. This problem of establishing a language for ‘thinking with suffering’ is explored with reference to the works of Hannah Arendt, Paul Ricoeur and Max Weber. An agenda for sociological research is proposed which focuses on the struggle to make sense out of the phenomenon of suffering as a force of cultural innovation. In this context, it is suggested that what is most interesting here is the evidence to suggest that, when faced with the ‘brute fact’ of a world where there appears to be too much suffering, people are always moved to make this phenomenon productive for thought and action.
{"title":"Thinking with suffering","authors":"Iain Wilkinson","doi":"10.1080/14797580109367242","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/14797580109367242","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract This article provides a critical review of literature on ‘social suffering’. Analytical attention is focused upon the ways in which writers struggle to bring ‘meaning’ to this topic. All sense that there is always something in events of extreme suffering that resists conceptualisation and defies analysis. This problem of establishing a language for ‘thinking with suffering’ is explored with reference to the works of Hannah Arendt, Paul Ricoeur and Max Weber. An agenda for sociological research is proposed which focuses on the struggle to make sense out of the phenomenon of suffering as a force of cultural innovation. In this context, it is suggested that what is most interesting here is the evidence to suggest that, when faced with the ‘brute fact’ of a world where there appears to be too much suffering, people are always moved to make this phenomenon productive for thought and action.","PeriodicalId":296129,"journal":{"name":"Cultural Values","volume":"32 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2001-06-05","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"124941167","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2001-04-01DOI: 10.1080/14797580109367226
H. Wright
Introduction. Cultural Studies is a relatively new and decidedly selfreflexive field. Variously conceptualized in the academy in the past as inter/anti/post disciplinary, it appears to have settled into becoming what Tony Bennett (1998) has described as a 'reluctant discipline' in its own right. However, cultural studies still remains a discourse influx. It has become a common focus area in the academy in the United Kingdom and Australia, mushroomed in the United States, strengthened in South Africa and spread to Taiwan and Morocco. It has become articulated with multiculturalism and various discourses based on the politics of social difference and employs avant garde theory. Yet it is also subject to hoaxes (for example 'the Sokal affair') and an ongoing backlash from both the left and the right. At various sites it appears to have become a largely academic exercise, abandoning its praxis roots, its characteristic of being at once an academic (anti)discipline and a political project, a theory-informed discourse and a community-based practice. Given that cultural studies was always intended to be constantly remade, depending on changing locations and conditions, given its current state of flux, and given its exciting but sometimes bewildering state of flux, it is important to take the pulse of the field from time to time, to go beyond our individual discipline-influenced courses, projects, and even various 'national schools,' to get a sense of the current state of affairs of the field in its entirety. In the following interview with prominent cultural studies figure, Larry Grossberg, conducted while he ivas in Knoxville to give an invited talk at the University of Tennessee, I elicited his views on the status quo of cultural studies. In particular I asked his view on such issues as the current state and politics of theory and theorizing, empiricism and empirical research, identity politics and the essentialism versus anti-essentialism debate, the institutionalization of cultural studies in the academy, and national schools and their consequence for internationalization of cultural studies.
介绍。文化研究是一个相对较新的、明显具有自我弹性的领域。在过去的学术界中，它被不同地概念化为内部/反/后学科，它似乎已经成为托尼·贝内特(1998)所描述的一种“不情愿的学科”。然而，文化研究仍然是一种话语涌入。它已成为英国和澳大利亚学术界共同关注的领域，在美国迅速发展，在南非得到加强，并蔓延到台湾和摩洛哥。它已经与多元文化主义和基于社会差异政治的各种话语结合起来，并采用了前卫理论。然而，它也受到骗局的影响(例如“索卡尔事件”)，并受到左翼和右翼的持续抵制。在许多地方，它似乎已经成为一个很大程度上的学术实践，放弃了它的实践根源，放弃了它既是一个学术(反)学科又是一个政治项目的特点，放弃了它既是一个理论信息的话语又是一个以社区为基础的实践。考虑到文化研究总是要根据不断变化的地点和条件不断进行改造，考虑到它目前的变化状态，考虑到它令人兴奋但有时令人困惑的变化状态，重要的是要不时地把握这个领域的脉搏，超越我们个人学科影响的课程、项目，甚至各种“国家学校”，从整体上了解这个领域的现状。在接下来的采访中，著名的文化研究人物拉里·格罗斯伯格(Larry Grossberg)在诺克斯维尔(Knoxville)应邀在田纳西大学(University of Tennessee)发表演讲，我询问了他对文化研究现状的看法。我特别询问了他对以下问题的看法:理论和理论化的现状和政治、经验主义和实证研究、身份政治和本质主义与反本质主义之争、学术界文化研究的制度化、民族学派及其对文化研究国际化的影响。
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Pub Date : 2001-04-01DOI: 10.1080/14797580109367230
J. Moran
Abstract This article explores the way that senile dementia is represented in contemporary culture, with particular reference to texts which narrate the experience of caring for a parent or spouse with one form of the illness. These narratives raise problematic issues about the materiality of the body and its relation to individual identity, and the unstable relationship between memory and identity in postmodern culture, by drawing on the actual experience of bodily dependency and disorientating memory loss in dementia patients. These speculations about the body, memory and the self are ultimately related in narratives of dementia to the inevitable process of aging and dying and the cultural meanings attached to it. The article places the representation of dementing illnesses within a Foucauldian narrative of surveillance and control in the discourse of aging and death in modern Western societies, redemptive views of illness in western culture and arguments about death in contemporary theory.
{"title":"Aging and identity in dementia narratives","authors":"J. Moran","doi":"10.1080/14797580109367230","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/14797580109367230","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract This article explores the way that senile dementia is represented in contemporary culture, with particular reference to texts which narrate the experience of caring for a parent or spouse with one form of the illness. These narratives raise problematic issues about the materiality of the body and its relation to individual identity, and the unstable relationship between memory and identity in postmodern culture, by drawing on the actual experience of bodily dependency and disorientating memory loss in dementia patients. These speculations about the body, memory and the self are ultimately related in narratives of dementia to the inevitable process of aging and dying and the cultural meanings attached to it. The article places the representation of dementing illnesses within a Foucauldian narrative of surveillance and control in the discourse of aging and death in modern Western societies, redemptive views of illness in western culture and arguments about death in contemporary theory.","PeriodicalId":296129,"journal":{"name":"Cultural Values","volume":"23 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2001-04-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"124951498","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2001-04-01DOI: 10.1080/14797580109367227
R. Cooper
Abstract The nature of culture as the symbolic expression of inarticulate matter is explored from a range of different cultural perspectives. Raymond Williams's work on culture, especially his ideas on material and symbolic production, serves to introduce an analysis of matter and its place in cultural production. The mutable nature of matter is explored through the modern physics of quantum theory as well as modern art, especially the work of Jasper Johns. Late‐modern culture is viewed in terms of a mutable space of matter that resists meaning and location. The implications of this resistance for understanding the cultivation of knowledge and subject‐object relations are then pursued in the contexts of art history (Michael Baxandall), the ‘social body’ (Jean‐Frangois Lyotard), the society of generalized communication (Gianni Vattimo), multi‐media culture (J. Hillis Miller), and computerization.
{"title":"A matter of culture","authors":"R. Cooper","doi":"10.1080/14797580109367227","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/14797580109367227","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract The nature of culture as the symbolic expression of inarticulate matter is explored from a range of different cultural perspectives. Raymond Williams's work on culture, especially his ideas on material and symbolic production, serves to introduce an analysis of matter and its place in cultural production. The mutable nature of matter is explored through the modern physics of quantum theory as well as modern art, especially the work of Jasper Johns. Late‐modern culture is viewed in terms of a mutable space of matter that resists meaning and location. The implications of this resistance for understanding the cultivation of knowledge and subject‐object relations are then pursued in the contexts of art history (Michael Baxandall), the ‘social body’ (Jean‐Frangois Lyotard), the society of generalized communication (Gianni Vattimo), multi‐media culture (J. Hillis Miller), and computerization.","PeriodicalId":296129,"journal":{"name":"Cultural Values","volume":"56 5 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2001-04-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"131995208","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2001-04-01DOI: 10.1080/14797580109367231
Ruby C. Tapia
Abstract This article analyzes ‘commemorative’ images of Diana Spencer for how they invoke tropes of charity and sympathy to produce racialized mediations of history, memory, motherhood and US national identity. Drawing from cultural theory that establishes technologies of memory and forgetting as material forces, this discussion illumines how images of Diana appearing in such popular US magazines as People and Life incorporate visual scripts of race and sentiment that have historically demarcated the relative social value(s) of maternity and reproduction. Understanding visual culture as a force that is both structured by and structuring of hierarchies of power enables us to see how the posthumous circulation of images of ‘Our Princess’ are indeed not ideologically innocent memorializations. Rather, these images are the physical, embodied material of a national monument that provides faithful ‘visitors’ an affective connection to historically idealized notions of whiteness, motherhood, and the family.
{"title":"Un(di)ing legacies: White matters of memory in portraits of ‘our princess’","authors":"Ruby C. Tapia","doi":"10.1080/14797580109367231","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/14797580109367231","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract This article analyzes ‘commemorative’ images of Diana Spencer for how they invoke tropes of charity and sympathy to produce racialized mediations of history, memory, motherhood and US national identity. Drawing from cultural theory that establishes technologies of memory and forgetting as material forces, this discussion illumines how images of Diana appearing in such popular US magazines as People and Life incorporate visual scripts of race and sentiment that have historically demarcated the relative social value(s) of maternity and reproduction. Understanding visual culture as a force that is both structured by and structuring of hierarchies of power enables us to see how the posthumous circulation of images of ‘Our Princess’ are indeed not ideologically innocent memorializations. Rather, these images are the physical, embodied material of a national monument that provides faithful ‘visitors’ an affective connection to historically idealized notions of whiteness, motherhood, and the family.","PeriodicalId":296129,"journal":{"name":"Cultural Values","volume":"33 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2001-04-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"126804084","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2001-04-01DOI: 10.1080/14797580109367228
Christopher Peterson
Abstract This essay enters the debate over the French appropriation of Poe not by seeking redress for the supposed political misdeeds of either Poe or the French, but rather, by addressing itself to the American response to the French reception of Poe. While American cultural studies critics in particular have sought to hold the French accountable for ignoring Poe's troubling biography — one in which the question of Poe's relationship to, and possible support of, antebellum slavery remains unanswered to this day — I argue that the important question of how we as critics situate ourselves in relation to material history is too often buried under a moralizing rhetoric of accountability. Following from, and extending, Jacques Derrida's notion of ‘speciality,’ I maintain that material history is itself a kind of conjuration that belies any strict distinction between the material and the immaterial. Against the demand for accountability, the notion of history‐as‐conjuration allows us to address questions of historical responsibility in a manner that circumvents the impulse to hold Poe accountable for his crimes’.
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Pub Date : 2001-01-01DOI: 10.1080/14797580109367217
Sara Ahmed, J. Stacey
The desire to testify now pervades contemporary culture. The imperative to speak out and to tell one's story operates across the traditional boundaries of public and private spaces, and is mobilised by disenfranchised subjects and celebrities alike. These testimonial forms are evident both in popular culture, such as talk shows and confessional television more generally, and in mainstream politics, as demonstrated by the confessions of public figures, such as the late Princess Diana or President Clinton. Such imperatives have reshaped autobiography, confession and remembrance in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, producing new testimonial forms, be they visual, artefactual, spoken, written or even bodily. These numerous testimonies bring with them new obligations of witnessing; readers, viewers, spectators, consumers are all required to become witnesses as they participate in different cultural forms. The demand to match the testimonial moment with the appropriate witness response may produce ambivalent and conflicted reactions: sympathy, terror, relief, recognition, empathy, anger, resentment, denial and disbelief. We have become witnesses to the testimonial projects of survivors of rape and child sexual abuse, cancer and AIDS, racist and homophobic attacks, war and torture, as well as to the atrocities of slavery, the Holocaust and apartheid. Thus, accounts of traumas of exceptional violence and of historical injustice proliferate alongside stories of everyday discrimination or misdemeanour. To some extent, this proliferation of testimonial forms involves an extension of the legal domain into other realms of politics and culture. Testifying to historical injustice since the Holocaust has radically transformed our very notion of politics and its relationship to both truth and justice. The United Nations and its concept of 'human rights' is bound up with the duty to report rights abuses everywhere and anywhere: to both bear witness and to speak, and indeed to close the gap between witnessing and speech. Notions of 'justice' have become bound up with witnessing, testifying and truth telling, whether it is in the 'Truth and Reconciliation Commission' in South Africa, in the report
作证的愿望现在弥漫在当代文化中。说出自己的故事的必要性跨越了公共和私人空间的传统界限，被剥夺公民权的主体和名人都动员起来。这些证言形式在流行文化(如谈话节目和更普遍的忏悔电视)和主流政治(如已故戴安娜王妃或克林顿总统等公众人物的忏悔)中都很明显。在20世纪末和21世纪初，这样的要求重塑了自传、忏悔和记忆，产生了新的见证形式，无论是视觉的、人工的、口头的、书面的，甚至是身体的。这些无数的见证带来了新的见证义务;读者、观众、观众、消费者在参与不同的文化形态时，都需要成为见证人。将证词时刻与适当的证人反应相匹配的要求可能会产生矛盾和冲突的反应:同情、恐惧、宽慰、认可、同情、愤怒、怨恨、否认和怀疑。我们目睹了强奸和儿童性虐待、癌症和艾滋病、种族主义和恐同袭击、战争和酷刑以及奴隶制、大屠杀和种族隔离暴行的幸存者的证言项目。因此，关于特殊暴力和历史不公正的创伤的叙述与日常歧视或轻罪的故事一起激增。在某种程度上，这种证明形式的扩散涉及到法律领域延伸到政治和文化的其他领域。对大屠杀以来历史不公的见证从根本上改变了我们对政治及其与真理和正义关系的概念。联合国及其“人权”概念与在任何地方报告侵犯人权行为的义务紧密相连:既见证又发言，实际上是缩小见证和发言之间的差距。报告指出，无论是在南非的“真相与和解委员会”(truth and Reconciliation Commission)，“正义”的概念都与见证、作证和讲真话联系在一起
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Pub Date : 2001-01-01DOI: 10.1080/14797580109367222
A. Whitehead
Abstract This paper derives from an exploration of the ways in which the letters of Holocaust writer Etty Hillesum, which are seemingly resistant to many of the interests of current trauma theory, can be read in relation to contemporary writing on testimonial. In particular, the three theorists I shall discuss here, Derrida, Caruth and Irigaray, directly address Freud's Beyond the Pleasure Principle, a central text in the current refiguring of trauma. This paper traces the ways in which Hillesum's letters can be read across the theoretical accounts. An interpretation of Hillesum's writing emerges in which the conventional emphasis on the mystical aspect of her texts is reinterpreted in terms of Caruth's emphasis on the life drive. Viewed as forging a creative language of departure, Hillesum's letters are situated in a central relation to the most recent developments in the theoretical discourse around testimony.
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