SANTIAGO DE CALIEs la capital del departamento del Valle del Cauca, segunda ciudad de la República de Colombia, ha sido testigo de 469 años de historia. Cálida y alegre ciudad, ofrece al visitante, además de la ya proverbial amistad de sus gentes, no pocos lugares de interés, monumentos históricos y arquitectónicos, plazas, parques y museos, iglesias, calles que nos hacen retroceder con nostalgia en el tiempo....
Y cuando llega la noche, con su fresca brisa, Cali abre las puertas a la alegría contagiosa de sus centros nocturnos, donde la salsa se baila con la mayor de las destrezas.
Santiago de Cali la sucursal del cielo, se convierte así en el lugar ideal para visitar.
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Es además una ciudad empresarial cuya infraestructura ofrece todas las facilidades para las reuniones de negocios, el alojamiento, las compras, la gastronomía y la diversión.
Irony, Nostalgia, and the Postmodern |
At the risk of succumbing to New Historicist fashion, I should nonetheless like to begin with a personal anecdote. But I shall ask you, the reader, to take an active role: I should like you to pretend you are me and imagine your response to the following situation. The time is a few years ago; you are in London, England. You have just that hour submitted to your publisher the final version of the manuscript of a book on the theory and politics of irony.1 In a celebratory mood, you walk into a bookstore. One of the first things that catches your eye--for obvious and deeply personal reasons--is the cover of an English magazine entitled The Modern Review. On it is pictured the equivalent of a "no smoking" sign, but this time the barred red circle of forbiddenness surrounds a pair of inverted commas, reinforcing the headline: "The End of Irony? The Tragedy of the Post-Ironic Condition." You might be somewhat nonplussed: you know you delivered the manuscript a bit later than you had promised--but you had not really counted on the book being utterly out of date before it was even published.
Perhaps you might react as I did: you might quickly (and not a little nervously) turn to the article inside on the commodification of irony by the very generation (the "twentysomething" generation) that was said to be using irony as its only defence against commodification.2 Depending on your temperament, you might think this entire incident was uncannily odd or disturbingly interesting or downright irritating. But stretch your imagination a little more and consider how you might then feel if, on the same pages as this article about the end of irony, you found a companion article about the seven types of (not ambiguity, but) nostalgia that were said to greet the "end of irony."
Remember, you are me in this exercise of the imagination: and you have therefore spent not a little time and energy over the last decade arguing that (at least what you would like to call) the "postmodern" has little to do with nostalgia and much to do with irony.3 The forces ranged against such a reading of postmodernism were formidable in the extreme,4 but you have always been a little stubborn. Of course, you have never denied that a lot of contemporary culture was indeed nostalgic: you cannot close your eyes (and ears) to everything going on around you. But there was also lots of irony--maybe too much irony--and that is what you have been trying to think through for the last few years. But here was irony's end and nostalgia's proliferating types sharing not only the same page, but the same popular culture examples. What's worse, to believe the authors of these articles, the end of irony seemed actually to necessitate this proliferation of nostalgia. Now (use your imagination) would you feel some kind of challenge in all this? Would you feel that welcome (or unwelcome) sense of unfinished business? Obviously, I did. I thought this issue of the magazine was Destiny, Fate, ... and all those other capitalized monstrosities by which we excuse our obsessions in life. And this essay represents my attempt to deal with this unfinished business, to try to understand why I had earlier chosen to all but ignore the nostalgic dimension of the postmodern in favour of the ironic. It cannot simply be put down to the fact that I am utterly un-nostalgic, though that is a personality fault to which I must admit. I am also relatively un-ironic (and I certainly miss many ironies)--as countless colleagues and students over the years have learned, much to their consternation and, no doubt, amusement. I simply believed irony to be more complicated, more interesting, more "edgy" than nostalgia, and in so believing, I all but ignored the very real and very uneasy tension between postmodern irony and nostalgia today.
The specific cultural forms of the postmodern are not my only focus here, because I also want to consider more broadly certain forms of contemporary culture, not all of which can be considered complicitously critical and deconstructing--that is, not all of them are postmodern. But it was postmodernism that brought the conjunction of irony and nostalgia quite literally into the public eye through the forms of its architecture. The early debates focussed precisely on that conjunction in response to postmodern architecture's double-coding, its deliberate (if ironized) return to the history of the humanly constructed environment.5 This return was in reaction to modern architecture's ostentatious rejection of the past, including the past of the city's historical fabric. The terms of the debate were basically as follows: was this postmodern recalling of the past an example of a conservative--and therefore nostalgic--escape to an idealized, simpler era of "real" community values?6 Or did it express, but through its ironic distance, a "genuine and legitimate dissatisfaction with modernity and the unquestioned belief in ... perpetual modernization"?7 The question soon became: how is it that the same cultural entity could come to be interpreted (apparently) so widely differently as to be seen as either ironic or nostalgic? Or as both ironic and nostalgic?8 The American television series "All in the Family" was one example of the latter conflation. Despite its allegedly progressive intent--what its creators intended as ironic de-bunking--it seems that Archie Bunker was popular in large segments of various populations because of the show's conservative, indeed openly nostalgic, appeal to attitudes perhaps consciously denied but deeply felt.9
In general cultural commentary in the mass media--as in the academy--irony and nostalgia are both seen as key components of contemporary culture today.10 In the 1980s, it was irony that captured our attention most; in the 1990s, it appears to be nostalgia that is holding sway. David Lowenthal has even asserted that, while "[f]ormerly confined in time and place, nostalgia today engulfs the whole past."11 Perhaps nostalgia is given surplus meaning and value at certain moments--millennial moments, like our own. Nostalgia, the media tell us, has become an obsession of both mass culture and high art. And they may be right, though some people feel the obsession is really the media's obsession.12 Yet, how else do you account for the return of the fountain pen--as an object of consumer luxury--in the age of the computer, when we have all but forgotten how to write?
The explanations offered for this kind of commercialized luxuriating in the culture of the past have ranged from economic cynicism to moral superiority. They usually point to a dissatisfaction with the culture of the present--something that is then either applauded or condemned. Leading the applause, an apocalyptic George Steiner claims that the decline in formal value systems in the West has left us with a "deep, unsettling nostalgia for the absolute."13 And, I suspect more than one reader longs for a time (in the idealized past) when knowledge--and its purveyors--had some purchase and influence on what constituted value in society. But even on the less contentious level of retro fashions or various other commercial nostalgias, it does appear that the "derogatory word 'dated' seems to have vanished from our language."14 It has been taken over by "nostalgic," a word that has been used to signal both praise and blame. But, however self-evident (on a common sense level) it may seem that an often sentimentalized nostalgia is the very opposite of edgy irony, the postmodern debates' conflation (or confusion) of the two should give us pause.
Before beginning to tackle this conflation, I need to lay out briefly the definitions of my principal concepts and the terms of my argument. I have already defined my particular usage of the term "postmodern"--which is not synonymous with the contemporary, but which does have some mix of the complicitous and the critical at its ambivalent core. And I am going to trust that readers will all have some sort of sense of what "irony" means--either in its rhetorical or New Critical meanings or in its more extended senses of situational irony or, with an historical dimension, of "romantic" irony. What exactly is "nostalgia," though? Or perhaps the first question really should be: what WAS nostalgia? With its Greek roots--nostos, meaning "to return home" and algos, meaning "pain"--this word sounds so familiar to us that we may forget that it is a relatively new word, as words go. It was coined in 1688 by a 19-year old Swiss student in his medical dissertation as a sophisticated (or perhaps pedantic) way to talk about a literally lethal kind of severe homesickness (of Swiss mercenaries far from their mountainous home).15 This medical-pathological definition of nostalgia allowed for a remedy: the return home, or sometimes merely the promise of it. The experiencing and the attributing of a nostalgic response appeared well before this, of course. Think of the psalmist's remembering of Zion while weeping by the waters of Babylon. But the term itself seems to be culturally and historically specific.16
This physical and emotional "upheaval ... related to the workings of memory"--an upheaval that could and did kill, according to seventeenth- and eighteenth-century physicians--was seen as a "disorder of the imagination" from the start.17 But by the nineteenth century, a considerable semantic slippage had occurred, and the word began to lose its purely medical meaning,18 in part because the rise of pathologic anatomy and bacteriology had simply made it less medically credible. Nostalgia then became generalized,19 and by the twentieth century, it had begun to attract the interest of psychiatrists.20 But curious things happened in that generalizing process: nostalgia became less a physical than a psychological condition; in other words, it became psychically internalized. It also went from being a curable medical illness to an incurable (indeed unassuageable) condition of the spirit or psyche.21 What made that transition possible was a shift in site from the spatial to the temporal. Nostalgia was no longer simply a yearning to return home. As early as 1798, Immanuel Kant had noted that people who did return home were usually disappointed because, in fact, they did not want to return to a place, but to a time, a time of youth.22 Time, unlike space, cannot be returned to--ever; time is irreversible. And nostalgia becomes the reaction to that sad fact.23 As one critic has succinctly put this change: "Odysseus longs for home; Proust is in search of lost time."24
Nostalgia, in fact, may depend precisely on the irrecoverable nature of the past for its emotional impact and appeal. It is the very pastness of the past, its inaccessibility, that likely accounts for a large part of nostalgia's power--for both conservatives and radicals alike. This is rarely the past as actually experienced, of course; it is the past as imagined, as idealized through memory and desire. In this sense, however, nostalgia is less about the past than about the present. It operates through what Mikhail Bakhtin called an "historical inversion": the ideal that is not being lived now is projected into the past.25 It is "memorialized" as past, crystallized into precious moments selected by memory, but also by forgetting, and by desire's distortions and reorganizations.26 Simultaneously distancing and proximating, nostalgia exiles us from the present as it brings the imagined past near. The simple, pure, ordered, easy, beautiful, or harmonious past is constructed (and then experienced emotionally) in conjunction with the present--which, in turn, is constructed as complicated, contaminated, anarchic, difficult, ugly, and confrontational. Nostalgic distancing sanitizes as it selects, making the past feel complete, stable, coherent, safe from "the unexpected and the untoward, from accident or betrayal"27--in other words, making it so very unlike the present. The aesthetics of nostalgia might, therefore, be less a matter of simple memory than of complex projection; the invocation of a partial, idealized history merges with a dissatisfaction with the present. And it can do so with great force. Think of how visceral, how physically "present" nostalgia's promptings are: it is not just Proust for whom tastes, smells, sounds, and sights conjure up an idealized past. If you are not like me (that is, if you are capable of nostalgia), you can think of your own experience--or, if need be, do as I have to do and think of the power of the taste of Proust's madeleine or the scent of violets in Tennyson's " A dream of fair women" or of a geranium leaf in David Copperfield.28
There are, of course, many ways to look backward. You can look and reject. Or you can look and linger longingly. In its looking backward in this yearning way, nostalgia may be more of an attempt to defy the end, to evade teleology. As we approach the millennium, nostalgia may be particularly appealing as a possible escape from what Lee Quinby calls "technological apocalypse."29 If the future is cyberspace, then what better way to soothe techno-peasant anxieties than to yearn for a Mont Blanc fountain pen? But there is a rather obvious contradiction here: nostalgia requires the availability of evidence of the past,30 and it is precisely the electronic and mechanical reproduction of images of the past that plays such an important role in the structuring of the nostalgic imagination today, furnishing it with the possibility of "compelling vitality."31 Thanks to CD ROM technology and, before that, audio and video reproduction, nostalgia no longer has to rely on individual memory or desire: it can be fed forever by quick access to an infinitely recyclable past.
That original theory of nostalgia as a medical condition was developed in Europe "at the time of the rise of the great cities when greatly improved means of transportation made movements of the population much easier";32 in other words, you would be more likely to be away from home and thus yearn for it. The postmodern version of nostalgia may have been developed (in the West, at least) at the time when the rise of information technology made us question not only (as Jean-François Lyotard told us we must33) what would count as knowledge, but what would count as "the past" in relation to the present. We have not lacked for critics who lament the decline of historical memory in our postmodern times, often blaming the storage of memory in data banks for our cultural amnesia, our inability to engage in active remembrance. But, as Andreas Huyssen has convincingly argued, the contrary is just as likely to be true. In his words: "The more memory we store on data banks, the more the past is sucked into the orbit of the present, ready to be called up on the screen," making the past simultaneous with the present in a new way.34
Nostalgia, however, does not simply repeat or duplicate memory. Susan Stewart's provocative study, On Longing suggestively calls nostalgia a "social disease," defining it as "the repetition that mourns the inauthenticity of all repetition."35 The argument is that, denying or at least degrading the present as it is lived, nostalgia makes the idealized (and therefore always absent) past into the site of immediacy, presence, and authenticity. And here she approaches one of the major differences between nostalgia and irony. Unlike the knowingness of irony--a mark of the fall from innocence, if ever there was one--nostalgia is, in this way, "prelapsarian" and indeed utopian, says Stewart.36 Few have ever accused irony (even satiric irony) of successfully reinstating the authentic and the ideal.
Nostalgia has certainly not lacked for defenders, most of whom are psychoanalytically-oriented.37 This is not surprising if you think of the significant relationship psychoanalysis posits between identity and the personal psychic past unearthed by memory. This relationship becomes the model for the link between collective identity and memory for those who see a move to nostalgic transcendence and authenticity as a positive move. As one person in this camp has put it: "Longing is what makes art possible."38 By "longing," he means the emotional response to deprivation, loss, and mourning. Nostalgia has, in this way, been deemed the necessary inspirational "creative sorrow" for artists.39 This position draws on the original seventeenth-century meaning of the word; it sees nostalgia in our century as the positive response to the homelessness and exile of both private "nervous disorder and [public] persecution of actual enslavement and barbaric cruelty."40 When I think of the displaced homeless peoples of Rwanda or Bosnia, however, the more trivialized, commercialized connotations of the word "nostalgia" do stand in the way for me. My feelings when experiencing those lushly nostalgic Merchant/Ivory film versions of earlier novels must be different (in kind and not only in degree) from the experience of political refugees yearning for their homeland. But perhaps not.
In other words, despite very strong reservations (based in part on personality limitations), I do know that I should never underestimate the power of nostalgia, especially its visceral physicality and emotional impact. But that power comes in part from its structural doubling-up of two different times, an inadequate present and an idealized past.41But this is where I must return to that other obsession of mine--irony--for irony too is doubled: two meanings, the "said" and the "unsaid," rub together to create irony--and it too packs considerable punch. People do not usually get upset about metaphor or synecdoche, but they certainly do get worked up about irony, as they did a few years ago in Toronto, where I live and work, when the aptly named Royal Ontario Museum put on an exhibition that used irony to deal with the relationship of Canadian missionaries and military to Empire in Africa. Sometimes, as we all know well, people get upset because they are the targets or victims of irony. Sometimes, though, anger erupts at the seeming inappropriateness of irony in certain situations. Witness the remarks of the Curriculum Advisor on Race Relations and Multiculturalism for the Toronto Board of Education at the time: "The implied criticism of colonial intrusion and the bigotry of the white missionaries and soldiers relies heavily on the use of irony, a subtle and frequently misunderstood technique. In dealing with issues as sensitive as cultural imperialism and racism, the use of irony is a highly inappropriate luxury"--especially, I might add, when condemnation is what is expected and desired.42
What irony and nostalgia share, therefore, is a perhaps unexpected twin evocation of both affect and agency--or, emotion and politics. I suspect that one of the reasons they do so is that they share something else--a secret hermeneutic affinity that might well account for some of the interpretive confusion with which I began, the confusion that saw postmodern artifacts, in particular, deemed simultaneously ironic and nostalgic. I want to argue that to call something ironic or nostalgic is, in fact, less a description of the ENTITY ITSELF than an attribution of a quality of RESPONSE. Irony is not something in an object that you either "get" or fail to "get": irony "happens" for you (or, better, you make it "happen") when two meanings, one said and the other unsaid, come together, usually with a certain critical edge. Likewise, nostalgia is not something you "perceive" in an object; it is what you "feel" when two different temporal moments, past and present, come together for you and, often, carry considerable emotional weight. In both cases, it is the element of response--of active participation, both intellectual and affective--that makes for the power.
Because people do not talk about this element of active attribution, the politics of both irony and nostalgia are often written off as quietistic at best. But irony is what Hayden White calls "transideological": it can be made to "happen" by (and to) anyone of any political persuasion. And nostalgia too is transideological, despite the fact that many would argue that, whether used by the right or the left, nostalgia is fundamentally conservative in its praxis, for it wants to keep things as they were--or, more accurately, as they are imagined to have been.43 But, the nostalgia for an idealized community in the past has been articulated by the ecology movement as often as by fascism,44 by what Jean Baudrillard calls "[m]elancholy for societies without power."45 From the seventeenth century on, nostalgia seems to have been connected to the desire to return specifically to the homeland. In nineteenth-century Europe, that homeland became articulated in terms of the nation state, and nostalgia began to take on its associations with nationalism--and chauvinism.46 Even its more innocent-seeming forms--such as the preparing and eating of familiar foods by immigrant groups--can be seen as a nostalgic enactment of ethnic group identity, a collective disregarding, at least temporarily, of generational and other divisions.47
One brave anthropologist has claimed that, unlike such searches for ethnicity, feminism has "no tendency toward nostalgia, no illusion of a golden age in the past."48 It has been suggested that this lack of nostalgic response is because the narratives of nostalgia--from the Bible onward--are male stories, Oedipal stories which are alienating to women (who usually remain at home like Penelope, while men wander the world and risk getting homesick).49 And, in support of such a theory, literary and film critics alike have located strains of a current antifeminist, nostalgic retreat to the past in the face of the changes in culture brought about by the rise of feminism.50 Humankind has not infrequently responded with a nostalgic defensive retreat into the past when feeling threatened: for example, despite its forward-looking ideology, the late nineteenth-century United States gave great new value to its Colonial past--as an "exclusive WASP [White Anglo-Saxon Protestant] heritage"--in part to combat the mass immigration that was accompanying industrialization and that felt so new and so un-"American."51
The politics of nostalgia are not only national or gender politics, of course. Think of the popularity in the 1980s of the David Lean film of Forster's A Passage to India or ofThe Jewel and the Crown, the television adaptation of Paul Scott's The Raj Quartet. The intended anti-nostalgic exposé of the corruption and exploitation of empire in India may have been less the cause of their success than either a nostalgic liberal-utopian hope that two races might have been able to live as equals--despite history--or a nostalgic memory of the time when Britain was not a minor world power but, rather, ruler of an empire upon which the sun never set.52 This is what Renato Rosaldo calls "imperial nostalgia," the kind that makes racial domination appear innocent through elegance of manners.53 But, this nostalgia puts us, as viewers, into the same position as the very agents of empire, for they too have documented at length their paradoxical nostalgia for the cultures they had colonized--in other words, the ones they had intentionally and forcefully altered. This is the nostalgia of those who believe in "progress" and innovation, a nostalgia (again, paradoxically) for more simple, stable worlds--such as those of the putatively static societies they destroyed.
Post-colonial critics have pointed to nostalgic moments in the history of the colonized, too, however. To some, the "négritude" move in African cultural theory, with its focus on the pre-capitalist, pre-imperial past, was the sign of a nostalgic search for a lost coherence.54 Many oppressed people--Holocaust survivors and North American First Nations peoples among them--have had a strong and understandable nostalgia for what is perceived as their once unified identity. But most often, the post-colonial focus of attention has been on the nostalgia of the (usually) European colonizers, on their sense of loss and mourning for the cultural unity and centrality they once had.55 But, as Fredric Jameson has said, "a history lesson is the best cure for nostalgic pathos."56
Jameson's own attack on the postmodern is in itself worth examining in this context because it is an attack on both its regressive nostalgia and its trivializing irony. One of Jameson's main targets is what he calls the postmodern "nostalgia film"--a term that he has used to refer to anything from George Lukas's American Graffiti to Laurence Kasdan's Body Heat. These are what he calls "fashion-plate, historicist films" that reveal "the desperate attempt to appropriate a missing past."57 To him, these are the inauthentic, nostalgic "celebrations of the imaginary style of a real past" which he sees as "something of a substitute for that older system of historical representation, indeed as a virtual symptom-formation, a formal compensation for the enfeeblement of historicity in our own time."58 This medicalized psychoanalytic language--"symptom-formation", "compensation"--is used quite deliberately by Jameson because he feels that the postmodern taste for such films corresponds to certain needs in what he calls "our present economic-psychic constitution."59
But film theorist Anne Friedberg has pointed out that what Jameson is really protesting here is the distanced relation of every film from its historical referent. In other words, it is the medium and not postmodernism that gives the illusion of a "perpetual present interminably recycled."60 Or, as Derek Jarman put it when rewriting Marlowe in his postmodern film version of Edward II, "[f]ilmed history is always a misinterpretation. The past is the past, as you try to make material out of it, things slip even further away."61But, even if Jameson is wrong in where he puts the blame for the nostalgia, what interests me is that, when he finds something nostalgic--be it in the theorizing of the Frankfurt School or the novels of J.G. Ballard--nostalgia is meant to be taken negatively as "regressive."62 Yet his own rhetoric and position can themselves at times sound strangely nostalgic: in article after article in the 1980s, he repeatedly yearned for what he called "genuine historicity" in the face of a postmodernism which, in his words, was "an elaborated symptom of the waning of our historicity, of our lived possibility of experiencing history in some active way."63 And yet, it is precisely nostalgia for this kind of "lost authenticity" that has proved time and time again to be paralyzing in terms of historical thinking.64 Indeed Jameson's position has been called both regressive and defeatist.65 Is Jameson's implicit mythologizing and idealizing of a more stable, pre-late-capitalist (that is, modernist) world not in itself perhaps part of an aesthetics (or even politics) of nostalgia? If so, it is one he shares with his Marxist predecessor, Georg Lukács, for whom it was not modernism but realism that constituted that implied "moment of plenitude"66 in the past around which literary historical nostalgia revolved.
Michael Bérubé has, in fact, suggested that the Left, in America at least, has at times recently seemed paralyzed "by dreams of days when things were better." As he puts it: "it was only the repeated interventions of women, ethnic minorities and variously queer theorists that finally shattered the pernicious sense of nostalgia to which so many men on the antipostmodern left fell victim."67 Nostalgia can certainly be, in Tim Reiss's strong terms, "functionally crippling."68 Jameson's preference for science fiction over these period-recreation "nostalgia" films is a bit deceptive, for it simply points to his orientation toward the very common futuristic dimension of an equally nostalgic utopian drive.69If the present is considered irredeemable, you can look either back or forward. The nostalgic and utopian impulses share a common rejection of the here and now.
It is not that the here and now, the present, does not have its problems, however. All "presents" have always had their problems, but there is little doubt that there has been, in the last few decades, a commercialization of nostalgia, especially in the mass media, a commercialization that many have seen as a real evasion of contemporary issues and problems.70 Ralph Lauren's "Safari" fashion and perfume line a few years ago allowed us to experience the nostalgic style of an era without bearing any of its historical costs; it also offered us, as one writer put it, "a chance to relive the days of the tragically doomed upper class engaging in their white mischief on the plains of the Serengeti"71--"living without boundaries", as the ads said. This is a combination of commercial nostalgia--that teaches us to miss things we have never lost--and "armchair nostalgia"--that exists without any lived experience of the yearned-for time.72
Is this part of the "postmodern"? Since it is part of late-capitalist culture, Jameson would say it is. But, to generalize the term "postmodern" into a synonym for the contemporary is to abandon its historical and cultural specificity--an abandonment Jameson would never condone for modernism, for example. To illustrate what I mean about the need to make distinctions, think of the difference between contemporary postmodern architecture and contemporary revivalist (nostalgic) architecture; the postmodernarchitecture does indeed recall the past, but always with the kind of ironic double vision that acknowledges the final impossibility of indulging in nostalgia, even as it consciously evokes nostalgia's affective power. In the postmodern, in other words, (and here is the source of the tension) nostalgia itself gets both called up, exploited, and ironized.73 This is a complicated (and postmodernly paradoxical) move that is both an ironizing of nostalgia itself, of the very urge to look backward for authenticity, and, at the same moment, a sometimes shameless invoking of the visceral power that attends the fulfilment of that urge.74
Perhaps the history of the wider cultural entity called postmodernity would help explain this paradox. If, as it has been argued often, nostalgia is a by-product of culturalmodernity (with its alienation, its much lamented loss of tradition and community),75 then postmodernity's complex relationship with modernity--a relationship of both rupture and continuity--might help us understand the necessary addition of irony to this nostalgic inheritance. It has become a commonplace to compare the end of the nineteenth century to the end of our own, to acknowledge their common doubts about progress, their shared worries over political instability and social inequality, their comparable fears about disruptive change.76 But if nostalgia was an obvious consequence of the last fin-de-siècle panic--"manifest in idealizations of rural life, in vernacular-revival architecture, in arts-and-crafts movements, and in a surge of preservation activity"77--then some, not all (not the commercial variety, usually), but some nostalgia we are seeing today (what I want to call postmodern) is of a different order, an ironized order. If the nineteenth century turned nostalgically to the historical novels of Walter Scott and familiar Gothic Revival architecture, the twentieth has combined nostalgia with irony to produce the historiographic metafictions of Salman Rushdie and historically suggestive, parodic architectural ideas of Charles Moore's once splendid Piazza d'Italia in New Orleans. Gone is the sense of belatedness of the present vis-à-vis the past; the act of ironizing (while still implicitly invoking) nostalgia undermines modernist assertions of originality, authenticity, and the burden of the past, even as it acknowledges their continuing (but not paralyzing) validity as aesthetic concerns.
Our contemporary culture is indeed nostalgic; some parts of it--postmodern parts--are aware of the risks and lures of nostalgia, and seek to expose those through irony. Given irony's conjunction of the said and the unsaid--in other words, its inability to free itself from the discourse it contests--there is no way for these cultural modes to escape a certain complicity, to separate themselves artificially from the culture of which they are a part. If our culture really is obsessed with remembering--and forgetting--as is suggested by the astounding growth of what Huyssen calls our "memorial culture" with its "relentless museummania,"78 then perhaps irony is one (though only one) of the means by which to create the necessary distance and perspective on that anti-amnesiac drive. Admittedly, there is little irony in most memorials, and next to none in most truly nostalgic re-constructions of the past--from Disney World's Main Street, USA to those elaborate dramatized re-enactments of everything from the American Civil War to medieval jousts restaged in contemporary England. But there is much ironized nostalgia too--in Angela Carter's meditation on gender and the dawn of the twentieth century inNights at the Circus or in the wonderful generic paradox of a new work commissioned by the Metropolitan Opera of New York: William Hofman and John Corigliano's The Ghosts of Versailles. It is ironically and paradoxically called a "grand opera buffa"--for "grand" is the only kind of "intimate" opera buffa you can put on at that particular opera house, with its more than 3000 seats and its penchant for spectacle and indeed for "grand opera." From a postmodern point of view, the knowingness of this kind of irony may be not so much a defense against the power of nostalgia as the way in which nostalgia is made palatable today: invoked but, at the same time, undercut, put into perspective, seen for exactly what it is--a comment on the present as much as on the past.
Seen from that angle, though, not only have irony and nostalgia gone hand in hand in the postmodern, but perhaps they have done so for a long time (as those who work in earlier periods may know only too well): Don Quijote gave us those wonderful ironies of incongruity and inappropriateness precisely through his nostalgia for a chivalric past. In like vein, the all too ready attribution of irony to someone like Madonna in her Marilyn (and maybe even in her Evita) phase cannot really be separated from nostalgia. This may in part be because irony and nostalgia are not qualities of objects; they are responses of subjects--active, emotionally- and intellectually-engaged subjects. The ironizing of nostalgia, in the very act of its invoking, may be one way the postmodern has of taking responsibility for such responses by creating a small part of the distance necessary for reflective thought about the present as well as the past.
Endnotes
1. Irony's Edge: The Theory and Politics of Irony (London and New York: Routledge, 1995).
2. Toby Young and Tom Vanderbilt, "The End of Irony?" The Modern Review 1.14 (April-May 1994): 6-7.
3. See Linda Hutcheon, A Poetics of Postmodernism: History, Theory, Fiction (London and New York: Routledge, 1987); The Politics of Postmodernism (London and New York: Routledge, 1988); The Canadian Postmodern (Toronto: Oxford UP, 1998).
4. The list would be endless, but let me simply note the most cited opponent of the postmodern, Fredric Jameson, whose 1984 essay on "Postmodernism, Or The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism" in the New Left Review 146 (1984): 53-92 in many ways provoked my own work in the field.
5. See Charles Jencks, The Language of Post-Modern Architecture (London: Academy, 1977) and Post-Modern Classicism: The New Synthesis (London: Academy, 1980).
6. See Manfredo Tafuri, Theories and History of Architecture (London: Granada, 1980), 52-9.
7. Andreas Huyssen, "Mapping the Postmodern," reprinted in Joseph Natoli and Linda Hutcheon, eds., A Postmodern Reader (Albany: SUNY P, 1993), 112.
8. Of course in the 1960s Susan Sontag characterized camp in precisely these terms in her "Notes on 'Camp'" in Against Interpretation and other Essays (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1966), 275-92.
9. See Sherry Lynne Rosenthal, "Four Essays on the Nostalgic Appeal of Popular Fiction, Film, and Television: Hard Times, The Birth of a Nation, The Grapes of Wrath,All in the Family." Ph.D. dissertation, University of California, San Diego, 1983.
10. See Peter Rist, "Nostalgia: Stars and Genres in American Pop Culture," Canadian Review of American Studies 20.1 (1989): 111-17.
11. David Lowenthal, The Past Is a Foreign Country (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1985), 6.
12. See Christopher Lasch, "The Politics of Nostalgia," Harper's Magazine (November 1984), 68; Lowenthal 29; Sandra Ernst Moriarty and Anthony F. McGann, "Nostalgia and Consumer Sentiment," Journalism Quarterly 60 (1983): 85 on the impact of nostalgic professional design magazine advertisements on the media.
13. George Steiner, Nostalgia for the Absolute, Massey Lectures, 14th series (Toronto: CBC, 1974), 50.
14. Robert Rubens, "The Backward Glance--A Contemporary Taste for Nostalgia," Contemporary Review (September 1981): 149.
15. Johannes Hofer, Dissertatio medica de nostalgia, oder Heimwehe (Basel, 1688), translated in The Bulletin of the Institute of the History of Medicine 7 (1934): 379-91.
16. This is in spite of early medical attempts to universalize it into something felt by all beings--of all ages and temperaments--anywhere on the face of the earth. E.g. Philippe Pinel's nostalgia entry in the Encyclopédie Méthodique: Médecine, 10 (Paris: Agasse, 1821). See also B. Ruml, "Theory of Nostalgic and Egoic Sentiments," Psychological Bulletin 30 (1933): 656-7.
17. See Jean Starobinski, "The Idea of Nostalgia," Diogenes 54 (1966): 81-103. The citations are from pages 90 and 87 respectively.
18. The medical meaning did see a revival, evidently, during the American Civil War. See J. Theodore Calhoun, "Nostalgia as a Disease of Field Service," Medical and Surgical Reporter 11 (27 February 1864); DeWitt C. Peters, "Remarks on the Evils of Youthful Enlistments and Nostalgia," American Medical Times (14 February 1863).
19. See Antonio Prete, "L'assedio della lontananza," in Antonio Prete, ed., Nostalgia: storia di un sentimento (Milan: Raffaello Cortina, 1992), 17.
20. See the discussion of, among others, Karl Jaspers' Heimweh und Verbrechen (1909) in Starobinski 99-101.
21. For more on the medical and psychological angle on nostalgia, see Willis H. McCann, "Nostalgia--A Review of the Literature," Psychological Bulletin 38 (1941): 165-82 and "Nostalgia: A Descriptive and Comparative Study," Journal of Genetic Psychology 62 (1943): 97-104; George Rosen, "Nostalgia: A 'Forgotten' Psychological Disorder," Clio Medica 10.1 (1975): 28-51.
22. Immanuel Kant, Anthropologie in pragmatischer Hinsicht (1798). More recently, it has been argued that the appeal of the comic strip in French culture today is nostalgia for childhood. See Irène Pennacchioni, La Nostalgie en images: une sociologie du récit dessiné (Paris: Librairie des Méridiens, 1982).
23. See Vladimir Jankélévitch's meditation on this in L'Irreversible et la nostalgie (Paris: Flammarion, 1974).
24. James Phillips, "Distance, Absence, and Nostalgia," in Don Ihde and Hugh J. Silverman, eds., Descriptions (Albany: SUNY P, 1985), 65.
25. M.M. Bakhtin, The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays, ed. Michael Holquist, trans. Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist (Austin: U of Texas P, 1881), 147. Thanks to Russell Kilbourn for calling this to my attention.
26. See Phillips 65.
27. Lowenthal 62; Douglas T. Miller and Marion Nowak, The Fifties: The Way We Really Were (New York: Doubleday, 1977).
28. But is this perhaps how nostalgia only "masquerades as memory," as one theorist puts it? See E.B. Daniels, "Nostalgia: Experiencing the Elusive," in Ihde and Silverman 84.
29. Lee Quinby, Anti-Apocalypse: Exercises in Genealogical Criticism (Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1994), xvi.
30. Malcolm Chase and Christopher Shaw, "The Dimensions of Nostalgia," in Christopher Shaw and Malcolm Cross, eds., The Imagined Past: History and Nostalgia(Manchester and NY: Manchester UP, 1989), 4. Chase and Shaw also point out that the photograph is the "paradigm case of the moment of nostalgia" (9).
31. Lowenthal 30.
32. Starobinski 101-2.
33. See Jean-François Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge, trans. Geoff Bennington and Brian Massumi (Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1984).
34. Andreas Huyssen, Twilight Memories: Marking Time in a Culture of Amnesia (New York and London: Routledge, 1995), 253.
35. Susan Stewart, On Longing: Narrative of the Miniature, the Gigantic, the Souvenir, the Collection (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins UP, 1984), 23.
36. Stewart 23.
37. See, for instance, Roderick Peters, "Reflections on the Origin and Aim of Nostalgia," Journal of Analytic Psychology 30 (1985): 135-48; or Nandor Fodor, "Varieties of Nostalgia," Psychoanalytic Review 37 (1950): 25-38.
38. Laurence Lerner, The Uses of Nostalgia: Studies in Pastoral Poetry (London: Chatto & Windus, 1972), 52.
39. Michael M. Mason, "The Cultivation of the Senses for Creative Nostalgia in the Essays of W.H. Hudson," Ariel 20.1 (1989): 23. It has also been called our "moral conscience" for it is said to let us know what values we hold most dear and help us fight "the sickness of despair." See Ralph Harper, Nostalgia: An Existential Exploration of Longing and Fulfilment in the Modern Age (Cleveland: P of Western Reserve U, 1966), 28.
40. Harper 21.
41. All nostalgia, then, would be what Fred Davis calls "interpreted nostalgia" wherein an analysis of an experience, however brief or mistaken, comes to be fused with that primary experience and thus alters it. See Yearning for Yesterday: A Sociology of Nostalgia (New York: Free P, 1979), 25.
42. The Curriculum Advisor on Race Relations and Multiculturalism for the Toronto Board of Education, cited in "Analyzing Racism at ROM" in The Varsity (June 1990), 4.
43. See Susan Bennett, Performing Nostalgia: Shifting Shakespeare and the Contemporary Past (London and New York: Routledge, 1996) 5; 161, n.4.
44. See Anthony Arblaster, Viva la libertà: Politics in Opera (London: Verso, 1992), 180.
45. Jean Baudrillard, "The Precession of Simulacra," in Natoli and Hutcheon 361. He goes on to call nostalgia "the phastasmal parodic rehabilitation of all lost referentials" (372).
46. See Jankélévitch; Kathleen Parthé, "Village Prose: Chauvinism, Nationalism, or Nostalgia?" in Sheelagh Duffin Graham, ed., New Directions in Soviet Literature(London: Macmillan, 1992), 106-21.
47. See Richard Raspa, "Exotic Foods among Italian-Americans in Mormon Utah: Food as Nostalgic Enactment of Identity," in Linda Keller Brown and Kay Mussell, eds.,Ethnic and Regional Foodways in the United States: The Performance of Group Identity (Knoxville: U of Tennessee P, 1984), 185-94.
48. Michael M.J. Fischer, "Autobiographical Voices (1, 2, 3) and Mosaic Memory," in Kathleen Ashley, Leigh Gilmore, and Gerald Peters, eds., Autobiography and Postmodernism (Amherst: U of Massachusetts P, 1994), 92.
49. Teresa Maria Brown, "Rewriting the Nostalgic Story: Woman, Desire, Narrative," Ph.D. dissertation, University of Florida, 1989.
50. See Janice Doane and Devon Hodges, Nostalgia and Sexual Difference: The Resistance to Contemporary Feminism (London and New York: Methuen, 1987), xiii. See also Barbara Creed, "From Here to Modernity: Feminism and Postmodernism," Screen 28.2 (1987): 47-67 on film nostalgia and issues of gender which Fredric Jameson does NOT deal with. For a discussion of the condemnation of utopian "future nostalgia" by feminist writers, see Kathe Davis Finney, "The Days of Future Past or Utopians Lessing and LeGuin Fight Future Nostalgia," in Donald M. Hassler, ed., Patterns of the Fantastic (Mercer Island, WA: Starmont House, 1983), 31-40. For a general critique of various kinds of utopian thinking, including nostalgic ones, see Vincent P. Pecora, Households of the Soul (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1996).
51. Lowenthal 121.
52. On Shakespeare's role in this kind of nostalgia, see Bennett 145: "To reproduce a classic text of the European imperial archive is always to risk its willing and wistfully nostalgic assent to (re)claim its own authority. Those texts are simply so heavily overcoded, value laden, that the production and reception of the 'new' text necessarily becomes bound to the tradition that encompasses and promotes the old 'authentic' version. This remains the argument against the revival/rewriting of The Tempest or any other classical text: that containment is an inevitable effect."
53. Renato Rosando, Culture and Truth: The Remaking of Social Analysis (Boston: Beacon P, 1989), 68. Thanks to Monika Kaup for calling this to my attention.
54. Simon Simonse, "African Literature between Nostalgia and Utopia: African Novels since 1953 in the Light of the Modes-of-Production Approach," Research in African Literatures 13.4 (1982): 451-87.
55. See Ien Ang, "Hegemony-in-Trouble: Nostalgia and the Ideology of the Impossible in European Cinema," in Duncan Petrie, ed., Screening Europe: Image and Identity in Contemporary European Cinema (London: British Film Institute, 1992): 21-31.
56. Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism, or the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (Durham, NC: Duke UP, 1991), 156.
57. Jameson, Postmodernism xvii and 19, respectively.
58. Fredric Jameson, Signatures of the Visible (New York and London: Routledge, 1990), 85 and 130 respectively.
59. Fredric Jameson, "Nostalgia for the Present," The South Atlantic Quarterly 88.2 (1989): 527.
60. Anne Friedberg, "Les Flaneurs du Mal(l): Cinema and the Postmodern Condition," PMLA 106.3 (1991): 419-31.
61. Derek Jarman, Queer Edward II (London: British Film Institute, 1991), 86.
62. See, respectively, Fredric Jameson, The Ideologies of Theory: Essays 1971-1986. Volume I: Situations of Theory (Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1988), 110 andPostmodernism 156.
63. Jameson, Postmodernism 19 and 21, respectively.
64. John Frow, "Tourism and the Semiotics of Nostalgia," October 57 (1991): 135.
65. Simon During, "Postmodernism or Post-colonialism Today," Textual Practice 1.1 (1987): 32-47.
66. See Fredric Jameson, Marxism and Form: Twentieth-Century Dialectical Theories of Literature (Princeton: Princeton UP, 1971), 38. The phrase is used to describe Adorno's critique of theories of history organized around the covert hypothesis of such a "moment of plenitude" in the past or future.
67. Michael Bérubé, "Just the Fax, Ma'am, Or, Postmodernism's Journey to Decenter," Village Voice (October 1991), 14.
68. Timothy J. Reiss, "Critical Environments: Cultural Wilderness or Cultural History?" Canadian Review of Comparative Literature 10.2 (June 1983): 193.
69. But it does so at a time when, as Andreas Huyssen has argued, Western culture's utopian imagination "is shifting from its futuristic pole toward the pole of remembrance." See Huyssen, Twilight Memories 88.
70. See Allison Graham, "History, Nostalgia, and the Criminality of Popular Culture," Georgia Review 38.2 (1984): 348-64. See also Elizabeth Wilson, Adorned in Dreams: Fashion and Modernity (London: Virago, 1985, on nostalgia in fashion as a "strangely unmotived appropriation of the past" (172).
71. Vanderbilt 7.
72. These are the terms of Arjun Appadurai, in his Modernity at Large: Cultural Dimensions of Globalization (Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1996), 77-8.
73. This is one step beyond what has been called the ironic nostalgia of, say, post-Soviet artists who, according to Svetlana Boym, "reconfigure and preserve various kinds of imagined community and offer interesting cultural hybrids--of Soviet kitsch and memories of totalitarian childhood." See Svetlana Boym, "From the Russian Soul to Post-Communist Nostalgia," Representations 49 (Winter 1995): 151.
74. There may be analogies here with what Bennett calls "queer nostalgia" wherein "identity-forming discourses of the past are both confirmed and fractured at the moment of performance" (159).
75. See Chase and Shaw 7.
76. See Lowenthal 394-6.
77. Lowenthal 396.
78. Huyssen, Twilight Memories 5; see Lasch for contrasting view: "If Americans really cared about the past, they would try to understand how it still shapes their ideas and actions. Instead they lock it up in museums or reduce it to another object of commercialized consumption" (69).
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ALL 2008Slow Food, Slow Film Dennis Rothermel Professor and Chair, Department of Philosophy California State University, Chico November 7, 2008 12:00 Noon -- Brown Bag Location TBA This talk draws parallels between the products of industrialized food and the products of industrialized cinema, through a discussion of two Hollywood remakes of foreign films about food and cooking -- Ang Lee's Eat Drink Man Woman and Sandra Nettlebeck's Bella Martha. The traits of mainstream cinema manipulative effects are easily identified in the Hollywood adaptations, and a parallel transformation in the food content as well. The lecture will conclude with some philosophical remarks deriving from Hubert Dreyfus' exposition of gift-giving and Roberto Esposito's development of normativization. co-sponsered by film studies. Past EventsSpring 2008Much Ado About Soul FoodPsyche Williams-Forson Friday, May 16th 1:30p in 3201 Hart Hall, UC Davis Psyche Williams-Forson author of the award winning Building Houses Out of Chicken Legs: Black Women, Food, & Power. (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2006), which explores the ties between African-American food culture, entrepreneurship, travel and racism. Her lecture at UC Davis examined the visual culture of soul food in the effort to look critically at the way its representations attend to gender and racial constructions. Prof. Williams-Forson also led a graduate research workshop during her visit, sponsored by CSFC. Read more about Psyche Williams-Forson at http://www.amst.umd.edu/People/williamsforson.htm NYT Book Review August 13, 2006 The Gospel Bird Review by MATT LEE and TED LEE http://www.nytimes.com/2006/08/13/books/review/Lee2.t.html?emc=eta1 These events were made possible by the Davis Humanities Institute and co-sponsoring University groups, including Women and Gender Stuudies, African and African American Studies, and Black Family Week. Starbucks, Consumption and GlobalityJeeEun SongDATE: April 18th | Project Workshops CSFC holds project workshops for faculty and graduate students working in the areas of food, culture and consumption. To find out about how to participate in CSFC research workshops please email...
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| Fall 2006 Carole Counihan Professor of Anthropology (Millersville University, PA) Speaking Food and Making Place in the San Luis Valley of Colorado November 14 Tuesday, 2006 Counihan discusses her fieldwork, food-centered life history interviews that she has collected since 1996 in the small Mexicano town of Antonito in the southern San Luis Valley of Colorado. By examining Mexicanas’ diverse constructions of foods, landscapes, rivers, and gardens, she explores the relationship between the food voice and place in anthropological method and theory. Through stories about foods and places, traditionally silenced people portray culture, express gender, and enrich the historical record: these life histories contest stereotypes about the Chicanos’ relegation of women to the home and disregard for environmental conservation. They reveal longstanding roots in the land, which can provide cultural legitimacy and economic sustenance, hallmarks of Chicano cultural citizenship. Professor of History at the University of the Pacific A Hill of Beans: A History of the World's Most Ubiquitous Peasant Food October 27, 2006 Description: Ken Abala offers a series of mini-biographies of various legume species and what they reveal about the people who will or will not eat them. | ||
| Spring 2006 Meredith Abarca University of Texas, El Paso Food-Centered Discourses: Intellectual Communities Across Fields of Knowledge Friday, April 28th at 12:00PM, 2006 The talk will raise a number of intellectual as well as ethical questions regarding the negotiation of food politics and philosophy embedded within different areas of food studies as well as food/cooking practices. Two communities voices prevalent within my work are the discourse of working-class Mexican and Mexican-American women and those of feminist’s university researchers. What subjectivities are negotiated when "charlas" about food take place between these two groups? How do these food talks change our understanding of the “knowledge” either group professes to have, and their relationship (responsibilities and obligations) to society at large? This talk will explore three aspects: first, how does the language of food speak differently according to its localized place? Second, what are the conceptual ways in which food-centered discourses overlap in particular places? This overlap creates what she calls a borderless boundary zone. The final exploration, therefore, asks: what are the strengths, as well as the limitations, in bridging the food voices of/from different places and spaces? About the speaker: Meredith E. Abarca received a Ph.D. in Comparative Literature from the University of California at Davis. She is an assistant professor of English at the University of Texas, El Paso, where she teaches courses on Chicana/o Literature, Mexican-American Folklore, Film and Literature of the Americas, Critical Theory, and Women Philosophers in the Kitchen. Her book Voices in the Kitchen: Views of Food and the World from Working-Class Mexican and Mexican American Women was recently released by Texas A&M University Press. | ||
| March Madness- two talks on meat, crisis, and mad cow disease in American culture. Friday, March 3, 2006 Lynn Houston 'Not Business-As-Usual': Mad Cow Disease As Cultural Crisis This presentation takes up Heidegger’s questions about the nature and "event" of technology, theorizing the role of technology in our everyday lives, in the formation of our beings, and most importantly, theorizing how technology functions in the construction (or destruction) of our subjectivity through the production of our food. To this aim, the phenomenon of mad cow disease is read as a cultural crisis that reveals and makes unfamiliar to us values and norms that we have come to taken for granted, thus calling into question the body as site of discourse. This crisis critiques values regarding the subject/object distinction, as well as other categories/boundaries/borders, the material conditions of personhood, and the production and circulation of knowledge in global, industrial capitalism. Lynn Houston is currently a tenure-track assistant professor of American literature in the English Department of California State University, Chico. Prior to that, she held a visiting assistant professorship in southeastern Louisiana. Lynn received her doctoral degree from Arizona State University; her dissertation was entitled "The Mad Cow Nexus: The Stakes/Steaks of Personhood in Global, Industrial Food Production." She first began her work in food studies during her masters work at the University of Geneva, Switzerland, while funded by a Fulbright grant for independent research in comparative literature. AND Laura Hudson It's a mad mad mad mad world: Mad Cow and Meat Systems Ten years ago, the U.S. "mad cow" crisis reached a head with the appearance of former cattle rancher turned vegan activist Howard Lyman on the Oprah Winfrey show. Lyman’s account of common meat industry practices, including the use of cattle proteins in cattle feed, led Oprah to exclaim: “It has just stopped me cold from eating another burger!” The National Cattleman's Beef Association sued both Lyman and Winfrey for their statements. Fear that meat production practices might result in a public health crisis was secondary to fear over the economic effects that public distrust would have on the industry. While mad cow disease has largely faded from the public eye, superseded by the explosion of other crises, the industry continues to employ production methods that put public health at risk in the interests of industry profit. What an investigation of industry and government response to the threat of mad cow disease reveals is that it is not the cows that have gone mad, but the system itself.
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| Winter 2006 Charlotte Biltekoff Postdoctoral Scholar in Food Science and Dietary Ideals / Social Ideals: A Cultural Perspective on Food and Health Friday, February 3rd 12:00, 2006 This talk will explore the meaning of dietary health from a cultural and a historical perspective and show why it is important to understand the social role that dietary advice plays. It will consider the relationship between dietary ideals and social ideals in the United States from the late nineteenth century to the present, focusing primarily on the World War II National Nutrition Program, a massive homefront nutrition education program. My central claim will be that the nutrition lessons promoted by wartime dietary reformers aimed not only for individual health but also for social well-being, and that wartime dietary ideals also delineated the boundaries of fitness for citizenship. Towards the end of the talk, we will reflect on how this historical perspective on dietary advice might help us to think about the social role of dietary ideals within the contemporary context of the obesity epidemic. About the Speaker: | ||
| Links University of California, Davis Graduate Program in Cultural Studies Food and Culture Texts: Robert Mondavi Institute for Wine and Food Science Culinary Historians of Northern California Association for the Study of Food and Society Gastronomica: The Journal of Food and Culture |
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 Entre la avenida sexta y Chipichape se halla el Parque de la Música. Durante las ferias de Cali este lugar se ve engalanado con especiales visitantes que llegan con sus discos como un tesoro guardado bajo sus brazos. Estos particulares visitantes se reúnen allí con un objeto social específico: difundir y multiplicar los conocimientos acumulados por años de investigación y experiencia en el desarrollo historiográfico de la música afrocaribeña. Son los melómanos. Un grupo social con características independientes e identitarias en su conformación urbana. En este espacio, con estos sujetos, la música se aprecia en su connotación artística, histórica y cultural, no sólo como un formato de divertimento. El lugar, acondicionado para recibir cerca de cinco mil visitantes por noche que van a escuchar las temáticas musicales definidas por la organización, y presentadas por reconocidos melómanos provenientes de diversas partes de Colombia y del mundo, tiene otras variables que ensanchan el propósito de esta reunión anual. Se hicieron presentes cerca de setenta comerciantes de música, libros, fotografías, instrumentos, litografías, videos, que permiten la inmersión del visitante y el especialista en el universo y la magia caribeña. El evento estuvo matizado por música en vivo de orquestas nacionales e internacionales que cerraban la noche y despedían a los caleños tras doce horas continuas de disfrutar y bailar con un ritmo ajeno a su espacio telúrico y conformación social. La salsa, el son, la guaracha, el danzón, la pachanga, la columbia, el mambo, el bolero antillano, el son montuno y el new yorkino, deleitaban a incansables bailadores, afirmando con esta posibilidad que la salsa y la música afrocaribeña tienen un lugar privilegiado en su cultura y cotidianidad. Cali es considerada la capital mundial de la salsa, imaginario urbano originado y afianzado con un proceso social de más de siete décadas en que la música afrocaribeña se ha adoptado y recepcionado a través de los melómanos, como una impronta de su cultura e identidad. La génesis de este fenómeno, que se prolongó en el tiempo hasta desembocar en la adopción de una cultura ajena a nuestra geografía, tiene sus raíces en la construcción del ferrocarril del Pacífico hacia 1920, que conectó a Cali con Buenaventura. Tras la apertura del puerto, se hizo común observar a los nativos que se embarcaban en los buques multinacionales, llegando con colecciones discográficas de diversos países del caribe. Cali se vio influenciada por estos nuevos sonidos y progresivamente, entre los habitantes de la antigua ciudad, se hizo frecuente el culto hacia la música afrocaribeña proveniente, en principio, del puerto de Buenaventura. Cali es una ciudad alejada de la costa y enclavada en un valle interandino, sin embargo, la conexión con Buenaventura y una climatología específica permiten un ambiente similar al que se encuentra en la extensión del Caribe. El fenómeno caribeño se refuerza debido al proceso del mestizaje, que encuentra en la raza negra un factor dominante para la apropiación de culturas cuyo centro es la base percutiva. Posteriormente, hacia los años cincuenta, Cali se convierte en centro comercial e industrial. Recibe una gran ola caribeña, ya no en formato de disco como los antiguos receptores, sino con la visita artística de grandes figuras y orquestas de la música afrocaribeña, a las que todavía se rinde homenaje en las reuniones de melómanos y coleccionistas, recordando sus éxitos y anécdotas, ya que muchos de ellos fueron partícipes activos de este fenómeno cultural que creció en los barrios populares de Cali. En los años cuarenta y cincuenta, durante el acelerado auge industrial, y con la violencia partidista en campos y aldeas colombianas, la inmigración intensa profundizó la hibridación cultural, y consolidó un nuevo “sensorio” que, como caldo de cultivo, permitió la ávida recepción de la música antillana y la rítmica caribeña en Cali. Estas preferencias y gustos se expresaron inicialmente en los sectores populares, pues la pasión por esa música expresaba el goce y la liberalidad del cuerpo que se hacía ritmo corporal en el baile . Llegaron en su momento de esplendor el Trío Matamoros, Miguelito Valdés, El Septeto Habanero, la Riverside, Celina y Reutilio, alcanzando su clímax con la visita recurrente del más grande de los conjuntos del Caribe década tras década: La Sonora Matancera con sus cantantes principales: Daniel Santos, Celia Cruz, Bienvenido Granda, Leo Marini, Carlos Argentino Torres, Alberto Beltrán y el barranquillero Nelson Pinedo. Esta ola musical generó movimientos culturales y sociales al interior de la ciudad en torno a la música caribeña, afianzando el gusto por esta a través de la proliferación de bares y salsotecas, reuniones de coleccionistas y concursos de baile. Cali se convertía en una sede del Caribe en el Océano Pacífico. Los datos históricos alrededor del fenómeno identitario generado en Cali a partir de la influencia de la música caribeña se pueden rastrear principalmente a través del discurso de los “museos vivientes”, o representantes sociales de la música, en obras literarias que exponen la adopción del ritmo nacido en las antillas, como la novela Celia Cruz Reina Rumba de Umberto Valverde (melómano, investigador y escritor caleño), quien recrea magistralmente con su historia la época gloriosa de la música antillana en Cali; y en material periodístico que recoge en crónicas, como las del Alfonso Bonilla Aragón, la atmósfera cultural y social del barrio popular caleño, contaminado progresivamente con una cultura ajena que terminó por inundar la ciudad y sus alrededores; ejemplificando un claro caso de enajenamiento cultural e incidencia massmediática que permeó la ciudad, el consumo y los gustos musicales de los caleños. En las dos décadas siguientes a la ola caribeña de los cincuenta, el fenómeno se transformó y fortaleció con la salsa - originada en New York -, que encontró en Cali un espacio cómodo y de aceptación debido al anterior proceso. De nuevo llegan a Cali las grandes vedettes en su momento cumbre. Desde New York, Cuba y Puerto Rico arriban estrellas del naciente género para presentarse en eventos masivos como la feria de Cali, que contribuyó a que el imaginario colectivo de ser otra meca del popular ritmo, se enraizara debido a la visita recurrente de grandes invitados del género. La novela ¡Que viva la música! de Andrés Caicedo es un registro crónico y ficcionado de este fenómeno. Un referente de la importancia sociocultural de la salsa en la relaciones de modernidad y actualidad de la atmósfera juvenil caleña del setenta. A lo largo de estás siete décadas, el melómano y coleccionista ha contribuido silenciosamente al fortalecimiento del imaginario colectivo que constituye a Cali como capital de la salsa. Su trabajo de recopilación de piezas discográficas ontológicas, de difusión de la tradición afrocaribeña, de creación de redes de coleccionistas, ha ubicado a Cali como un centro neurálgico de tributo constante a la nostalgia y a nuevas armonías del género, fortaleciendo así su permanencia en el imaginario urbano de la ciudad. El decimocuarto encuentro de melómanos y coleccionistas de Cali es una tradición de la ciudad. Resultado de una transformación generacional del sujeto social coleccionista de música, que a través de su experiencia personal, cultivó y proporcionó a la ciudad un elemento cultural constituido en rasgo identificable. En cada década la ciudad se vio afectada por el trabajo anónimo de este ser urbano, que interiorizaba los ritmos modernos provenientes del Caribe y los irradiaba simultáneamente a la ciudad mediante la actividad nocturna y cultural. Hoy la ciudad no siente pertenencia por el rotulo afianzado en el desarrollo de la tradición afrocaribeña. Sin embargo los melómanos, en su afán romántico y nostálgico, se han propuesto como misión recuperar el título de capital mundial de la salsa para Cali. Es por eso que se han organizado como asociación (Asociación de melómanos y coleccionistas de Santiago de Cali), conformada por redes de coleccionistas (UNIMELC-Conciencia Latina), a través de encuentros programáticos y especializados en barrios y clubes de la ciudad, constituyéndose como la principal y más grande asociación de melómanos del país y una de las más importantes de Latinoamérica. Su logro más importante fue impulsar el encuentro de melómanos de la feria a nivel internacional, ello se produjo gracias al reconocimiento en el exterior de Melómanos Documentos, la publicación periódica de su magazín musical. Esta asociación sigue luchando por la permanencia de la tradición afrocaribeña, no encuentra en los massmedias recepción de sus objetivos, pues ante las oleadas migratorias y el auge de nuevos géneros comerciales, la cultura de la salsa se ha visto desplazada paulatinamente de los gustos de los habitantes de Cali. El interés de seguir sosteniendo el rotulo de Cali como capital salsera, hoy por hoy, sólo le pertenece a los melómanos, pues esta es su justificación histórica y social. Del 26 al 30 de diciembre de 2005, en el marco de la 48 feria de Cali, se realizó en el Parque de la Música el 14 encuentro de coleccionistas y melómanos de Cali. Primer encuentro internacional de esta materia con invitados especiales de Francia, España, Alemania, Puerto Rico, Panamá y New York. Este evento se constituye progresivamente en una opción cultural dentro de la feria, recogiendo con él los vestigios de una tradición salsera en Cali, que pretende mantener el estandarte como capital mundial del género caribeño. |
California dreamin
ver fichaEl cine rumano sorprende de nuevo. Deliciosa fábula que critica el militarismo occidental (de color yanqui) y alumbra la superación de barreras lingüísticas, culturales y emocionales entre extraños forzados a convivir. "
ver cartel
Director: Cristian Nemescu
Estreno: 2008-08-22
Genero: Comedia
rutina, figuras borrosas ajenas al despacho del estratega pero a la larga marionetas de sus designios. Como en el benévolo cruce de caminos entre egipcios y hebreos, la sátira recubre muchos de los tramos de esta pintoresca película. Cristian Nemescu, su malogrado artífice, no logró ver el montaje final ni tampoco podrá catar el halo de culto que quizá recaiga en su obra, de trazo pausado y cámara inquieta. Porque no es ésta una excelente pieza visual o envoltorio maqueado para recubrir flaquezas en la sustancia. La póstuma del joven Nemescu viene a confirmar la pujanza de la industria rumana, el legítimo magisterio de la compatriota 4 MESES, 3 SEMANAS, 2 DÍAS (Cristian Mungiu, 2007), brutal y descorazonador viaje al infierno en pleno cénit Ceaucescu. Y ratifica ese pedestal adquirido armado de inteligencia, con la sola herramienta de la mordida irónica sobre una historia mínima. Otra más digna de atención, otra vez la mirada puesta en terrenos de cotidianeidad en mitad de ninguna parte, territorio casi fantasmal que alberga ruindades y desencuentros, afectos imprevistos y combates de egos, la sexualidad fortuita y la barrera idiomática a la postre sorteada.
El simbólico trayecto que maquina Nemescu viste el ligero fuselaje de una fábula localista, neuralgia de conflictos personales bajo el gran conflicto burocrático que enhebra la función. Armand Assante -rotunda presencia- encara sin éxito el bloqueo de su convoy ordenado por el corrupto jefe de estación de esa recóndita e imprevista aldea, verdadero escollo en el camino hacia una Kosovo en los estertores. La tozudez del personaje choca con la cuestionable eficacia de las altas esferas occidentales, trasiego de llamadas telefónicas mediante, en la práctica estériles. Radica en esta premisa lo insólito de una propuesta amable sólo en continente, pronto desplegará el libreto su arsenal de crítica mordaz al caciquismo provinciano frente al intruso -en este caso, la soldadesca de la era Clinton-, hilando con delicado esmero las intimidades que despierta situación tan descabellada entre invasores y autóctonos. Es por ello que los tintes políticos del conjunto, 
toda la convulsión laboral que vertebra gran parte del relato se aloja dentro de un edificio emocional bien construido, asentando los dramas interpersonales al modo de dibujo polimorfo de ese choque cultural al que yanquis y rumanos se ven abocados. Quizá susceptible de acortar su duración, esta parábola condena la inoperancia militar y los rigores del capitalismo voraz en pequeñas comunidades, donde a veces el alcalde no es más que un títere al servicio del yugo explotador del empresario. De paso se cuela una divertida reflexión sobre la capacidad de vencer abismos lingüísticos, de cambiar afectos sin la evidencia de la palabra (o con pobres traducciones de los discursos). Cruces de miradas, hilarantes malentendidos, impetuosos arrebatos que dan pie a secciones de impagable eficacia, festivas muestras del humor bien asumido y plasmado sin que lo burdo asome el hocico. Se cuentan como gemas memorables la imitación de Elvis Presley en la fiesta, todos los detalles del cortejo de los militares reventados de testosterona al sector femenino o el discurso de Assante en apoyo a los lugareños cansados de corrupciones.
¿Pueden los americanos, tantos años esperados, dirimir estas diferencias aunque no les incumba? ¿Pueden erigirse en héroes de causas peregrinas, en salvadores de patrias chicas? La comicidad, sin rozar el ámbito delirante y macarrónico de Kusturica, orienta cualquier posible respuesta. Lo que equivale a afirmar el talento de alguien sobrado de ingenio por bascular entre lo costumbrista y lo burlesco, por torear la rigidez del cine combativo e instalarse en un equilibrado sarcasmo. Por hacer de su fábula un atemporal recinto de esperanzas regadas de sabor agridulce que nunca deja de sorprendernos.Más críticas de Tomás Diaz
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The Critical Theory Institute
The Critical Theory Institute provides a locus for the conduct and support of collaborative, interdisciplinary research focused on the theoretical underpinnings of such fields as history, literature, philosophy, art and politics. The Institute's principal function is to provide a forum for debate among competing movements in contemporary critical theory so that existing theoretical models can be challenged and refined. The Institute's research consists not only of the application of theory to date but also of self-reflexive investigation of theoretical presuppositions in order to produce alternative theoretical constructs and strategies. The Institute organizes colloquia, lectures, seminars, and workshops in which leading theorists from the United States and abroad participate in its research projects. It also sponsors the annual Wellek Library Lectures in which a leading theorist gives a series of lectures on a topic of importance in critical theory.The Critical Theory Institute Wellek Library Lectures
May 2002
Critical Theory Institute Books
The Aims of Representation: Subject, Text, History. Edited and with an Introduction by Murray Krieger. New York: Columbia University Press, 1987.
- Reprinted in 1993 by Stanford University Press.
Murray Krieger: "Introduction: The Literary, the Textual, the Social":1-22.- Jean-François Lyotard: "Judiciousness in Dispute, or Kant After Marx":23-67.
- David Carroll: "Narrative, Heterogeneity, and the Question of the Political: Bakhtin and Lyotard":69-106.
- Mark Poster: "Foucault, Post-Structuralism, and the Mode of Information":107-130.
- John Carlos Rowe: "Surplus Economies: Deconstruction, Ideology and the Humanities":131-158.
- Anthony Giddens: "Action, Subjectivity, and the Construction of Meaning":159-174.
- Robert Weimann: "History, Appropriation, and the Uses of Representation in Modern Narrative":175-215.
- Wofgang Iser: "Representation: A Performative Act":217-232.
Essays After the Essays - Dominick LaCapra: "Criticism Today":235-255.
- Stephen Greenblatt: "Capitalist Culture and the Circulatory System": 257-273.
The States of 'Theory': History, Art, and Critical Discourse. Edited and with an Introduction by David Carroll. New York: Columbia University Press, 1990.
Contents:
David Carroll: "Introduction: The States of 'Theory' and the Future of History and Art":1-23.
The Question of History- Carolyn Porter: "Are We Being Historical Yet?":27-62.
- Jacques Derrida: "Some Statements and Truisms about Neo-Logisms, Newisms, Postisms, Parasitisms, and Other Small Seismisms":63-94.
- Lynn Hunt: "History Beyond Social Theory":95-111.
- Claude Lefort: "Machiavelli: History, Politics, Discourse":113-124.
- Fredric Jameson: "Spatial Equivalents: Postmodern Architecture and the World System":125-148.
- Jean-Luc Nancy: "Finite History":149-172.
The Question of Aesthetics - Rosalind E. Krauss: "The Blink of an Eye":173-199.
- Wolfgang Iser: "The Aesthetic and the Imaginary":201-220.
- Murray Krieger: "The Semiotic Desire for the Natural Sign: Poetic Uses and Political Abuses":221-253.
- Juan Villegas: "Toward a Model for the History of Theater":255-279.
- J. Hillis Miller: "Face to Face: Plato's Protagoras as a Model for Collective Research in the Humanities":282-295.
- Jean-François Lyotard: "After the Sublime: The State of Aesthetics":297-304.
Politics, Theory, and Contemporary Culture. Edited and with an Introduction by Mark Poster. New York: Columbia University Press, 1993.
Contents:- Mark Poster: "Introduction":1-12.
- Catherine R. Stimpson: "How Did Feminist Theory Get This Way?":13-40.
- John Carlos Rowe: "The Writing Class":41-82.
- Gabriele Schwab: "The Subject of the Political Unconscious":83-110.
- Teresa de Lauretis: "Freud, Sexuality, and Perversion":111-130.
- Samuel Weber: "Breaching the Gap: On Lacan's Ethics of Psychoanalysis":131-158.
- David Carroll: "Community After Devastation: Culture, Politics, and the 'Public Space'":159-196.
- Jacques Derrida: "Back from Moscow, in the USSR":197-235.
- Alexander Gelley: "City Texts: Representation, Semiology, and Urbanism":237-260.
- Jean-François Lyotard: "The Wall, the Gulf, and the Sun: A Fable":261-275.
- Ernesto Laclau: "Power and Representation":277-296.
`Culture' and the Problem of the Disciplines. Edited and with an Introduction by John Carlos Rowe. New York: Columbia University Press, 1998.
Contents:- John Carlos Rowe: "Introduction":1-13.
- David Lloyd: "Foundations of Diversity: Thinking the University in a Time of Multiculturalism":15-43.
- J. Hillis Miller: "Literary and Cultural Studies in the Transnational University":45-67.
- Sacvan Bercovitch: "The Function of the Literary in a Time of Cultural Studies":69-86.
- Linda Williams: "Discipline and Distraction: Psyche, Visual Culture, amd Postmodern Cinema":87-120.
- Leslie Rabine: "Fashion and the Racial Construction of Gender":121-140.
- James A Boon: "Accenting Hybridity: Postcolonial Cultural Studies, a Boasian Anthropologist, and I":141-169.
- Suzanne Gearhart: "Colonialism, Psychoanalysis, and Cultural Criticism: The Problem of Interiorization in the Work of Albert Memmi":171-197.
- Mark Poster: "Textual Agents: History at 'The End of History':199-227.
The Forces of Globalization. Edited and with an Introduction by Gabriele Schwab. New York: Columbia University Press, 2002 (forthcoming.)
Contents:- Etienne Balibar: "A Global Culture?"
- Chakrabarty, Dipesh: “"Towards a Political Economy of Belonging: Historical Difference and the Logic of Capital"”
- Chambers, Iain: "A Torn Map, a Fold in Time, an Interruption"”
- Comaroff, Jean: “"Alien-Nation: Zombies, Immigrants and Millennial Capitalism"”
- Conley, Verena: "Globalism and Environment: Ecological Territories"”
- Ferguson, James: "Transnational Topographies of Power: Beyond ‘the State’ and ‘Civil Society’ in the Study of African Politics"”
- Grosz, Elizabeth: “"The Global, the Virtual and a Politics of the Future"”
- Miller, J. Hillis: "Will Literary Study Survive the Globalization of the University and the New Regime of Telecommunications?"”
- Miyoshi, Masao: "Empty Museum"”
- Ning, Wang: "Postmodernity, Globalization and the Chinese Cultural and Intellectual Strategy"
- Poster, Mark: "Nations, Identies and Global Technologies"”
- Rabine, Leslie: "Globalization from the Margins: The Case of African Fashion"”
Research Project: "Futures of Property & Personhood" (1999-2003)
In the 1999-2000 academic year the Critical Theory Institute at the University of California, Irvine began its new three-year research project, “The Futures of Property and Personhood.” In its focus on property, the topic explores the challenges to social and cultural theory posed by privatization and its broader political, cultural and institutional effects. It considers, too, the manifold changes in the status of personhood brought about by the forces of privatization and globalization, as well as the new technologies that facilitate the remaking of human bodies and determine the politics of reproduction. The most pervasive effects of privatization include a general weakening of liberalism’s hold on the social imaginary, a trend that profoundly affects state practices, socio-cultural reproduction, and the institutional production of knowledge. By exploring the synergy and dissonance between conceptions of the private as marketable and the private as inalienable, the CTI poses the question of how critical theory can productively engage with the contemporary transformations and futures of notions such as property, personhood, and related concepts of citizenship, state, culture, and knowledge.
Since the Enlightenment, definitions of property have entailed corresponding configurations of the person who owned, and/or was subjected to, property. In the past three decades, critical theories have devised and debated new models to respond to historical changes in the relation between property and personhood. Most of these theories challenge the classical paradigms of liberalism, Marxism, and psychoanalysis, expanding their focus to include issues such as symbolic economies, regimes of power and knowledge, or the superimposition of commodity and sexual fetishism. Many of these theories rethink the legacy of Nietzsche, Marx and Freud from the vantage point of the new economies of a global corporate media culture and its continually changing impact on relations between property and personhood. Today, new forms of privatization demand that we rethink the range of available models of subjectivity in relation to late capitalist, global and corporate economies and their effects on personhood. We need to ask whether contemporary critiques of the subject are adequate to challenge narratives of the triumph of the market and the privatization of knowledges, persons, and life itself.
Privatization, as we understand it, refers to a complex array of interconnected processes and relationships through which political rights, social membership, knowledge production, and the related spheres that constitute personhood are increasingly brought within the ambit of the capitalist marketplace. We are currently living through a profound acceleration of such processes of privatization and their far-reaching effects on the social and cultural imaginary. Among such effects we may count the economic, political, and epistemological reworking of notions of citizenship, the re-definition of the nation-state in relation to a transnational economy and its global markets, and the privatization of services formerly under state management. Similarly, privatization deeply affects social and cultural identities, subjectivities, and cosmologies of personhood. Niche marketing and demographic “indicators” of consumer preference, for example, are rendered as self-identity. Moreover, identity itself is increasingly framed through acquisitive individualism. Self-identity becomes a product to be worked on, invested in, and competitively performed and deployed as a social currency. In a similar vein, identitarian forms of social protest are increasingly recoded as consumptive and private. We witness a pervasive expansion and transformation of property, accompanied by concomitant changes in the self-as-proprietor and the self-as-investor. Newly expanded property constructs and laws extend from rights in potential and future ideas, to rights in cells, organs, and genetic material.
These complicated economic, legal, and social changes are also transforming the very category of culture. As the concept itself comes under scrutiny in the anthropological and literary circles that made it their hallmark for the greater part of the century, culture is now increasingly recoded in proprietary terms. Collectivities and corporations battle over knowledges and practices newly configured as potentially alienable and commodifiable cultural properties. Individuals protect cultural works through the apparatus of patent and copyright. Opponents of a neo-liberal stance often frame their project in terms of claiming collective properties, re-imagining the commons, and reinvigorating the community. But what is the status of commonality and community when culture itself — in Marilyn Strathern’s phrase — has been “enterprized up?” What happens if culture can be both chosen and selected from a seemingly infinite array of patented goods for consumption? What are the consequences when culture is deemed intrinsic to identity and becomes the object of collective property rights?
These processes are transforming not only the world at large, but also the immediate environment of our intellectual activity. Everyday practices of privatization in the academy include the university’s use of market models to guide curricular changes and the privatization of knowledge — from information technologies and copyright restrictions impacting the classroom, to modes of knowing and new categories of the known.These practices are radically transforming the most fundamental relations concerning the conceptions of person, knowledge, and property on which intellectual production has long rested. The consequences of such transformations have yet to be fully anticipated and explored.
The proposed project identifies three rubrics within which to focus its analysis of how privatization and the related reconfiguration of the social imaginary pose a challenge for contemporary debates in critical theory:
property
citizenship and personhood
the posthumanChallenges to Property
Liberal nation-states in the post-War era claimed to serve the public good through social services and economic redistribution, with the promise of full “social” as well as political citizenship for all. Today, deregulated markets and international trade and finance, together with the increasing importance of international organizations, have produced a world in which such promises are explicitly disavowed, even as an ideal. But if the welfare state is dying, the interventionist ways of the nation-state are alive and well. States today subsidize and enforce markets through tax policies, enterprise zones, interest rates and central banking, as well as through property regimes and the promise of violence should they be breached. At the inter-governmental level, states attempt to harmonize their protocols both for the use of force to guarantee property, and for the construction of proprietary entities. Labor emerges as the only commodity that does not enjoy freedom of movement.
We are thus witnessing less the decline of state regulation than the expansion of the domain of property itself. The state gives over some of its traditional functions to private enterprise and to the voluntary sector, resulting in increased competition that also means increased risk. New property regimes demand new forms of securitization, resulting in the creation of fungible, negotiable proprietary interests in any thing or entity. Financial entities tie property so closely to risk that it threatens to collapse into risk itself. We witness the emergence of actuarial properties, persons rendered as risk-profiles, contracts specifying corporate relationships to “potential” properties. What are the implications for critical theory of a change in the very meaning of property? What new theories of capitalism, labor, and value are called for in response to such reconfigurations? How can critical theory recognize, and provide insight into, both the new forms of oppression or exploitation as well as the new possibilities for liberation and resistance that such transformations may open up?
Critical theorists have successfully demonstrated the bankruptcy of narratives of linear development and progress. But we have not yet thought through the consequences of this bankruptcy for the production of knowledge and for the logic and justification of our own knowledge practices. Critical theory traditionally saw itself in opposition to nationalism and liberalism alike. But how can critical theory remain “critical” at a time when the fundamental principles of liberalism are themselves being called into question, less by theoretical critique than by socio-economic transformation?
Today, even the knowledge produced in the university is being privatized. In the absence of an over-arching state commitment to social citizenship, and in a property regime that restricts dissemination and use of knowledge, what becomes of the traditional function of the university, and its project of imparting “universal” knowledge to the citizens of the nation? If we reject both the liberal assertion of knowledge as universal enlightenment and the “privatized” notion of knowledge as a commodity for sale in the market, then how do we understand the place and efficacy of our own knowledge production? And how can we re-imagine the university in a way that enables a critique of the logic of privatization without reaffirming notions of liberal enlightenment or an unsituated, universal knowledge?Citizenship and Personhood
In classical liberalism, the private sphere entailed the domain of home, religion, family, personal relationships and affiliations through which individuals created and realized themselves. It was also the domain where individuals came to know their interests — personal, and economic — and to go about fulfilling them. The public existed above and between various “private spheres,” providing a space in which everyone was supposedly allowed to pursue his or her private interests and affiliations without threat of force or fraud. How are private and public being rerouted and redefined in the present? How are new proprietarian logics challenging the vision of personhood at the heart of liberal conceptions of the public (the world of the citizen, equal to all others) and the private (the world of the individual, unique among all others)?
In much of the world today, social citizenship is no longer a central goal of the state. In rolling back the contract between state, capital, and labor, abandoning social welfare policies to private and voluntary enterprises, and replacing social citizenship with consumer citizenship, the state seems uninterested in its traditional civic obligations. Who “belongs” in a world of consumer citizenship where one participates in the nation by virtue of one’s investment in the national productive-consumptive product? What are the boundaries of rights and obligations, given the extensive commodification of citizen identity? And, what are the limits of protest, given the commodification of dissent and the sale of a politics of lifestyle choice or gut-level preference?
In addition to a change in relation between citizen and state, the expansion of privatization brings in its wake new exclusions within and between states. Suprastate organizations like the WTO, MAI and GATT reconfigure sovereignty and political liberalism even as strong states dictate foreign policy through the language and mechanisms of the “market.” Working less in terms of “national interests” than in terms of free market-principles, states have not so much abandoned their powers as transformed the field in which they operate. Privatization thus has a direct effect on concepts and practices of “security” both within and between states. In much of the world, public police are increasingly supplanted by private security corporations; public prisons by corrections management facilities; and state armies by private mercenary forces. The privatization of security means both new forms of “war” and new forms of “peace.” It thus gives new meaning to the “rule of law,” dismembering liberalism’s promise of rules of law over rules of men, of public over private interest. How can critical theory address these challenges to citizenship without falling into nostalgia for the citizen-subject of liberalism, the rule of law as guarantor of rights and freedoms, and modern notions of belonging and identity that continue to animate conflict and community?The Posthuman
What futures hold for the category of the human when the self-as-proprietor explodes into a dispersed network of corporate interests? Whither social protest when the privatization of identity recodes interests as fungible preferences? How can critical theory map this post-humanist, or as some prefer to call it, posthuman landscape? How can we provide a theoretical grip on the new subjects and objects of a hyper-commodified world? Can we find theoretical means or grounds for a critique of the privatized human body that does not fall back into a humanist nostalgia?
Across disciplines and theoretical orientations, the very boundaries of the human are in the process of being redefined. The challenges to personhood have vast implications and ramifications beyond the material, political, economic, social and cultural spheres. They affect the social and cultural imaginary, the psychosocial formation of persons or subjects, as well as possible philosophical, ethical and epistemological conceptions of the subject, of personhood, and of agency more generally. A wide range of recent theories on the posthuman and the posthuman body (Deleuze/Guattari, Halberstam/ Livingston, Squier, Hayles, Haraway) as well as the inhuman (Lyotard) have been engaged in theorizing, analyzing, and conceptualizing these profound changes in the status of personhood. A whole body of current theoretical work on the politics of reproduction is equally concerned with issues of privatization and related challenges to property and personhood. Reproductive politics, one of the most controversial and hotly debated issues in critical theory today, concerns sexual and gender politics, bioethics, communal politics, subject constitution, human and civil rights, as well as modes of information characteristic of a technological media culture.
Many current debates, ranging from genetic engineering and the Human Genome project to the “sustainability” of our planet, focus on the relationship between property, privatization and reproduction. Current changes in the politics of reproduction challenge fundamental theoretical concepts across disciplines and force us to rethink the relationships among, and the erosion of boundaries of, traditional categories such as nature and culture, the subject, the human, civil rights, property, the body, etc. Moreover, economic reproduction is itself linked to the “politics of reproduction” more generally, particularly in light of the reconfiguration of the human body to serve industrial production and of its submission to a regime of discipline and punishment. As Susan Squier argues in Reproducing the Posthuman Body, discourses about reproduction and reproductive representations “help to consolidate the global power of multinational late capitalism,” defining and distributing difference “within and across a variety of temporally and geographically overlapping power grids,” including civil society, institutional science, medicine and industrial capitalism (p. 115f.).
Finally, the changing relationship between the public and the private, and the challenges posed by privatization and new property constructs, similarly determine the politics of cultural reproduction, pertaining to the renegotiation— if not obliteration—of the boundaries between nature and culture, human and nonhuman, inhuman or posthuman. According to Halberstam and Livingston, “the posthuman does not necessitate the obsolescence of the human; it does not represent an evolution or devolution of the human. Rather it participates in re-distributions of difference and identity” (10). Such profound redefinitions of personhood, and of the boundaries of the human more generally, pertain to global culture and global flows of capital, information, discourses, and bodies. In the social imaginary, they engender a particular “postmodern gothic,” a “gothicization of the body” (Halberstam/Livingston) afloat with phantasms of the “body without organs” (Deleuze/Guattari; Beckett) or even of the “grotesque clone" (Baudrillard). If this posthuman body is, as Halberstam and Livingston argue, only the “seismograph and epicenter” of epistemic changes, the concomitant revaluation of cultural values affects all politics, transcoding the spheres of economy, technology, law, biology, culture, and psychology. Theories that trace the effects of globalization in the cultural imaginary—such as those of Appadurai, Jameson, Deleuze and Guattari, Haraway, among others—prepare the futures of theoretical models that make such transcodings part of their basic presuppositions.
Such transformations are, of course, often partial and even contradictory. Even while the very categories of the human, the subject, and personhood are under revision, the “human” is enjoying a remarkable renaissance in global discursive fields centered on “human rights.” Human rights are precisely not a universal standard applied irrespective of place, not a bulwark against the processes of privatization or the reconfiguration of personhood. On the contrary, the very notion of human rights circulates within the circuits of governmentality structuring and structured by a privatized, neoliberal global economy. For example, the World Bank and IMF attach “human rights conditionality” to countries receiving “assistance” in “structural adjustment.” Human rights become a device of governmentality and commodification when deployed as an index of “liberalization” (of markets) and “democratization” (of non-Western political orders). Thus, discourses of the human, human rights and humanitarianism need to be critically explored under these changed conditions.
The trends and developments outlined herein should make it clear that the anticipated futures of property and personhood fundamentally affect the most central parameters of the debates in critical theory as they have developed in the past decades. They, in fact, reach far beyond the now familiar critique of the categories and values of the tradition of humanism and enlightenment. The gradual refashioning of fundamental theoretical concepts and binaries such as nature/culture, body/mind, self/other, human/inhuman, life/death, man/woman, subject/object has begun to converge in a pervasive epistemological change. At stake is nothing less than the sustainability of theoretical concepts in a global ecology in which transcoded social, cultural, economic, political, somatic and psychic energies and flows have transcended even the familiar signatures of the postmodern.
Works Cited:
Posthumann Bodies. Eds. Judith Halberstam and Ira Livingston. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1995.
Squier, Susan Merrill. Babies in Bottles: Twentieth Century Visions of Reproductive Technology. New Brunswick: Rutgers UP, 1994.Research Project: "The Forces of Globalization" (1995-1998)
- "In the Fall of 1995, the Critical Theory Institute at the University of California, Irvine begins a new three-year project devoted to the general topic of "globalization" and a critical analysis of just what forces constitute "globalization" as the term and its related concepts are used today. Like other idioms of the intellectual community, such as "culture" in our previous research project ("'Culture' and the Problem of the Disciplines," CTI Project, 1992-1995), "globalization" is used with great frequency to describe complex processes and yet these uses are often uncritical of their ideological and methodological assumptions. In the tradition of our previous projects, we intend to read critically the multiple assumptions behind the term, in order better to theorize the range of meanings associated with "globalization" today.
- We understand "globalization" in terms of communications' models, which we terms "networks" to distinguish these signifying practices from those governed by more narrowly conceived linguistic and semiotic models, which were developed before the advent of the technologies partially responsible for the new globalization. One of the subtexts of this project is an investigation of similarities and differences between "modern internationalism" and "postmodern globalization." By the same token, the "networks" we hope to analyze are not utterly distinct from the older semiotic models; each network suggests a coherent discursive community, not unlike the unified field model of some semiotic systems, that transcends specific national and regional boundaries. Implicit in many of these new discursive communities are new theories of social organization that follow from the communications' protocols of these networks. In many cases, these social organizations include reconceptualizations of traditional categories of social division and identification, such as race, ethnicity, class, gender, and sexual identity.
- Although the four networks of globalization we propose to study critically are intended to provide an approximate mapping or topography of the new transnational terrain, they are not indended to constitute the total scheme of cultural expressions and social behaviors in what some have termed the "new global order." Just what this expression means cannot be answered even by a manifold project such as this one, but will in large part be determined by historical events. Academic research projects like this one should not attempt to predict or anticipate those events; instead, such research can read critically what is already operative within the several different networks of transnational practice.
- During our planning year, 1994-1995, we have analyzed the forces of globalization into four dominant networks, each of which is immediately recognizable by a term or concept used today as one conventional sign for the new "global" situation. These networks are:
- These networks of globalization intersect in many crucial ways, and we have analyzed their respective predicates in approximately analogous terms. It should be noted, however, that the analogies between the subdivisions of these different networks do not presume homologies that we expect to "find" in our research. We are merely trying to organize the different areas investigated in ways that will make productive comparisons and contrasts more likely.
- In order to foreground possible overlaps between different global networks and thus articulate better what we mean at this stage by "global forces," we intend to apply three different methodological criteria to each of our four transnational networks. We shall ask to what extent each of these global networks contributes to:decentering or recentering of the customary modes of scientific knowledge; new hierarchies and process of hierarchization, such as class, gender, race, and such formulations as "first," "second," and "third world"; diasporac, nationalism, local, and regionalism as metaphors for new social organizations.
- Transnational corporate networks will be investigated in terms of their control over new forms of world-wide cultural dissemination, language circulation, consumerism, labor organization and finance. The way in which global economic and financial institutions have made national governments obsolete and exercise unchecked powers over peoples' lives of a magnitude unequalled in the past will provide a focus. We will also examine the paradoxes involved in the practices of these economic giants. How have they created hyperorganization on some levels of social and ecological life while producing unprecedented chaos on other levels? How has their supra-national power rendered obsolete traditional notions of social contract while leading to intensified claims of citizenship? How have they destablized traditional boundaries of class, ethnicity, gender, generation, and authority while creating new hierarchies and intensifying the polarizations between haves and have-nots on a world-wide scale? We will explore the contribution that critical theories can make on the one hand to understanding the role of institutions like the World bank and the IMF and on the other hand to the experiences of migrant workers. We will ask what kinds of theories can help us envision the as-yet-undiscovered political and social forms that would redistribute social power away from corporate control into more democratic relations?
- The unstable, contested concept of culture looms large in many of the key debates that seek to define the present moment, both within the academy and outside it. As an analytical concept, "culture" has undergone major transformations in recent years, transformations that may most readily be identified as hybridization, creolization, multiculturalism, transnationalism, globalization. Further, such transformations at the level of the disciplines and media open up new, hitherto unmarked, links with political and social discourses throughout the world.
- In dealing with this problematic we want to differentiate, first of all, two conceptions of culture, one allied to cultural studies and the other to anthropology: on the one hand, a cultural studies (or "aesthetic") approach is oriented primarily to cultural products and expressive forms; on the other, the anthropological understanding of "culture" is directed to the lifeworlds of people, to symbolic and cosmological systems. We are interested in exploring the increasingly important intersections between these two conceptions, and notably the ways in which such intersections are being determined through processes of globalization.
- As we approach the last years of the twentieth century, it is to be expected that many of the struggles over culture and globalization, purity and creolization, will take on new urgency. Practices of taxonomy and dissemination become determining in altogether new ways in areas like pedagogy, work and leisure, art and media, belief and ritual. Our aim is to be attentive both to the symbolic and political dimension of this process and thus to foreground ethical stakes that are implicit in the kinds of transformations we have outlined in the conceptualization of culture.
- Both of the previous areas of investigation depend upon our study of how various technologies have contributed to the globalization of economies and cultures. Of technologies, we are especially interested in communications' technologies, such as e-mail, video, fax, hypertext, internet, satellite, and film. We are especially interested in the ways new technologies have resulted in new modes of commodification, both in terms of "objects of consumption" and the more general "object-relations" through which human subjects in part socially construct themselves. If the "commodity" is, for example, no longer defined primarily through its materiality but rather through its discursive (or semiotic) functionality, then its mobility across national and other territorial borders is likely to be greater. In a related area, the "the image" (lacking a better term at this stage of our project) takes the place of both the humanly constructed "object" and the linguistic "sign." What is the phenomenology of the "image" in a global framework, and to what extent does the "image" function within or beyond the parameters of specificlanguages? In this latter regard, does "image production" depend upon criteria of valuation, such as performative and communicative efficiency, that differ from the criteria governing a "useful" object or "meaningful" statement in language? More complex structures incorporating "images" into narratives, such as "virtual realities," will have to be examined similarly according to their implicit criteria for valuation.
- New forces of globalization suggest variously coordinated transnational efforts in ecological awareness and environmental protection. These same forces suggest, however, technological transformations of "Nature," such as in genetic engineering and the human genome project, that constitute yet another force of globalization: the thorough incorporation or subordination of Nature to social and economic domains. In this conext, we would be particularly interested in studying assumptions of political responses to the globalization of environmental issues, ranging from specific political movements (Earth First!, the Green Party and its international offshoots, various eco-feminisms) to the recent valorization of the local over the international,, as well as just how such neo-regionalismsare configured in terms of a postmodern cosmopolitanism. Certain health issues are also relevant in this network, as they they are in the cultural network (above), especially as epidemics and pandemics (such as AIDS) and environmental crises and disasters (such as damage to the ozone layer) shape transnational policies and thus contribute to what is understood in the phrase, forces of globalization.
Conclusions:
- Insofar as "transnational," "post-national," "global," or other terms designate a research "area," it remains one that is still at its earliest formulation in terms of the diferent disciplines appropriate to its description and analysis. Scholars in the Humanities are particularly in need of research examples and models, because of the frequency with which they use these terms in uncritical or conventional ways. In many discussions among humanists, the idea of "multinational capital," for example, is assumed to have a very specific reference, but in fact merely designates the historian's, literary critic's, or philosopher's vague sense that economic processes are no longer tied to distinct nation-states.
- Our new research project depends crucially on contributions by anthropologists, economists, sociologists, and political scientists, in addition to the scholars in the traditionally defined humanities. The extraordinary interdisciplinarity required to investigate our four global networks will thus be a particular challenge to the scholars involved in this project, both the permanent members of the Critical Theory Institute and those scholars outside Irvine invited to contribute to our research.
- Our research project is, then, one that will encourage inter-disciplinarity across not just the often compatible disciplines of the Humanities but across the often more unbridgeable divisions of the natural and physical sciences, social sciences, and fine arts, and humanities. In our own modest way, we hope to encourage new research that encompasses the complexity of social, national, and transnational formations better than more humanities-specific projects in cultural studies have done to date."
Members:
(1996-1998)Gabriele Schwab -- English & Comparative Literature, Director of the Critical Theory Institute
Lindon Barrett -- English & Comparative Literature
Chungmoo Choi -- East Asian Language & Literature
Rey Chow -- English & Comparative Literature
Jacques Derrida -- French & Italian, Philosophy
Liisa Malkki -- Anthropology
J. Hillis Miller -- English & Comparative Literature
Mark Poster -- History, past Director of Critical Theory Institute
Leslie Rabine -- French & Italian
John Carlos Rowe -- English & Comparative Literature
John Smith -- German
Brook Thomas -- English & Comparative LiteraturePrevious Research Project (1992-1995)
"`Culture' and the Problem of the Disciplines"- "In recent years the question of culture has become a focus of theorizing in several disciplines and intellectural currents. Postmodern theorists disputed the distinction between high and low culture. Anthropological theorists problematize culture as an object of knowledge as well as the position of the ethnographer and the "informant." In literary theory deconstruction and new historicism revise the understanding of culture, raising a general question of the translatability among cultures. Historians open a field of "a new cultural history" to unsettle the treatment of culture in the older social and intellectual histories. Feminism and ethnic studies indicate limitations of theorizing culture in relation to masculine and Eurocentric presuppositions. Finally a newer tendency has emerged called cultural studied which draws upon diverse theories and analytic traditions to address the domain of culture as an autonomous region.
- At the epistemological level, these initiatives raise doubts about the possibility of culture as a discrete object of knowledge, of cultural identity as a stable unity, and of the subject as the basis for aesthetic judgements. The Critical Theory Institute wishes to explore the issue of culture from the many theoretical perspectives that may shed light on it in order, if possible, to bring these various positions of questioning into defined loci of scrutiny, to develop theoretical postures that may clarify the issues at stake, and perhaps to propel them to a new level of understanding.
- One area where collaborative work may be especially productive for a group like ours is that of the institutional framework of our own profession. Thus a focus on the culture of academia will enable us to examine assumptions underlying our professional-institutional practices (e.g., of criticism, of pedagogy) and to initiate specific investigations such as the following: the rationale of the disciplines; the life-span and the mutation of theoretical schools or movements in academic principles; the interdependence and antagonisms in the relation of cultural criticism to the disciplines. In these examples we would like to focus on the way notions and assumptions about culture interact with disciplinary practices.
- We understand critical theory and the problem of culture as dialectically constituted, not discrete or isolable theoretical practices or entities. Our goal is thus both to explore the role that cultural presuppositions and stated or implicit theories of culture have played in the constitution of various forms of critical theory and also to explore the theoretical presuppositions underpinning the notion of culture in its various historical and disciplinary forms."
(Excerpted from the UCI General Catalog)
What is Cultural Criticism? by Johanna M. Smith
What do you think of when you think of culture? The opera or ballet? A performance of a Mozart symphony at Lincoln Center, or a Rembrandt show at the Metropolitan Museum of Art? Does the phrase "cultural event" conjure up images of young people in jeans and T-Shirts or of people in their sixties dressed formally? Most people hear "culture" and think "High Culture." Consequently, most people, when they first hear of cultural criticism, assume it would be more formal than, well, say, formalism. They suspect it would be "highbrow," in both subject and style.
Nothing could be further from the truth. In one of the goals of cultural criticism is to oppose Culture with a capital C, in other words, that new of culture which always and only equates it with what we sometimes call "high culture." Cultural critics want to make the term culture refer to popular culture as well as to that culture we associate with the so-called classics. Cultural critics are as likely to write about "Star Trek" as they are to analyze James Joyce's Ulysses. They want to break down the boundary between high and low, and to dismantle the hierarchy that the distinction implies. They also want to discover the (often political) reasons why a certain kind of aesthetic product is more valued than others.
A cultural critic writing on a revered classic might concentrate on a movie or even comic strip version. Or she might see it in light of some more common form of reading material (a novel by Jane Austen might be viewed in light of Gothic romances or ladies' conduct manuals), as the reflection of some common cultural myths or concerns (Huckleberry Finn might be shown to reflect and shape American myths about race, concerns about juvenile delinquency), or as an example of how texts move back and forth across the alleged boundary between "low" and "high" culture. A history play by Shakespeare, as one group of cultural critics has pointed out, may have started off as a popular work enjoyed by working people, later become a "highbrow" play enjoyed only by the privileged and educated, and, still later, due to a film version produced during World War II, become popular again--this time because it has been produced and viewed as a patriotic statement about England's greatness during wartime (Humm 6-7). Even as this introduction was being written, cultural critics were analyzing the "cultural work" being done cooperatively by Mel Gibson and Shakespeare in Franco Zeffirelli's recent movie, Hamlet.
In combating old definitions of what constitutes culture, of course, cultural critics sometimes end up combating old definitions of what constitutes the literary canon, that is, the once-agreed-upon honor roll of Great Books. They tend to do so, however, neither by adding books (and movies and television sitcoms) to the old list of texts that every "culturally literate" person should supposedly know, nor by substituting for it some kind of Counterculture Canon. Rather, they tend to combat the canon by critiquing the veryidea of canon. Cultural critics want to get us away from thinking about certain works as the "best" ones produced by a given culture (and therefore as the novels that best represent American culture). They seek to be more descriptive and less evaluative, more interested in relating than rating cultural products and events.
It is not surprising, then, that in an article on "The Need for Cultural Studies," four groundbreaking cultural critics have written that "Cultural Studies should . . . abandon the goal of giving students access to that which represents a culture." Instead, these critics go on to argue, it should show works in reference to other works, economic contexts, or broad social discourses (about childbirth, women's education, rural decay, etc.) within whose contexts the work makes sense. Perhaps most important, critics doing cultural studies should counter the prevalent notion that culture is some wholeness that has already been formed. Culture, rather, is really a set of interactive cultures, alive and growing and changing, and cultural critics should be present- and even future-oriented. Cultural critics should be "resisting intellectuals," and cultural studies should be "an emancipatory project" (Giroux 478-80).
The paragraphs above are peppered with words like oppose, counter, deny, resist, combat, abandon, and emancipatory. What such words suggest--and quite accurately--is that a number of cultural critics view themselves in political, even oppositional, terms. Not only are cultural critics likely to take on the literary canon while offering political readings of popular films, but they are also likely to take on the institution of the university, for that is where the old definitions of culture as High Culture (and as something formed and finished and canonized) have been most vigorously preserved, defended, and reinforced.
Cultural critics have been especially critical of the departmental structure of universities, for that structure, perhaps more than anything else, has kept the study of the "arts" more or less distinct from the study of history, not to mention from the study of such things as television, film, advertising, journalism, popular photography, folklore, current affairs, shoptalk, and gossip. By doing so, the departmental structure of universities has reasserted the high/low culture distinction, implying that all the latter subjects are best left to historians, sociologists, anthropologists, linguists, and communication theorists. But such a suggestion, cultural critics would argue, keeps us from seeing the aesthetics of an advertisement as well as the propagandistic elements of a work of literature. For these reasons, cultural critics have mixed and matched the most revealing analytical procedures developed in a variety of disciplines, unabashedly jettisoning the rest. For these reasons, too, they have formed--and encouraged other scholars to form—networks other than and outside of those enforced departmentally.
Some initially loose interdisciplinary networks have, over time, solidified to become Cultural Studies programs and majors, complete with courses on comics and surveys of soaps. As this has happened, a significant if subtle danger has arisen. Cultural critics, Richard Johnson has warned, must strive diligently to keep cultural studies from becoming a discipline unto itself--one in which students encounter cartoons as a canon and belief in the importance of such popular forms as an "orthodoxy" (39). The only principles that critics doing cultural studies can doctrinally espouse, Johnson suggests, are the two that have thus far been introduced: namely, the principle that "culture" has been an "inegalitarian" concept, a "tool" of "condescension," and the belief that a new, "interdisciplinary (and sometimes antidisciplinary)" approach to true culture (that is, to the forms in which culture actually lives now) is required now that history and art and media are so complex and interrelated (42).
Johnson, ironically, played a major part in the institutionalization of cultural studies. Together with Stuart Hall and Richard Hoggart, he developed the Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies, founded by Hoggart and Hall at Birmingham University, in England, in 1964. The fact that the Centre was founded in the mid-1960s is hardly surprising; cultural criticism, based as it is on a critique of elitist definitions of culture, spoke powerfully to and gained great energy and support from a decade of student unrest and revolt. The fact that the first center for cultural studies was founded in England, in Europe, is equally unsurprising. Although the United States has probably contributed more than any other nation to the media through which culture currently lives, critics in Europe, drawing upon the ideas of both Marxist and non-Marxist theorists, first articulated the need for something like what we now call cultural criticism or cultural studies. Indeed, to this day, European critics are more involved than Americans, not only in the analysis of popular cultural forms and products but also in the analysis of human subjectivity or consciousness as a form or product of culture. ("Subjectivities," Johnson argues, are "produced, not given, and are . . . objects of inquiry" inevitably related to "social practices," whether those involve factory rules, supermarket behavior patterns, reading habits, advertisements watched, myths perpetrated, or languages and other signs to which people are exposed [11 15].)
Among the early continental critics now seen as forerunners of present-day cultural critics were those belonging to the Annales school, so-called because of the name of the journal that Marc Bloch and Lucien Febvre launched, in France, in 1929: Annales: Economies, Societes, Civilizations. The Annales school critics greatly influenced later thinkers like Michel Foucault, who, in turn, influenced other Annales thinkers such as Roger Chartier, Jacques Ravel, Francois Furet, and Robert Darnton. Both firstand second-generation Annales school critics warn against the development of "topics" of study by cultural critics--unless those same critics are bent on "developing . . . [a] sense of cohesion or interaction between topics" (Hunt 9). At the same time, interested as they are in cohesion, Annales school critics have warned against seeing the "rituals and other forms of symbolic action" as "express[ing] a central, coherent, communal meaning." They have reminded us that texts affect different readers "in varying and individual ways" (Hunt 13-14).
Michel Foucault is another strong, continental influence on present--day cultural criticism--and perhaps the strongest influence on American cultural criticism and the so-called new historicism, an interdisciplinary form of historical criticism whose evolution has often paralleled that of cultural criticism. Influenced by early Annales critics and contemporary Marxists (but neither an Annales critic nor a Marxist himself), Foucault sought to study cultures in terms of power relationships. Unlike Marxists and someAnnales school critics, he refused to see power as something exercised by a dominant over a subservient class. Indeed, he emphasized that power is not just repressivepower: a tool of conspiracy by one individual or institution against another. Power, rather, is a whole complex of forces; it is that which produces what happens.
Thus even a tyrannical aristocrat does not simply wield power, for he is empowered by "discourses"—accepted ways of thinking, writing, and speaking--and practices that amount to power. Foucault tried to view all things, from punishment to sexuality, in terms of the widest possible variety of discourses. As a result, he traced the "genealogy" of topics he studied through texts that more traditional historians and literary critics would have overlooked, looking at (in Lynn Hunt's words) "memoirs of deviants, diaries, political treatises, architectural blueprints, court records, doctors' reports--applying consistent principles of analysis in search of moments of reversal in discourse, in search of events as loci of the conflict where social practices were transformed" (Hunt 39). Foucault tended not only to build interdisciplinary bridges but also, in the process, to bring into the study of culture the "histories of women, homosexuals, and minorities"—groups seldom studied by those interested in culture with a capital C (Hunt 45).
Of the British influences on cultural studies and criticism as it is today, several have already been mentioned. Of those who have not, two early forerunners stand out. One of these, the Marxist critic E. P. Thompson, revolutionized study of the industrial revolution by writing about its impact on human attitudes, even consciousness. He showed how a shared cultural view, specifically that of what constitutes a fair or just price, influenced crowd behavior and caused such things as the food riots and rick burnings of the nineteenth century. The other, even greater, early British influence on contemporary cultural criticism and cultural studies was the late Raymond Williams. In works like The Long Revolution and Culture and Society: 1780-1950, Williams demonstrated that culture is not a fixed and finished but, rather a living and changing; thing. One of the changes he called for was the development of a common socialist culture.
Like Marxists, with whom he often both argued and sympathized, Williams viewed culture in relation to ideologies, what he termed the "residual," "dominant," or "emerging" ways of viewing the world held by classes or individuals holding power in a given social group. But unlike Thompson and Richard Hoggart, he avoided emphasizing social classes and class conflict in discussing those forces most powerfully shaping and changing culture. And, unlike certain continental Marxists, he could never see the cultural "superstructure" as being a more or less simple "reflection" of the economic "base." Williams's tendency was to focus on people as people, on how they experience conditions they find themselves in and creatively respond to those conditions in their social practices. A believer in the resiliency of the individual, he produced a body of criticism notable for what Hall has called its "humanism" (63).
As is clear from the paragraphs above, the emergence and evolution of cultural studies or criticism are difficult to separate entirely from the development of Marxist thought. Marxism is, in a sense, the background to the background of most cultural criticism, and some contemporary cultural critics consider themselves Marxist critics as well. Thus, although Marxist criticism and its most significant practitioners are introduced elsewhere in this volume, some mention of Marxist ideas— and of the critics who developed them--is also necessary here. Of particular importance to the evolution of cultural criticism are the works of Walter Benjamin, Antonio Gramsci, Louis Althusser, and Mikhail Bakhtin.
Bakhtin was a Russian, later a Soviet, critic so original in his thinking and wide-ranging in his influence that some would say he was never a Marxist at all. He viewed language--especially literary texts--in terms of discourses and dialogues between discourses. Within a novel written in a society in flux, for instance, the narrative may include an official, legitimate discourse, plus another infiltrated by challenging comments and even retorts. In a 1929 book on Dostoyevsky and a 1940 study Rabelais and His World, Bakhtin examined what he calls "polyphonic" novels, each characterized by a multiplicity of voices or discourses. In Dostoyevsky the independent status of a given character is marked by the difference of his or her language from that of the narrator. (The narrator's voice, too, can in fact be a dialogue.) In works by Rabelais, Bakhtin finds that the (profane) language of the carnival and of other popular festivities play against and parody the more official discourses, that is, of the magistrates or the Church. Bakhtin influenced modern cultural criticism by showing, in a sense, that the conflict between "high" and "low" culture takes place not only between classic and popular texts but also between the "dialogic" voices that exist within all great books.
Walter Benjamin was a German Marxist who, during roughly the same period, attacked certain conventional and traditional literary forms that he felt conveyed a stultifying "aura" of culture. He took this position in part because so many previous Marxist critics and, in his own day, Georg Lukacs, had seemed to be stuck on appreciating nineteenth-century realistic novels-and opposed to the modernist works of their own time. Benjamin not only praised modernist movements, such as Dadaism, but also saw as hopeful the development of new art forms utilizing mechanical production and reproduction. These forms, including radio and films, offered the promise of a new definition of culture via a broader, less exclusive domain of the arts.
Antonio Gramsci, an Italian Marxist best known for his Prison Notebooks (first published as Lettere dal caracere in 1947), critiqued the very concept of literature and, beyond that, of culture in the old sense, stressing not only the importance of culture more broadly defined but the need for nurturing and developing proletarian, or working-class, culture. He suggested the need to view intellectuals politically--and the need for what he called "radical organic" intellectuals. Today's cultural critics calling for colleagues to "legitimate the notion of writing reviews and books for the general public," to "become involved in the political reading of popular culture," and, in general, to "repoliticize . . . scholarship" have often cited Gramsci as an early advocate of their views (Giroux 482).
Finally, and most important, Gramsci related literature to the ideologies of the culture that produced it and developed the concept of "hegemony," a term he used to describe the pervasive, weblike system of meanings and values--ideologies--that shapes the way things look, what they mean and, therefore, what reality is for the majority of people within a culture. Gramsci did not see people, even poor people, as the helpless victims of hegemony, as ideology's idiotic robots. Rather, he believed that people have the freedom and power to struggle against ideology, to alter hegemony. As Patrick Brantlinger has suggested in Crusoe's Footprints: Cultural Studies in Britain and America(1990), Gramsci's thought is unspoiled by the "intellectual arrogance that views the vast majority of people as deluded zombies, the victims or creatures of ideology" (100).
Of those Marxists who, after Gramsci, explored the complex relationship between literature and ideology, the French Marxist Louis Althusser also had a significant impact on cultural criticism. Unlike Gramsci, Althusser tended to see ideology in control of people, and not vice versa. He argued that the main function of ideology is to reproduce the society's existing relations of production, and that that function is even carried out in most literary texts, although literature is relatively autonomous from other "social formations." Dave Laing has explained Althusser's position by saying that the "ensemble of habits, moralities, and opinions" that can be found in any work of literature tend to "ensure that the work-force (and those responsible for re-producing them in the family, school, etc.) are maintained in their position of subordination to the dominant class" (91).
In many ways, though, Althusser is as good an example of where Marxism and cultural criticism part ways as he is of where cultural criticism is indebted to Marxists and their ideas. For although Althusser did argue that literature is relatively autonomous--more independent of ideology than, say, Church, press, or State--he meant by literature not just literature in the narrow sense but something even narrower. He meant Good Literature, certainly not the popular forms that present-day cultural critics would want to set beside Tolstoy and Joyce, Eliot and Brecht. Those popular fictions, Althusser assumed, were mere packhorses designed (however unconsciously) to carry the baggage of a culture's ideology, mere brood mares destined to reproduce it.
Thus, while cultural critics have embraced both Althusser's notion that works of literature reflect certain ideological formations and his notion that, at the same time, literary works may be relatively distant from or even resistant to ideology, they have rejected the narrow limits within which Althusser and other Marxists have defined literature. In "Marxism and Popular Fiction" (1986), Tony Bennett uses "Monty Python's Flying Circus" and another British television show, "Not the 9 o'clock News," to argue that the Althusserian notion that all forms of popular culture are to be included "among [all those] many material forms which ideology takes . . . under capitalism" is "simply not true." The "entire field" of "popular fiction"—which Bennett takes to include films and television shows as well as books--is said to be "replete with instances" of works that do what Bennett calls the "work" of "distancing." That is, they have the effect of separating the audience from, not rebinding the audience to, prevailing ideologies (249).
Although there are Marxist cultural critics (Bennett himself is one, carrying on through his writings what may be described as a lover's quarrel with Marxism), most cultural critics are not Marxists in any strict sense. Anne Beezer, in writing about such things as advertisements and women's magazines, contests the "Althusserian view of ideology as the construction of the subject" (qtd. in Punter 103). That is to say, she gives both the media she is concerned with and their audiences more credit than Althusserian Marxists presumably would. Whereas they might argue that such media make people what they are, she points out that the same magazines that may, admittedly, tell women how to please their men may, at the same time, offer liberating advice to women about how to preserve their independence by not getting too serious romantically. And, she suggests, many advertisements advertise their status as ads, just as many people who view or read them see advertising as advertising and interpret it accordingly.
The complex and subtle sort of analysis that Beezer has brought to bear on women's magazines and advertisements has been focused on paperback romance novels by Tania Modleski and Janice Radway, in Loving with a Vengeance (1982) and Reading the Romance (1984), respectively. Radway, a feminist cultural critic who uses but finally exceeds Marxist critical discourse, points out that many women who read romances do so in order to carve out a time and space that is wholly their own, not to be intruded upon by their husband or children. Also, Radway argues, such novels may end in marriage, but the marriage is usually between a feisty and independent heroine and a powerful man she has "tamed," that is, made sensitive and caring. And why do so many such stories involve such heroines and end as they do? Because, Radway demonstrates through painstaking research into publishing houses, bookstores, and reading communities, their consumers want them to be that way. They don't buy--or, if they buy they don't recommend--romances in which, for example, a heroine is raped: thus, in time, fewer and fewer such plots find their way onto the racks by the supermarket checkout.
Radway's reading is typical of feminist cultural criticism in that it is political--but not exclusively about oppression. The subjectivities of women may be "produced" by romances--that is, their thinking is governed by what they read--but the same women also govern, to some extent, what gets written or produced, thus doing "cultural work" of their own. Rather than seeing all forms of popular culture as manifestations of ideology, soon to be remanifested in the minds of victimized audiences, non-Marxist cultural critics tend to see a sometimes disheartening but always dynamic synergy between cultural forms and the culture's consumers.
Mary Poovey does this in The Proper Lady and the Woman Writer (1984), a book in which she traces the evolution of female "propriety." Poovey closely connects the proprieties taught by eighteenth-century women who wrote conduct manuals, ladies' magazines, and even novels with patriarchal notions of women and men's property (Since property was inherited, an unfaithful woman could threaten the disposition of a man's inheritance by giving birth to children who were not his. Therefore, writings by women that reinforced proprieties also shored up the proprietary status quo.) Finally, though, Poovey also shows that some of the women writers who reinforced proprieties and were seen as "textbook Proper Ladies" in fact "crossed the borders of that limited domain" (40). They may have written stories showing the audacity, for women, of trying to lead an imaginative, let alone audacious, life beyond the bounds of domestic propriety. But they did so imaginatively and audaciously.
Whereas Mary Poovey, in The Proper Lady and the Woman Writer, viewed Frankenstein in terms of its relation to conduct manuals and novels by Jane Austen, most cultural critics who have written about Mary Shelley's best-known novel have instead read it in the context of a very different popular form: the Gothic tale. Paul O'Flinn, for instance, begins his essay on "Production and Reproduction: The Case of Frankenstein" by pointing out that the novel was published in the same year as a famous attack on the fifty-year-old tradition of Gothic fiction.
In the essay that follows, Lee E. Heller begins by treating Frankenstein as Gothic fiction and by suggesting that the interesting thing about Gothic is its "existence in both 'highbrow' and popular forms." What is true of Gothic in general, Heller goes on to argue, is especially true of Frankenstein, which in its book and movie versions has cut a wide swath of audience appeal through boundaries that usually prove impenetrable. Although it remains a classic, Frankenstein is also, quite dearly, a fit subject for the new cultural criticism.
Heller next places the Frankenstein "original" in the cultural contexts of a late-eighteenth-century debate about education and literacy. This was a period during which the "reading class" had grown to include most of the middle class, a fact that at once had allowed the novel to emerge (as a form, it is more dedicated to representing ordinary life than is poetry) and which, at the same time, had set off a somewhat moralistic debate about what constitutes proper entertainment for readers in need of instruction. That debate had been intensified by the advent of Gothic fiction, the audience for which tended to be more female than male and less prosperous than the audiences of, say, Fielding and Smollett. Should such an audience be reading a kind of writing that seemed only to excite the emotions needlessly and not to instruct? Perhaps because many people were answering that question in the negative, the Gothic evolved to combine the moral elements of the "serious" eighteenth-century novel with the entertaining, escapist excitement that it had come to be known for.
Heller's interest in audience--and in the novel as a consumer product -is as typical for a critic practicing cultural criticism as is her interest in a text that defies the boundaries between "Literature" and popular fiction. So, of course, is her concern with the "cultural work" (Jane Tompkins's phrase) done by a given form in a given historical moment. What makes Heller's version of the new cultural criticism particularly complex and exciting is that she identifies within a given literary form (here Gothic) three distinguishableforms of that form (horror Gothic, sentimental-educational Gothic, and "high" philosophical Gothic), each of which is then shown to have been doing a different kind of cultural work for a different class or kind of audience--but all within the same text.
Thus, she explains Frankenstein's ability to persist in popularity over the centuries, among a range of socioeconomic classes and via a variety of forms, by showing it to be a hybrid form, a variegated thread twisted together of sensational, middle-class sentimental, and philosophical strands. In the process, she provides a strikingly original reading, one that shows not only how a cultural debate lies behind a text but also how it is foregrounded within the text. For she shows that Frankenstein is as much about good and bad education, salutary books, and (Cornelius Agrippa's) corrupting, "sad trash," as it is about ghouls and their horrifying acts.
Finally, though, Heller's work represents cultural criticism at its best by virtue of the fact that it sets the text in its later historical periods, including our own. Through her essay, we can see the radical metamorphosis of its meaning and function in subsequent film versions (from the 1931 classic through the crop of "Freddie" and "Jason" movies); the changing ways in which we have used the word Frankenstein to speak of historical figures and atrocities (from Adolf Hitler to the atom bomb to the monstrous "wildings" that have been committed in Central Park). Thus, Heller makes Frankenstein speak in a way that critics taking other approaches to the novel can only hope to make it speak, for she shows all Frankensteins to be versions of Frankenstein and shows how the current version speaks now.
CULTURAL CRITICISM: A SELECTED BIBLIOGRAPHY
General Introductions to Cultural Criticism, Cultural Studies
Brantlinger, Patrick. Crusoe's Footprints: Cultural Studies in Britain and America. New York: Routledge, 1990.Desan, Philippe, Priscilla Parkhurst Ferguson, and Wendy Griswold. "Editors' Introduction: Mirrors, Frames, and Demons: Reflections on the Sociology of Literature."Literature and Social Practice. Ed. Desan, Ferguson, and Griswold. Chicago: U of Chicago P. 1989. 1-10.
Eagleton, Terry. "Two Approaches in the Sociology of Literature." Critical Inquiry 14 (1988): 469-76.
Giroux, Henry, David Shumway, Paul Smith, and James Sosnoski. "The Need for Cultural Studies: Resisting Intellectuals and Oppositional Public Spheres." Dalhousie R eview 64.2 (1984): 472-86.
Gunn, Giles. The Culture of Criticism and the Criticism of Culture. New York: Oxford, 1987.
Hall, Stuart. "Cultural Studies: Two Paradigms." Media, Culture and Society 2 (1980): 57-72.
Humm, Peter, Paul Stigant, and Peter Widdowson, eds.Popular Fictions: Essays in Literature and History. New York: Methuen, 1986. See especially the intro. by Humm, Stigant, and Widdowson, and Tony Bennett's essay "Marxism and Popular Fiction." 237-65.
Hunt, Lynn, ed. The New Cultural History: Essays. Berkeley: U of California P. 1989.
Johnson, Richard. "What Is Cultural Studies Anyway?" Social Text: Theory/Culture/Ideology 16 (1986-87): 38-80.
Pfister, Joel. "The Americanization of Cultural Studies." Yale Journal of Criticism 4 (1991): 199-229.
Punter, David, ed. Introduction to Contemporary Critical Studies. New York: Longman, 1986. See especially Punter's "Introduction: Culture and Change" 1-18, Tony Dunn's "The Evolution of Cultural Studies" 71-91, and the essay "Methods for Cultural Studies Students" by Anne Beezer, Jean Grimshaw, and Martin Barker 95-118.
Cultural Studies: Some Early British Examples
Hoggart, Richard. Speaking to Each Other. 2 vols. London: Chatto, 1970.
--. The Uses of Literacy: Changing Patterns in English Mass Culture. Boston: Beacon, 1961.
Thompson, E. P. The Making of the English Working Class. New York: Pantheon, 1977.
-- . William Morris: Romantic to Revolutionary. New York: Pantheon, 1977.
Williams, Raymond. Culture and Society, 1780-1950. New York: Harper, 1958.
--. The Long Revolution. New York: Columbia UP, 1961.
Cultural Studies: Continental and Marxist Influences
Althusser, Louis. For Marx. Trans. Ben Brewster. New York: Pantheon, 1969.Althusser, Louis, and Etienne Balibar. Reading Capital. Trans. Ben Brewster. New York: Pantheon, 1971.
Bakhtin, Mikhail. The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays. Ed. Michael Holquist. Trans. Caryl Emerson. Austin: U of Texas P. 1981.
--. Rabelais and His World. Cambridge: MIT, 1968.
Benjamin, Walter. Illuminations. Ed. with intro. by Hannah Arendt. Trans. H. Zohn. New York: Harcourt, 1968.
Bennett, Tony. "Marxism and Popular Fiction." Humm, Stigant, and Widdowson.
Foucault, Michel. Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison. Trans. Alan Sheridan. New York: Pantheon, 1978.
--. The History of Sexuality, Vol. 1. Trans. Robert Hurley. New York: Pantheon, 1978.
Gramsci, Antonio. Selections from the Prison Notebooks. Ed. Quintin Hoare and Geoffrey Nowell Smith. New York: International, 1971.
Modern Cultural Studies: Selected British and American Examples
Colls, Robert, and Philip Dodd, eds. Englishness: Politics and Culture, 1880-1920. London: Croom Helm, 1986.Modleski, Tania. Loving with a Vengeance: Mass-Produced Fantasies for Women. Hamden: Archon, 1982.
Poovey, Mary. Uneven Developments: The Ideological Work of Gender in Mid-Victorian England. Chicago: U of Chicago P. 1988.
Radway, Janice. Reading the Romance: Women, Patriarchy, and Popular Literature. Chapel Hill: U of North Carolina P. 1984.
Cultural Studies of Frankenstein
Baldick, Chris. In Frankenstein's Shadow: Myth, Monstrosity, and Nineteenth-Century Writing. Oxford: Clarendon, 1987.Bewell, Alan. "An Issue of Monstrous Desire: Frankenstein and Obstetrics." Yale Journal of Criticism 2.1 (1988): 105-28.
LaValley, Albert J. "The Stage and Film Children of Frankenstein: A Survey." The Endurance of Frankenstein. Ed. George Levine and U. C. Knoepflmacher. Berkeley: U of California P. 1979. 243-89.
O'Flinn, Paul. "Production and Reproduction: The Case of Frankenstein." Literature and History 9.2 (1983): 194-213.
Poovey, Mary. The Proper Lady and the Woman Writer: Ideology as Style in the Work of Mary Wollstonecraft, Mary Shelley, and Jane Austen. Chicago: U of Chicago P. 1984. See especially ch. 4: "'My Hideous Progeny': The Lady and the Monster."
Rieder, John. "Embracing the Alien: Science Fiction in Mass Culture." Science-Fiction Studies 9.1 (March 1982): 26-37.
Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty. "Three Women's Texts and a Critique of Imperialism." Critical Inquiry 12.1 (1985): 243-61.
Vlasopolos, Anca. "Frankenstein's Hidden Skeleton: The Psycho-Politics of Oppression." Science-Fiction Studies 10.2 (1983): 125-36.
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