The Contemporary and Eccentric Position of ‘The Winnebago Man’

Abstract

Click to increase image sizeClick to decrease image size Notes 1 Winnebago Man < http://www.youtube.com/watch?v = zSWUWPx2VeQ>[13.01.2012]. 2 Winnebago Man: The Angriest Man in the World, dir. Ben Steinbauer (Kino International, 2010). 3 Found footage specialists are a group of enthusiasts who source often homemade VHS material and promote it to cult status via Found Footage festivals, and more recently, via YouTube. 4 See Franco Beradi, ‘Biopolitics and Connective Mutation’, Culture Machine 7 (2005), < http://www.culturemachine.net/index.php/cm/rt/printerFriendly/27/34>[13.01.2012]. 5 Gilles Deleuze, Pure Immanence, trans. Anne Boyman, (New York: Zone, 2001). See also Daniel W. Smith, ‘“A Life of Pure Immanence”: Deleuze's “Critique et Clinique” Project’, in Gilles Deleuze, Essays Critical and Clinical, trans. Daniel W. Smith and Michael A. Greco (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997) pp.xiii–xiv 6 Sigmund Freud ‘Civilization and its Discontents’, in Civilization, Society and Religion, ed. James Strachey, 12 vols (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1993). Marcuse's advancement of the idea that the costs of socialization and civilization were too great are very much in this line; see Herbert Marcuse, Eros and Civilization, 2nd edn (London: Routledge, 1987). 7 This refers to the professional tennis star, John McEnroe, who was well known for his series of spectacular outbursts at what he considered poor line calls during matches. 8 Of the numerous references that could be provided here, Paul Gilroy's reflections on the legacy of the politics of self and other possession in light of the history of slavery provides an important reminder that the idea of being postcolonial (or indeed postmodern) may be premature. See Paul Gilroy, The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1993). In feminism, Irigaray's contribution to understanding the relationship between the feminine and the failure of self-possession in our tradition was paradigm shifting. See, for example, Luce Irigaray, This Sex Which is Not One (New York: Cornell University Press, 1985). There are now numerous special issues of journals devoted to understanding the role played by the figure of the animal as the other of self-mastering man. See, for example, Social Text 29.1 (2011). 9 Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: the Birth of the Prison, trans. Alan Sheridan (New York: Vintage Books, 1979). What Foucault's studies of discipline reveal – and what is self-possession, if not the raison d'etre of discipline? – is the role space plays in operationalizing discipline. 10 Dave Ronalds, ‘Introduction: Losing It’, parallax 63 (this issue), 18.2 (2012), p.1. 11 Agnes Heller, ‘From hermeneutics in social science toward a hermeneutics of social science’, Theory and Event, 18 (1989), p.291. 12 Max Weber, ‘Science as a Vocation’ in From Max Weber, ed. C. Wright-Mills (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1949) 13 See Michel Foucault, ‘What is Enlightenment?’ in The Foucault Reader, ed. Paul Rabinow (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1984). For a counter-argument see Barry Hindess, ‘Been there, done that…’ Postcolonial Studies, 11.2 (2008), pp.65–77. 14 Giorgio Agamben, Nudities, trans. David Kishik and Stefan Pedatella (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2010) p.11. 15 Giorgio Agamben, Nudities, p.11. 16 Giorgio Agamben, Nudities, p.12. 17 Giorgio Agamben, Nudities, p.13. 18 See Giorgio Agamben, Homer Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life, trans. Daniel Heller-Roazen (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1998). 19 Giorgio Agamben, Nudities, p.15. 20 Giorgio Agamben, The Coming Community, trans. Michael Hardt, (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993). 21 Plutarch, Lives: Volume 7 (Demosthenes and Cicero: Alexander and Caesar), trans. Bernadotte Perrin, (Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press, 1914), Section 11. 22 Giorgio Agamben, Nudities, p.15. 23 Giorgio Agamben, Nudities, p.15. 24 Giorgio Agamben, Nudities, p.11. 25 Helmuth Plessner, Laughter and Crying: A Study of the Limits of Human Behaviour, Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press 1971) p. 88. 26 Helmuth Plessner, Laughter and Crying, p.142. 27 For a clear description of Plessner's ‘philosophical anthropology’, see Bernard Prusak, ‘The Science of Laughter: Helmuth Plessner's Laughing and Crying Revisited’, Continental Philosophy Review 38.1–2 (2006), pp.41–69. 28 Michael Billig, Laughter and Ridicule: Towards a Social Critique of Humour (London: Sage Publications, 2005). See also, Michael Billig, ‘Freud and the Language of Humour’, Psychologist, 15.9 (2002), pp. 452–455. 29 Michael Wolf, ‘A Grasshopper Walks into a Bar: The role of humour in normativity’, Journal for the Theory of Social Behaviour, 32:3 (2002) pp. 331–343. 30 Michael Billig, Laughter and Ridicule. 31 Michael Wolf, ‘A Grasshopper Walks into a Bar’. 32 Michael Wolf, ‘A Grasshopper Walks into a Bar’, p.336. 33 Michael Billig, Laughter and Ridicule. 34 Immanuel Kant, Critique of Judgement [1790], trans. Werner S. Pluhar (Indianapolis, IN: Hackett, 1987), §54, p. 203. 35 Michael Billig, Laughter and Ridicule, p.99. 36 Helmuth Plessner, Laughter and Crying, p.142. 37 Bernard Prusak, ‘The Science of Laughter’, p. 43. 38 To suggest that laughter represents the body's response to an incongruous situation is not merely to imply that the fact of our embodiment poses a problem for self-mastery, a point which feminists have convincingly made decades ago. See, for example, Elizabeth Grosz, Volatile Bodies, (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1994). 39 Note that in Helmuth Plessner's Laughter and Crying the latter is a major concern. See p.25. 40 Bernard Prusak, ‘The Science of Laughter’. 41 Bernard Prusak, ‘The Science of Laughter’, p.44. 42 Bernard Prusak, ‘The Science of Laughter’, p.43. 43 Bernard Prusak, ‘The Science of Laughter’, p.43. 44 Helmuth Plessner, Laughter and Crying, p.31. 45 Helmuth Plessner, Laughter and Crying, p.87. 46 Helmuth Plessner, Laughter and Crying, p.88. 47 Friedrich Nietzsche, The Gay Science (With a Prelude in Rhymes and an Appendix of Songs), trans. Walter Kaufmann (New York: Vintage Books, 1974) p.75. 48 Georges Bataille, Inner Experience, trans. Leslie Anne Boldt (Albany: State University of New York, 1988). 49 Helmuth Plessner, Laughter and Crying, p.142. 50 Giorgio Agamben, Nudities, p.44.