Abstract:The turn to poststructuralism is frequently linked to a particular time and place, the 1966 conference at Johns Hopkins University where Jacques Derrida’s “Structure, Sign, and Play in the Discourse of the Human Sciences” offered a critique of Claude Levi-Strauss. An analysis of the claims actually made there by Derrida shows that despite his celebrated distinction between two interpretations of interpretation, he insists on the impossibility of choosing, and that what he in fact resists is the “empiricism” of structuralist projects, which attempt to provide accounts of the functioning of cultural systems (as opposed to readings that undertake a critique of the concepts they use). Derrida’s essay thus provided an excuse in America, where it was taken for granted that the task of criticism was to produce interpretations of literary works, to reject the difficult work of poetics, writ large, and to embrace a self-critical hermeneutics under the name of “poststructuralism.”
{"title":"Poststructuralist Turn?","authors":"J. Culler","doi":"10.1353/dia.2019.0033","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/dia.2019.0033","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract:The turn to poststructuralism is frequently linked to a particular time and place, the 1966 conference at Johns Hopkins University where Jacques Derrida’s “Structure, Sign, and Play in the Discourse of the Human Sciences” offered a critique of Claude Levi-Strauss. An analysis of the claims actually made there by Derrida shows that despite his celebrated distinction between two interpretations of interpretation, he insists on the impossibility of choosing, and that what he in fact resists is the “empiricism” of structuralist projects, which attempt to provide accounts of the functioning of cultural systems (as opposed to readings that undertake a critique of the concepts they use). Derrida’s essay thus provided an excuse in America, where it was taken for granted that the task of criticism was to produce interpretations of literary works, to reject the difficult work of poetics, writ large, and to embrace a self-critical hermeneutics under the name of “poststructuralism.”","PeriodicalId":46840,"journal":{"name":"DIACRITICS-A REVIEW OF CONTEMPORARY CRITICISM","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2020-12-03","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1353/dia.2019.0033","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"43372992","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Abstract:Fredric Jameson’s classic work of 1972, The Prison-House of Language: A Critical Account of Structuralism and Russian Formalism, stands out historically as an inquiry into what a model is in the comparative humanities of the postwar period. Though his particular focus in the book is on the linguistic turn (posed against Marxist formalism), his consideration of the model bears directly on “turn theory,” be it deconstructive, cultural, historicist, postcolonial, or cognitive.
{"title":"The Prison-House of Translation? Carceral Models, Translational Turns","authors":"E. Apter","doi":"10.1353/dia.2019.0034","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/dia.2019.0034","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract:Fredric Jameson’s classic work of 1972, The Prison-House of Language: A Critical Account of Structuralism and Russian Formalism, stands out historically as an inquiry into what a model is in the comparative humanities of the postwar period. Though his particular focus in the book is on the linguistic turn (posed against Marxist formalism), his consideration of the model bears directly on “turn theory,” be it deconstructive, cultural, historicist, postcolonial, or cognitive.","PeriodicalId":46840,"journal":{"name":"DIACRITICS-A REVIEW OF CONTEMPORARY CRITICISM","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2020-12-03","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1353/dia.2019.0034","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"42607345","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Abstract:In this essay I consider the ubiquitous figure of thinking’s turn and a historical time in which turns happen beside, inside, or astride other turns like a complex series of epicycles, each vying for historiographical primacy. I argue that the age of the turn forces intellectual historians not simply to choose one turn that would successfully stand in for contemporary inquiry tout court but to think the turn itself, to try to understand what generates and sustains the figure or shape of thinking as turning. I hypothesize that the time in which thinking takes place is also figured and traced out, by the manifestos and representatives of individual turns, as a local convulsion rather than a global rotation or revolutionary breach. In what follows I turn to and fro to glance at several possible starting points for an adequate theorization of the turn and our “convulsive” present, moving from an investigation into thinking and turning in the work of Martin Heidegger to our contemporary moment, in which theorists attempt to suture the particular concepts and objects they wish to “take seriously” to the movements inherent in thought itself. I end speculatively, offering a reading of “the turn” shot through with social and (even) erotic implications.
{"title":"Turns and Revolutions: On the Convulsive Present","authors":"Zachary Tavlin","doi":"10.1353/dia.2019.0032","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/dia.2019.0032","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract:In this essay I consider the ubiquitous figure of thinking’s turn and a historical time in which turns happen beside, inside, or astride other turns like a complex series of epicycles, each vying for historiographical primacy. I argue that the age of the turn forces intellectual historians not simply to choose one turn that would successfully stand in for contemporary inquiry tout court but to think the turn itself, to try to understand what generates and sustains the figure or shape of thinking as turning. I hypothesize that the time in which thinking takes place is also figured and traced out, by the manifestos and representatives of individual turns, as a local convulsion rather than a global rotation or revolutionary breach. In what follows I turn to and fro to glance at several possible starting points for an adequate theorization of the turn and our “convulsive” present, moving from an investigation into thinking and turning in the work of Martin Heidegger to our contemporary moment, in which theorists attempt to suture the particular concepts and objects they wish to “take seriously” to the movements inherent in thought itself. I end speculatively, offering a reading of “the turn” shot through with social and (even) erotic implications.","PeriodicalId":46840,"journal":{"name":"DIACRITICS-A REVIEW OF CONTEMPORARY CRITICISM","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2020-12-03","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1353/dia.2019.0032","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"42784146","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Excerpt:Originally from Quanzhou, China and currently based in the United States, Cai Guo-Qiang began his artistic career as an oil painter in the 1970s, but while studying at the Shanghai Theatre Academy in the early 1980s, he began experimenting with gunpowder as an artistic medium. He further refined his technique when he lived in Japan from 1986 to 1995 and continued working primarily with gunpowder after moving to the United States in 1995. Cai uses gunpowder not only for large-scale fireworks and explosions, but also for an innovative practice in which he carefully detonates the gunpowder against canvas or other materials to produce suggestive images. He has stated that he was attracted to the multiple and contradictory connotations of gunpowder, noting that “in China every significant social occasion of any kind, good or bad—weddings, funerals, the birth of a baby, a new home—is marked by the explosion of fireworks. . . . I saw gunpowder used in both good ways and bad, in destruction and reconstruction.”
{"title":"Cai Guo-Qiang","authors":"C. Rojas","doi":"10.1353/dia.2019.0037","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/dia.2019.0037","url":null,"abstract":"Excerpt:Originally from Quanzhou, China and currently based in the United States, Cai Guo-Qiang began his artistic career as an oil painter in the 1970s, but while studying at the Shanghai Theatre Academy in the early 1980s, he began experimenting with gunpowder as an artistic medium. He further refined his technique when he lived in Japan from 1986 to 1995 and continued working primarily with gunpowder after moving to the United States in 1995. Cai uses gunpowder not only for large-scale fireworks and explosions, but also for an innovative practice in which he carefully detonates the gunpowder against canvas or other materials to produce suggestive images. He has stated that he was attracted to the multiple and contradictory connotations of gunpowder, noting that “in China every significant social occasion of any kind, good or bad—weddings, funerals, the birth of a baby, a new home—is marked by the explosion of fireworks. . . . I saw gunpowder used in both good ways and bad, in destruction and reconstruction.”","PeriodicalId":46840,"journal":{"name":"DIACRITICS-A REVIEW OF CONTEMPORARY CRITICISM","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2020-12-03","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1353/dia.2019.0037","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"43970626","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"From the Editors: Terraforming","authors":"Karen Pinkus, D. Woods","doi":"10.1353/dia.2019.0023","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/dia.2019.0023","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":46840,"journal":{"name":"DIACRITICS-A REVIEW OF CONTEMPORARY CRITICISM","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2020-08-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1353/dia.2019.0023","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"46775040","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Abstract:The Anthropocene hypothesis leaves us with the picture of a world that may have never felt more aggregative, with or without our consent, and never more terraforming in its capacity to turn everything Anthropos come in contact with into a condition of its existence. And yet, in the end the delayed legibility the Anthropocene hypothesis projects into the existential nowhere of landscapes of extinction and other previews of humanity in its fossil state is utterly indifferent to the world it leaves us to inhabit on impossible perceptual terms. But why bother with the visual make-up of that world in the grand flattening scheme of things? The terrestrial hypotheses evolved throughout this paper tend to a past that stays with us in a temporal field levelled by data extraction neither relevant nor entirely disposable.
{"title":"Terrestrial Hypotheses: A Slideshow","authors":"V. Bruyère","doi":"10.1353/dia.2019.0026","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/dia.2019.0026","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract:The Anthropocene hypothesis leaves us with the picture of a world that may have never felt more aggregative, with or without our consent, and never more terraforming in its capacity to turn everything Anthropos come in contact with into a condition of its existence. And yet, in the end the delayed legibility the Anthropocene hypothesis projects into the existential nowhere of landscapes of extinction and other previews of humanity in its fossil state is utterly indifferent to the world it leaves us to inhabit on impossible perceptual terms. But why bother with the visual make-up of that world in the grand flattening scheme of things? The terrestrial hypotheses evolved throughout this paper tend to a past that stays with us in a temporal field levelled by data extraction neither relevant nor entirely disposable.","PeriodicalId":46840,"journal":{"name":"DIACRITICS-A REVIEW OF CONTEMPORARY CRITICISM","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2020-08-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1353/dia.2019.0026","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"42675614","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Abstract:At the very outset of the so-called Anthropocene, through the lens of a social theory since relegated to the “utopian” margins of critical thought, the visionary socialist Charles Fourier diagnosed a problem that mainstream modern science would spend much of the twentieth-century structurally unable to see: anthropogenic climate disruption and its etiology in the “progress” of European industry, slavery and colonial empire. This essay explores the heterodox naturalism that enabled such a prescient diagnosis, as well as the subversive image of “terraformation” that Fourier projected as a cure. For in contrast to today’s advocates of geo-engineering (but in concert with critics working to decolonize Anthropocene ecology), Fourier percieved that those who believe they know how to control the earth’s climate are the least capable agents of its emancipatory re-creation. He advanced, instead, the heretical proposition that nonhuman natures, no less than human ones, answer to justice and pleasure, rather than necessity and force. His dissident eco-social science thus aimed not to enable his Enlightened compatriots to engineer, but to disable them from thwarting the dazzling terrestrial futures that the earth’s other constituents were literally dying to create. Fourier’s techno-pastoral prophecies of orchestrated planetary transformation, then, beckon outside the familiar alternative between technofuturist hubris and ecological precaution, offering visions of multispecies luxury predicated on the abandonment of coercive labor and the adoption of a technics co-invented with human and non-human Others of Man. Next to the insane faith that our flourishing can still be founded on the earth’s domination (if only we do it right this time), Fourier’s outlandish prophecies, as Walter Benjamin once observed, “prove surprisingly sound.”
{"title":"Attracting the Earth: Climate Justice for Charles Fourier","authors":"A. Goldstein","doi":"10.1353/dia.2019.0027","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/dia.2019.0027","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract:At the very outset of the so-called Anthropocene, through the lens of a social theory since relegated to the “utopian” margins of critical thought, the visionary socialist Charles Fourier diagnosed a problem that mainstream modern science would spend much of the twentieth-century structurally unable to see: anthropogenic climate disruption and its etiology in the “progress” of European industry, slavery and colonial empire. This essay explores the heterodox naturalism that enabled such a prescient diagnosis, as well as the subversive image of “terraformation” that Fourier projected as a cure. For in contrast to today’s advocates of geo-engineering (but in concert with critics working to decolonize Anthropocene ecology), Fourier percieved that those who believe they know how to control the earth’s climate are the least capable agents of its emancipatory re-creation. He advanced, instead, the heretical proposition that nonhuman natures, no less than human ones, answer to justice and pleasure, rather than necessity and force. His dissident eco-social science thus aimed not to enable his Enlightened compatriots to engineer, but to disable them from thwarting the dazzling terrestrial futures that the earth’s other constituents were literally dying to create. Fourier’s techno-pastoral prophecies of orchestrated planetary transformation, then, beckon outside the familiar alternative between technofuturist hubris and ecological precaution, offering visions of multispecies luxury predicated on the abandonment of coercive labor and the adoption of a technics co-invented with human and non-human Others of Man. Next to the insane faith that our flourishing can still be founded on the earth’s domination (if only we do it right this time), Fourier’s outlandish prophecies, as Walter Benjamin once observed, “prove surprisingly sound.”","PeriodicalId":46840,"journal":{"name":"DIACRITICS-A REVIEW OF CONTEMPORARY CRITICISM","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2020-08-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1353/dia.2019.0027","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"44485002","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Abstract:Terraforming began as a fantasy about making other planets earthlike, then returned to earth as a frame for what humans have done, are doing, or will do to the planet. Toward a reading of the phrase “terraforming earth” that would prove fruitful for criticism and theory, I analyze it into three forms of recursivity: formal, historical, and ecological. The three-loop analytic illuminates examples from science fiction and contemporary culture: H.G. Wells’s novel The War of the Worlds, Kim Stanley Robinson’s novel Green Mars, and Elon Musk’s desire to terraform Mars. The political theory of Sylvia Wynter offers a way of conceptualizing terraforming in terms of the difference between those who do and do not have access to optimal, immunized ecosystems and those who do and do not have agency over the earth system. I draw conclusions about terraforming’s scale-specificity and political implications, especially for understanding subject-formation in the Anthropocene.
{"title":"“Terraforming Earth”: Climate and Recursivity","authors":"D. Woods","doi":"10.1353/dia.2019.0024","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/dia.2019.0024","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract:Terraforming began as a fantasy about making other planets earthlike, then returned to earth as a frame for what humans have done, are doing, or will do to the planet. Toward a reading of the phrase “terraforming earth” that would prove fruitful for criticism and theory, I analyze it into three forms of recursivity: formal, historical, and ecological. The three-loop analytic illuminates examples from science fiction and contemporary culture: H.G. Wells’s novel The War of the Worlds, Kim Stanley Robinson’s novel Green Mars, and Elon Musk’s desire to terraform Mars. The political theory of Sylvia Wynter offers a way of conceptualizing terraforming in terms of the difference between those who do and do not have access to optimal, immunized ecosystems and those who do and do not have agency over the earth system. I draw conclusions about terraforming’s scale-specificity and political implications, especially for understanding subject-formation in the Anthropocene.","PeriodicalId":46840,"journal":{"name":"DIACRITICS-A REVIEW OF CONTEMPORARY CRITICISM","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2020-08-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1353/dia.2019.0024","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"47455468","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Abstract:In this article, Deleuze and Guattari emerge as pioneers of a philosophical practice that finds its actualization in processes of terraforming. Whereas the dominant modes of thought and forms of life of our time have resulted in the ravaging of the biosphere and the endangerment of humanity’s future, Deleuze and Guattari’s joint works constitute a field manual for constructing another earth out of the ruins of this one. This paper suggests that the enigmatic figures that populate Deleuze and Guattari’s oeuvre, including sorcerers and artisans, are actually blueprints for forms of philosophical engagement with the power to refashion the world into one habitable for future generations. By building on the references to a “new earth” scattered throughout the works of Deleuze and Guattari, and mining the field of contemporary architecture for projects that anticipate the new earth’s emergence, this paper offers suggestions for how the new earth might be summoned.
{"title":"Philosophy as Terraforming: Deleuze and Guattari on Designing a New Earth","authors":"J. Parry","doi":"10.1353/dia.2019.0028","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/dia.2019.0028","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract:In this article, Deleuze and Guattari emerge as pioneers of a philosophical practice that finds its actualization in processes of terraforming. Whereas the dominant modes of thought and forms of life of our time have resulted in the ravaging of the biosphere and the endangerment of humanity’s future, Deleuze and Guattari’s joint works constitute a field manual for constructing another earth out of the ruins of this one. This paper suggests that the enigmatic figures that populate Deleuze and Guattari’s oeuvre, including sorcerers and artisans, are actually blueprints for forms of philosophical engagement with the power to refashion the world into one habitable for future generations. By building on the references to a “new earth” scattered throughout the works of Deleuze and Guattari, and mining the field of contemporary architecture for projects that anticipate the new earth’s emergence, this paper offers suggestions for how the new earth might be summoned.","PeriodicalId":46840,"journal":{"name":"DIACRITICS-A REVIEW OF CONTEMPORARY CRITICISM","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2020-08-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1353/dia.2019.0028","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"47064446","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
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