Cartesian Subject Research Articles

Picking Up Stones: Design Research and Urban Settlement

Introduction What is relationship of design research to methodology of urban design? This paper analyses methodologies of planning and design, and their assumptions about power and value and place of urban dwellers; it introduces critical framework of French cultural theorist Henri Lefebvre1 and refers to a Cartesian subjectivity taken as definitive of modemity. Secondly, four cases of design research-two concerning UK, Williamson2 and Robbins,3 one from Netherlands, ter Heide and Wijnbelt,4 and one from USA, Loukaitou-Sideris5-are examined. paper asks whether research replicates or challenges assumptions derived from conventional methodologies of disciplines such as urban planning and architectural design. Thirdly, alternative models of urban settlement are noted and alternative possibilities sketched. It is helpful to investigate this today because a majority of human inhabitants of earth will soon dwell in large urban concentrations, many in informal settlements which surround cities of southern hemisphere,6 and because history of Western (white, modern) exhibits an increasing dysfunctionality; its replication throughout world is a form of economic colonialism. Although literature of urbanism has equivalents of war stories for a masculine sensibility,' violence on which they are based is neither a fantasy nor an anomaly in post-war history of urban development, as demonstrated by Marshall Berman' '8 account of road building in New York in 1950s. This institutionalized brutality is more than marginalization of publics by enclaved urban development. It begins in a methodology which splits dwellers' experiences of urban living from conceptualization of the city in minds and graphic representations of planners, architects, and designers-which allows a disparity between representation and reality. While representation may be Utopian, experience can be chaotic. Berman writes of Robert Moses, who as City and Parks Commissioner redefined New York as a network of fast roads, that he seemed to glory in devastation 9 but that he genuinely loved New York. 10 This contradiction requires explanation. Do methodologies of urban planning and architectural design facilitate it? 1 Henri Lefebvre, Production Of Space (Oxford: Blackwell, 1991). 2 C. Williamson, Design in Central Milton Keynes: 25 Years on from Masterplan, Urban Design Intemational 1:4 (December, 1996): 335-356. 3 E. Robbins, Thinking Space/Seeing Space: Thamesmead Revisited, Urban Design Intemational 1:3 (September 1 996): 283-91. 4 H. ter Heide and D. Wijnbelt, To Know and to Make: Link Between Research and Urban Design, Joumal of Urban Design 1:1 (February, 1996): 75-90. 5 A. Loukatia-Sideris, Cracks in City: Addressing Constraints and Potentials of Urban Design, Joumal of Urban Design 1:1 (February, 1996): 91-102. 6 E. Wilson, Sphinx in City (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991), 128; and T. Angotti, Metropolis 200(London: Routledge, 1993), 28; A. Goldberg, The Birds Have Nested: Design Direction for Informal Settlements, Urban Design Intemational 1:1 (March, 1996): 3-15. Also J. Beall, A City forAll(London: Zed Books, 1997), 39. 7 M. Davis, City of Ouartz(London: Verso, 1990); L. Woods, Everyday War in P. Lang, ed., Mortal City(New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 1995), 46-53. 8 M. Berman, All That /s Solid Melts Into Air(London: Verso, 1983). 9 Ibid., 293. 10 Ibid., 307.

The Ticklish Subject: The Absent Centre of Political Ontology, and: The Fragile Absolute, or, Why is the Christian Legacy Worth Fighting For?, and: Contingency, Hegemony, Universality: Contemporary Dialogues on the Left, and: Cosmopolitanism (review)

Reviewed by: The Ticklish Subject: The Absent Centre of Political Ontology, and: The Fragile Absolute or, Why is the Christian legacy worth fighting for?, and: Contingency, Hegemony, Universality: Contemporary Dialogues on the Left, and: Cosmopolitanism Christian Moraru Slavoj Zizek. The Ticklish Subject: The Absent Centre of Political Ontology. London and New York: Verso, 2000. vi + 409 pp.; Slavoj Zizek. The Fragile Absolute or, Why is the Christian legacy worth fighting for?. London and New York: Verso, 182 pp. Judith Butler, Ernesto Laclau and Slavoj Zizek. Contingency, Hegemony, Universality: Contemporary Dialogues on the Left. London and New York: Verso, 2000; Cosmopolitanism. Guest eds., Carol A. Breckenridge, Sheldon Pollock, Homi K. Bhabha, Dipesh Chakrabarty. Public Culture 12..3 (Fall 2000). The Zizek industry is clearly a growth one as the three titles recently put out by Verso show. Two of them, The Ticklish Subject and The Fragile Absolute, came out in Wo Es War, a series edited by Zizek himself. Contingency, Hegemony, Universality, the third one, features several interventions by Zizek and was published in the Phronesis series edited by Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe. All of them are part of a broader project of reinventing politics in the post-Cold War era—or the “global age”—in which, as Laclau and Mouffe acknowledge in the brief description of their series, old categories such as “Left” and “Right” seem, to many, fairly irrelevant. To paraphrase Zizek’s own marxian paraphrase in his “Introduction” to The Ticklish Subject, the specter of this age haunts Zizek and practically everybody else in these books, including, as one would expect, the contributors to Public Culture’s special topic issue, Cosmopolitanism. Regarding the latter, let me mention for now Arjun Appadurai’s essay “Spectral Housing and Urban Cleansing: Notes on Millennial Mumbai” (627–651). For, it seems to me, the critic gives us here, as he has in Modernity at Large, a balanced account of globalization as driven by capital but also by cultural “particularities” that take advantage of capital flows. In other words, one thing that I admire in [End Page 205] Appadurai’s contribution—as well as in Mignolo’s “The Many Faces of Cosmopolis: Border Thinking and Critical Cosmopolitanism”—is the effort to read the global, an essentially ambiguous, multifaceted phenomenon. Unlike Appadurai and despite the intricate argument developed throughout hundreds of dense pages, Zizek seems to already know what globalization is all about. This prescience is not truly surprising given the predictable paradigm within which he operates—a paradigm of predictability, too, in that, chances are, his mix of Lacanian and marxist analysis “uncovers” invariably the logic of Capital. The issues Zizek raises, though, are certainly pressing. I think he risks “misreading” them (unavoidably, perhaps? does he “know what he is doing”?) as to “identify” all over the place the long hand of Capital—an obsessing, absolute Signifier and Signified collapsed into both phenomenon and meaning thereof simultaneously. But he does a good job of underscoring the global urgency of the problems he brings to the fore. The Ticklish Subject’s objective, for instance, anachronistic as it may sound—“[t]his book thus endeavours to reassert the Cartesian subject” (2)—provides an opportunity to take not only on Hegel and Heidegger but also on Badiou, Balibar, Rancière, and Laclau, and it is through a critique of their work that Zizek distinguishes between a certain type of universality and “capitalist globalism.” What happens in Part II, however, is a “universalization” of capital—it turns out, American capital—as the agent of global society at the expense of any cultural considerations that might give us a more complicated and perhaps encouraging picture. As in the last section on the book, which takes to task risk theorists such as Beck and Giddens, this Part also develops, or rather assumes, not only a certain definition of globalism but also of postmodernism. This last one, along with “deconstruction,” “multiculturalism,” and its various struggles along gender, ethnicity, or race lines are seized as accomplices—and unwittingly so (“they do not know what they are doing”)—to globalist (read capital) expansion. Now, in his book, Zizek often refers to the unholy alliance between the extremities of the political spectrum...

Conferring with the Dead: Necrophilia and Nostalgia in the Seventeenth Century

Conferring with the Dead: Necrophilia and Nostalgia in the Seventeenth Century Scott Dudley O that it were possible we might But hold some two days’ conference with the dead, From them I should learn somewhat, I am sure I never shall know here. The Duchess of Malfi 1 This nostalgic lament, uttered by the Duchess of Malfi just before her death, looks back to an earlier, though not so distant, cultural moment when it was still possible to hold “conference with the dead.” It simultaneously summons the images of the dead—the corpses, the severed body parts, and the skeletal remains—that are such a notable feature of this play as well as of seventeenth-century theater and culture in general. Derided as mere sensationalism, or, more recently, explored as a site for the emergent scientific objectification of the body and subsequent privileging of the Cartesian subject, the relics of the dead that accumulate in plays like The Duchess of Malfi, in fact, engage a counter-reformation, Roman Catholic aesthetic and theology about the dead body that most frequently clusters around discussions of relics and the efficacy of prayers to the saints. The remains of the body that accrue throughout the literature of this period participate in a uniquely seventeenth-century negotiation between emergent and residual cultural concerns about history, the nature of the body, subjectivity, representation, and epistemology. The necrophilia that surrounds these body parts reconstitutes, in an altered form, the residual cultural impetus to have access to the past through the physical, and, in the best new historicist fashion, thereby to hold “conference with the dead.” Earlier criticism of Jacobean theater was primarily concerned either to denigrate it for the “Tussaud Chamber of Horrors” that it frequently stages, or to justify it for its ability to depict a higher moral or theological order that triumphs over the macabre. 2 A decade ago Francis Barker argued that the “glorious cruelties” of the Jacobean theater “articulate a mode of corporeality” in which the body is not “that effaced residue which it is to become, beneath or behind the proper realm of discourse.” 3 [End Page 277] In a similar fashion Karin Coddon has argued that the necrophiliac desires that run throughout The Revenger’s Tragedy serve to “parody and to interrogate contemporary, increasingly scientistic notions of the body.” 4 These arguments, while seminal, do not account for the continuing power of residual cultural forces which complicate the distinctions between subject and object, discourse and body, present and past in this period. In the first half of the century the cultural tensions concerning corporeality, subjectivity, and epistemology, which had long been present in Reformation debates over issues of salvation, relics, and images, took on a new intensity in the increasingly frequent and often heated controversies regarding miracles performed at the shrines of saints. Beginning in 1606 with the English translation of the French pamphlet Histoire des Miracles (Miracles Lately Wrought) and continuing on for the next several decades, Catholic, Anglican, and occasionally Puritan authors argued with one another over the potential power of relics. The corpses and body parts that appear on the Jacobean stage—for example, Gloriana’s skull in The Revenger’s Tragedy, Annabella’s heart in ’Tis Pity She’s a Whore, or the severed hand in The Duchess of Malfi—participate in these theological debates. Unlike the corpses on the dissecting table or the view of the dead body taken by Protestant theology, body parts on the Jacobean stage are endowed with extraordinary material potency. They thus stage the moment in seventeenth-century culture when the corpse can be seen either as an object that has been emptied of all subjectivity, as Protestant theology and the emerging scientific discourse of anatomy claim, or as an object in which attenuated and even enhanced subjectivity and agency still reside, as Catholic polemics about relics insist. The intrusion of the macabre into these plays revives earlier cultural concerns which here return in an alienated form to mark the distance between the dominant and residual culture, and which expose areas of epistemological and affective human experience that the dominant culture does not and cannot address. 5 Such residual cultural concerns come...

On Foreign Ground: Grand Narratives, Situated Specificities, and the Praxis of Critical Theory and Law

This article is the first part of a two-part project which is critical of trends in contemporary U.S. critical and interdisciplinary legal scholarship and pedagogy. The larger project seeks to use this critique to model fruitful approaches to critical and theoretical scholarship in law “beyond 2000”.The focus of this article’s criticism is the work of two significant scholars of the second wave of what might broadly be called CLS scholarship, or more precisely critical, theoretical and interdisciplinary legal scholarship: Jack Balk in and Pierre Schlag. Looking back to the work of Duncan Kennedy and Stanley Fish, respectively progenitors of CLS and of theoretical interdisciplinary legal scholarship in the U.S., it is argued that the work of all four is marked by two significant flaws: lack of self-reflexivity and a desire for a realm of theory which unselfconsciously adopts the Cartesian split subject. The article then uses the work of Vicki Kirby and Pierre Bourdieu both to identify the tendencies it critiques, and to suggest why the work of Terry Threadgold and Peter Goodrich might provide models for a praxis of critical theory in law which is of particular use in the context of professional subject formation.

Dekartiškasis mąstantis subjektas: nepažintinės dimensijos problema

Straipsnyje nagrinėjama dekartiškojo subjekto negnoseologinio apibrėžimo prasmės problema. Teigiama, kad R. Descartes‘o subjekto samprata subjektyvumo problemą padarė Naujųjų amžių filosofijos pažintinio diskurso pagrindine problema. Kita vertus, šio diskurso krizė akivaizdžiai parodė R. Descartes‘o koncepcijos neredukuojamus prieštaravimus. Straipsnio autoriaus teigimu, vienintelis būdas bandyti apibrėžti dekartiškąjį subjektą negnoseologiškai – tai peržiūrėti tas procedūras, kuriomis mąstantysis transformuoja save į veikiantįjį ir pažįstantįjį subjektą. Tačiau šių procedūrų analizė parodo jų unikalumą ir neapibrėžiamumą. Dekartiškąjį epoche galima atlikti tik per Aš, t. y. pirmuoju asmeniu. Bet kokia kritiška, aprašanti nuostata remiasi ne epoche realizacija, bet kalba apie ją. Daroma išvada, kad dėl šių priežasčių dekartiškojo subjekto negnoseologinės dimensijos apibrėžimas yra negalimas.

"What About the Audience? What About Them?" : Spectatorship and Cinematic Pleasure

What about the Audience?AVhat About Them? : Spectatorship and Cinematic Pleasure Tamara Harvey Poststructuralist analyses of subjectivity tend to focus constitution of the Subject through the process of desire Subject's perceptions of on the and the an Other. These theories have broken ground in their critique of the unified Cartesian subject (the subject of empire) and of metaphysically guaranteed truth. But I want to explore pleasure, not desire. If desire is an experience of difference subtly informed by lack, pleasure is an experience of multiple differences often figured In particular, I (I believe improperly) in terms of excess. am interested in a kind of cinematic pleasure evident in genre film spectacles involving many bodies and mov- ing outside an individual's jouissance. Specifically, I discuss cinematic pleasure and the Kool Thing dance number from Hal Hartley's 1992 film Simple Men. Though movie is not a genre film, I use recent genre film theories because they say something useful about pleasure and because this specific scene works as a number like those found in genre films. I chose Simple Men because it gives me pleasure, and be- cause, though I don't have time to develop these ideas today, how we understand this scene reflects on our understanding of postmodernism analyzing this film in terms of pleasure and spectacle provides an alternative to readings which emphasize market excesses and ironic citationality. Genre films have been traditionally excluded from the canon of serious and aesthetically-redeemable films largely because they are concerned with pleasure rather than desire. Successful narrative is frequently connected to notions of desire narrative is driven by a lack whose fulfillment is the carrot which leads both characters and readers alike toward the denouement. When genre Hartley's films are characterized as a string of numbers loosely held together by a weak plot, the pleasure of these films is still being defined in terms of desire. Their weak plots suggest that satisfaction comes model, pleasure is simply the fulfillment of desire. The problem, I would argue, is that this this too soon and too crudely; by

The Business of Cyberpunk: Symbolic Economy and Ideology in William Gibson

The Business of Cyberpunk: Symbolic Economy and Ideology in William Gibson David Brande (bio) It is immaterial what consciousness starts to do on its own —Karl Marx, The German Ideology Ask your friendly Hosaka pocket computer for a five-minute précis on William Gibson’s Neuromancer, and it will probably reference several treatments of cyberpunk’s place within the canon of science fiction as well as commentaries on the novel’s representations of the vexed human-machine interface and their damaging implications for the onto-epistemologies of humanism. 1 Leaving aside issues of genre, literary influence, and tradition, it is the latter critical focus on the human-machine interface in the novel that I will address here—specifically, its portrayal of the flows of capital and the ideological mechanisms that construct the posthumanist “cyborg” in the first place. Far from inhabiting a “postideological” universe, the cyborg is best understood as an effect of advanced capitalism’s restructuring of modes and relations of production and its corresponding transformations in ideological reproduction. With some exceptions (including commentary by Pam Rosenthal, Andrew Ross, and Larry McCaffery 2), critics often situate Gibson’s work [End Page 509] within the context of “postindustrialism” and occasionally praise it for its depictions of “late capitalism,” without defining these terms or saying exactly how his work embodies or works through them. While it is, perhaps, out of a healthy skepticism of “vulgar” base/ superstructure models of economics and culture that leftist critics are wary of making deterministic claims about the connections between macroeconomic transformations and the appearance of the cyborg, the social and economic conditions of the production of cyborg life nonetheless remain to be articulated. 3 reading of Gibson that is informed by an awareness of the historical processes of capital’s tendencies to crisis and modes of alleviating (or rescheduling) these tendencies, and that locates technoscience within the coercive laws of the market, suggests some of the conditions of cyborg existence and indicates the economic and ideological significance of the development of “cyberspace.” Gibson’s fiction, read in this way, constructs a mirror of existing large-scale techno-social relations, providing the cultural critic with the means for critiquing those relations. What is required in such a reading, however, is not a simple appeal to an economic base; Gibson’s cyborgs—such as Case, the “console cowboy,” and Molly, the “razor-girl”—are not mere reflections of underlying economic processes, however much they may be conditioned by them and however little they look like “well-developed” fictional characters. The cyborg, as a trope for the dissolution of the Cartesian subject, is symptomatic of consistent and isomorphic shifts in all areas of socio-symbolic activity, all the “modes of symbolization,” in Jean-Joseph Goux’s terms—economic, subjective, philosophical. 4 Gibson’s significance, for my purposes, lies neither in his prose style (which revolutionized SF in the eighties), nor in his description of humanity’s disappearance into technology, but in his novels’ staging of the modes of symbolization characteristic of a technologically advanced capitalist society. If, as I suggest, [End Page 510] the cyborg is the “consciousness” of the techno-capitalist dream, then a corollary claim can be made about Gibson’s fiction: it is a dream of late-capitalist ideology. And, far from being reason for leftist critics to dismiss Gibson, this is what should draw our critical attention. As Slavoj Zizek argues, “The only way to break the power of our ideological dream is to confront the Real of our desire which announces itself in this dream.” 5 Zizek suggests, after Lacan, that it is only in the dream that we approach real awakening, the Real of our desire. This, he says, is not an idea of generalized illusion; Lacan argues that there is always a hard kernel, a leftover that cannot be reduced to a universal play of illusory mirroring: “the only point at which we approach this hard kernel of the Real is indeed the dream. . . . It was only in the dream that we approached the fantasy- framework which determines our activity, our mode of acting in reality itself.” 6 What is at stake, then, is the analytical benefit of taking Gibson...

The Discourse of Self in Victorian Poetry (review)

178Philosophy and Literature pecially Fackenheim who, after Adorno, would radically challenge such a conservative manoeuvre. A third might concern his curious relation to mentors (both alive and deceased) whose projects he gets wrong in ways that ironically enact the very issues they describe. If this be the stuff of which Seeskin's dreams are made, it behooves him to say so more forthrightly. If not, then it behooves him to identify the batdes he is waging and discard the pretense. In any event, it would probably be advantageous for him in the future to read somewhat more carefully and "gratefully" the architects ofthe positions he borrows and worry less about interesting nonJews in "Jewish philosophy" (p. 7) or promoting Judaism the way one would a new flavor of soft ice cream. Cornell UniversitySandor Goodhart The Discourse of Self in Victorian Poetry, by E. Warwick Slinn; ix & 213 pp. Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1991, $35.00. In this carefully written and tightly reasoned study Professor Slinn offers essentially deconstructive readings of three long Victorian poems, arguing that in these works the poets develop "the problematics of selfhood, pursuing a post-Romantic displacement of the self as an originary guarantor of meaning and truth" (p. 1). Slinn devotes his first two chapters to establishing a continuity between what he labels Hegelian "objective idealism" and Derridean textualism, his object being to show "how anti-dualist thinking and post-structuralist ideas are already present in the nineteenth century" (p. 38). Once he has established that Hegel undermines epistemological distinctions between subject and object and posits the concept of self as constituted by difference, Slinn turns to works of Tennyson, Clough, and Browning to demonstrate that similar problems of the relation between self and world play through Victorian poetry. In Maud, the speaker yearns for unmediated self-presence but finds himself defined by absence and lack (chap. 3); in Amours de voyage, Claude vacillates between solipsistic idealism and brute empiricism but finally emerges as a displaced self in a world of unstable oppositions (chap. 4); and in TL· Ring and tL· Book, textual sources of the narrative and its multiple perspectives reveal the irreducibly discursive nature of truth and the illusory nature of the self-present subject (chaps. 5 and 6). On the whole, Slinn's readings of individual texts are original and insightful. The troubling questions raised by Slinn's argument, however, are less issues of Reviews179 critical analysis per se than problems in literary and intellectual history. That one can fashion a Derridean Hegel or trace logocentrism's self-contradictions in Browning is not surprising. As Derrida has repeatedly demonstrated, no text is so righdy woven that it cannot be made to unravel itself. But whether Hegel and Browning are Derrideans avant la lettre is another matter. One of Slinn's key moves is to establish a Hegelian precedent for Victorian challenges to the Cartesian subject, but he does so by relying heavily on a revisionist reading of Hegel that poses considerable difficulties as a work of intellectual history. Slinn's principal guide to Hegel is Robert C. Solomon, whose In tL· Spirit of Hegel offers to "re-do Hegel ... to re-create, in our terms, the spirit of his philosophy" (p. 1) by separating the PL·nomenology from Hegel's later works and by differentiating between a totalizing Hegel of the Absolute and an antimetaphysical , anti-epistemological Hegel of non-teleological process. Solomon admits that fidelity to the letter of Hegel's text is not his primary aim, but one wonders at several points whether even the spirit of the text that Solomon uncovers is Hegelian or simply a modern appropriation of nineteenth-century thought. Similarly, when Slinn praises TL· Ring and the Book as "the triumph of dialectical thinking" (p. 1 19) in which "the self, like the world, is textualised, written into and through the structures of language" (p. 149), one must ask whether it is Browning or Slinn who has created this masterpiece oftextualism. Slinn's textual version of the relativist reading of the poem and his challenge of Pompilia as ethical center of the work, however capably these arguments may be mounted, finally are not persuasive enough to...

Reconstituting the Subject: Feminism, Modernism, and Postmodernism

Political agency is vital to the formulation of a feminist politics so feminists have attempted to create a subject that eschews the sexism of the Cartesian subject while at the same time retaining agency. This paper examines some of the principal feminist attempts to reconstitute the subject along these lines. It assesses the success of these attempts in light of the question of whether the subject is a necessary component of feminist theory and practice.

C.H. クーリーとG. H. ミードの自己論の構図

As Durkheim said, Pragmatism was a different style of thought from European rationalist tradition. William James questioned the basic premises of Cartesian subject. His major innovation was to regard not only the “external world” but also the “self” as object. Cooley realized that one's self cannot be understood without reference to his interpretation of how others see him. This view was formulated in his famous conception of the “looking-glass self”. Mead reinterpreted Cooley's theory of self along the lines of the pragmatic functionalism of Dewey and social behaviorism. How one can see himself as others see him? For Cooley, it was possible through “imagination” pepople have one another, for Mead, by “significant symbol”.

(Con)textual Contest: Derrida and Foucault on Madness and the Cartesian Subject

(Con)textual Contest: Derrida and Foucault on Madness and the Cartesian Subject

Measurement of the deflection function for a circular orthotropic plate

1. The deflection is a linear function of the load within the elastic region with free support (Fig. 1a) and with free edges (Fig. 1b). 2. The deflection is a function of the angle from the principal axes (Fig. 3) in a circular plate having cartesian orthotropy and subject to an axially symmetrical load. 3. The deflection of a circular orthotropic plate along the principal axes of anisotropy is very sensitive not only to the thicknesses and relation between the layers but also to the reinforcement direction, not only in the case of free hinging (Fig. 2, fiber ratio 1:2) but also with free edges (Fig. 3), except in the direction π=45°. 4. The rigidity of the plate varies with the angle from the principal axes along a convex curve, whose maximum lies at π=90°, which corresponds to the layer direction with a fiber ratio of 2 (Fig. 3).