Discursive Arena Research Articles

Masking Selves, Making Subjects: Japanese American Women, Identity, and the Body (review)

630 Biography 22A (Fall 1999) envisions respectful distance and invites partial palpability" (124), which her book achieves in impressive fashion. Vincent A. O'Keefe Traise Yamamoto. Masking Selves, Making Subjects: Japanese American Women, Identity, and the Body. Berkeley: U of California P, 1999. 317 pp. ISBN 0-520-21034-4, $17.95. In the wake of challenges made by contemporary cultural theory to previously unquestioned assumptions of subjecthood in literary studies, historically underrepresented voices are entering the arena of scholarly inquiry. Using the tools of feminism and cultural studies, they ask questions about who may be a subject, how a subject may be recognized, and how it may be embodied in a text. In a book that asks whether a specific group may find subjecthood, the question of "Is the experience of this particular group unique as a topic of inquiry?" implicitly asserts that it is. The monograph, then, becomes a defense of this assumption. In her introduction to Masking Selves, Making Subjects, Traise Yamamoto describes the contradictions in her methodology: This study grounds itself in the awkward juncture between two claims: that identity is a highly contingent and constructed category, one that for marginalized subjects must necessarily reference the ways in which the individual body is marked and circulates in the social and discursive arenas; and the somewhat contradictory assertion that for all the language of postmodern subjectivity, there remains a place for the self, that which is often rather condescendingly referred to as the product of backwards humanism. I retain the language of the self in conjunction with that of the subject, conjoined in what one might call a critical humanism, in order to discuss modes of agency that disrupt and cannot be causally or directly traced to the social or discursive constructs that would seem to determine the subject in all its modalities. (3) Masking Selves, Making Subjects is the result of this project, in which the fiction of Japanese American women writers is read as a defense of the writers' selves against the contingencies that endeavor to define them. Yamamoto's work is the first to engage with current debates in literary theory in an examination of post-World War II Japanese American women's writing. She argues that these writers Reviews 631 have dealt with the various encroachments on their identities as defined by their gender, nationality, and ethnicity, by using these very encroachments and assumptions as a "mask" beneath which they may continue to exist, and more importantly, act. As the first of its kind, Masking Selves, Making Subjects bears the burden of presenting as comprehensive a study of the topic as possible, attempting to cover history, personal accounts, theoretical expositions, and textual analysis. Perhaps as a result of the ambitious nature of this task, the book reads somewhat like a collection of five thematically related articles rather than a comprehensive whole; connections are sometimes clumsily made and require that the reader untangle the reasoning behind her arguments. This criticism notwithstanding, these chapters, especially the last three, offer a wealth of information and interpretation on a hitherto untouched topic. Using Edward Said's theory of orientalism as a point of departure in her study, Yamamoto considers how the gaze of the "west" has imagined Japan and subsequently Americans of Japanese descent, especially women, who embody a hyperfeminine vision of the already feminized "east." The first two chapters of this book follow the mathematics behind the lumping together of Japanese American women with Japan through a long history that reaches its defining moment during the Second World War. Yamamoto reveals the western assumptions of the duplicity of the Japanese, who are thought to hide their true selves beneath a veneer. In her readings of film and travel narratives, Yamamoto points out the troubling ways in which the gaze of the (male) west determines to see Japan as a mysterious woman. Yamamoto continues to demonstrate how these assumptions easily were transferred to those whose physical appearance betrays and overrides their nationality as American citizens. The "mask," then, is not a mask that has been designed by its wearer, but one that has been forced upon her by those who view her. What interests Yamamoto is what...

The discourse ethic and the problem of representing nature

This article critically explores what it might mean to ‘represent nature’ in discursive dialogue and whether such representation must necessarily be anthropocentric in a substantive rather than merely trivial sense. The analysis also examines whether, and to what extent, it is legitimate to inscribe ecocentric norms into the procedures of discursive dialogue as a matter of justice. Against Habermas, it is argued that the capacity for self‐directedness, however rudimentary, rather than communicative competence per se, should be accepted as the basis for moral considerability. Habermas's objection to allowing nature's interests to condition the dialogue are shown to be primarily epistemological rather than normative (that is, nature cannot speak, we cannot speak for nature and therefore it is not morally considerable). However, if these epistemological barriers are accepted as secondary to questions of morality, then non‐human beings ought to enter the circle of moral considerability and the idea of special discursive procedures for the incorporation of nature's interests becomes defensible. The precautionary principle is defended as one example of a convenient and parsimonious ‘decision rule’ which may incorporate and ‘represent’ nature's interests in practical discursive arenas.

Genre Anxiety in the Postmodern Public Sphere

This paper examines the roots of contemporary concerns about the influence of poststructuralist theories and aligned disciplines such as cultural studies on media studies, exemplified here by Keith Windschuttle's attack on the latter. Rather than taking detailed issue with Windschuttle's attack on critical theory, I examine the roots of what, I argue, is an anxiety about the shifting boundaries between conventional institutional and discursive arenas. Far from identifying a schism between academic and professional practice in media studies, I argue that recent developments in both fields have fostered a far closer relationship between the two arenas, and that it is precisely this proximity which is engendering anxiety among some commentators.

The Edge of Chaos: Structural Conspiracy and Epistemology in The X-Files

This essay argues for the latter interpretation by broadening the focus of investigation to include ways in which The X-Files situates itself in the landscape of scientific culture in the late twentieth century–especially with regard to the field called complex system dynamics, known more popularly as chaos theory. The show uses and represents concepts associated with dynamic systems theory that allow it to explore issues connected to the blurring and violation of epistemological boundaries shared between the hard sciences and the community of believers in paranormal phenomena. Chaotic dynamics informs the show's attempt to represent the relationship between rational skepticism and intuitive belief in contemporary scientific epistemology. The X-Files focuses on the paracultural discursive arena that comprises discourse between skeptics and believers regarding paranormal phenomena to represent and comment on the complex, recursive nature of scientific epistemological boundaries in the postmodern cultural milieu. It interrogates epistemological categories inherited from classical science and the new physics–categories circulated in the feedback loop connecting the paraculture, science, popular film, and television. Through this interrogation, The X-Files raises questions about the meaningfulness of those categories in ways that are not only terrifying but that also point to a deeper reflexivity and more complex appreciation of the search for meaning than usually represented in science fiction, horror, and the other genres incorporated into the show's narrative.

Situating Cultural Politics: Fringe Festivals and the Production of Spaces of Intersubjectivity

Canada's fringe festivals are important interventions in the discourses and institutions framing Canadian theatre, leading some to recognize them as sites of a radical cultural politics. Most commentators have placed their attention on performance at these events, but in this paper, the focus is on the manner in which these events reorganize urban spaces into festival spaces, constructing informal discursive arenas within which the interaction of patrons, artists, and organizers is encouraged, and which situates performance, display, and the negotiation of social identities within an intersubjective field less influenced by certain constraints in traditional theatre. What is often overlooked, however, is that these discursive arenas are constructed within, at the same time as they engage, the social and spatial organization of the city, and are therefore marked by certain exclusions and inclusions. By refusing to abstract these festivals, as ‘artistic events’, attention can be paid to their ‘topography’, to explore the relations between cultural practice, social identity, and the organization of the city.

Response to Goodrich on the Antirrhetic

Peter Goodrich suggests that recent efforts revive legal must reckon with the historical reality that lawyers use for foundational, anti-perspectival reasons. Figured speech is designed as apologia: identify error (which is knowable), correct it according established patterns of belief, and then punish it by excluding the errant words from the discursive arena. Goodrich has located an irony in the new of such thinkers as Chaim Perelman or James Boyd White: their optimistic, pluralistic reliance on restore community, Goodrich opposes antirrhetically a vision of absolute belief systems that use attack the relativism of logocentricity, destroy, in other words, the notion itself of multifaceted and ideationally open dialogue.' If is revived in its true sense, the word will fail. The constitution of community which the new rhetoricians aspire (partly hoping thereby dispel the threat of formalism they otherwise fear2) will fail take place in part because of the very conjuration of they are providing. Left develop through traditional, non-rhetorically based legal means, the sometimes stodgy language of the law finds a way grow and accommodate new voices and new demands;3 but rendered self-consciously rhetorical, legal speech is more likely fold in on itself, become defensive, adapt the antirrhetic mode. Against the flawed optimism of the new lawtalkers, Goodrich thus situates a forensic rhetoric that, in harmony with legal history, is epistemological and semiotic. Goodrich roots legal in values, not in process. The activity of dialogue, standing alone, serves no purpose but deflect the energies of the less powerful speaker, further the usually unspoken ultimate interests of the more powerful.4 The result of a rhetoricized law, although somewhat prettied up by an appeal pluralism, is the same as it has always been: to dispute and exclude, dissimulate and destroy.5 A rhetorics grounded solely in a genre of civic speech is a rhetorics unaware of history and unmindful of its own covert, but ultimately detectable, values.