Martin Jay Research Articles

Looking for the Bilder: the Subversion of Ocularcentrism in <em>Finnegans Wake</em>

Finnegans Wake is a work that subverts the distancing, dominating, totalizing gaze of the Western Eye. Writers such as David Levin, Juhani Pallasmaa, and Martin Jay provide a philosophical and cultural context from which to analyze Joyce’s subversion of what Heidegger calls the age of the world picture. Joyce’s lifelong argument with Wyndham Lewis is staged in the Wake in terms of the conflict between the ocular Shaun and the aural Shem. In addition, the theoretical detachment promoted by ocular metaphors is opposed by turning to the other senses and recognizing the blanks and blind spots in seeing itself. The political and philosophical dimensions of the issue are presented in terms of a recovery of being and a subversion of political domination. Ultimately, Joyce does not promote a defeat of the eye and a victory of the other senses, but works to achieve a new point of reconciliation and equilibrium.

Martin Jay. The Virtues of Mendacity: On Lying in Politics.

Martin Jay. The Virtues of Mendacity: On Lying in Politics.

Empires of Vision: A Reader ed. by Martin Jay and Sumathi Rawaswamy (review)

Reviewed by: Empires of Vision: A Reader ed. by Martin Jay and Sumathi Rawaswamy Carmen J. Nielson Jay, Martin and Sumathi Rawaswamy (eds.) – Empires of Vision: A Reader. Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2014. Pp. 688. Empires of Vision: A Reader is a collection of twenty-one essays written by some of the most important scholars presently working at the intersection of visual culture and post-colonial studies. These essays, combined with masterly introductions by the editors, Sumathi Ramaswamy and Martin Jay, offer an exceptional initiation into thinking through the visual turn vis-à-vis modern European imperialism. As the editors point out, these two concerns have developed largely in isolation from one another. Visual studies scholars have tended to neglect colonialism, while colonial and post-colonial scholarship has paid scant attention to visual culture. Bringing these research areas into the same analytical field, the editors suggest, enables “new configurations and reordering of received knowledge” about both visuality and imperialism (p. 2). This compilation emerged out of a 2009 workshop funded by the Social Science Research Council’s Dissertation Proposal Development Fellowship, which brought together doctoral students from a broad range of disciplines to work with Ramaswamy and Jay. The workshop’s purposes were to delineate the contours of existing scholarship located at the nexus of visuality and empire, as well as foster new developments in the field. The essays are excerpted from scholarship published, with one exception, since 2000 and covers spatial and temporal contexts spanning the globe over five centuries. The authors work from diverse disciplinary locations, including African-American Studies, Art History, Architecture, Anthropology, History, English, Spanish, and Women’s Studies. The collection’s breadth is matched by its depth; the essays are insightful, sophisticated, and most framed explicitly within continental philosophy, post-modern, and/or post-colonial theory. Although Latour and Bhabha loom largest, [End Page 818] Said, Fanon, W.J.T. Mitchell, Barthes, and Lacan are frequently cited, as is the work of influential figures like Anderson, Taussig, and Appadurai. Fundamentally, the collection is an incitement to scholars to treat empire and vision as mutually constitutive and to foreground visual subjectivities’ implication in and entwinement with power/knowledge (p. 4). It is also a challenge to the Western canon’s “entrenched antivisualism” and a critique of post-colonial theory’s privileging of textuality (p. 5). In her introduction, Ramaswamy explains that the way forward requires a radical re-conceptualization of visual practices “as objects of knowledge in and of themselves, as world-making and world-disclosing, rather than merely world-mirroring” (p. 12). In the same vein, Christopher Pinney, in his essay “Creole Europe,” argues that scholars will need “to develop new languages which…articulate pathways that will allow objects and material practices to manifest their own primary role as instantiations of significance…, rather than being subjugated as the expression of some higher order of meaning whose primary form is located elsewhere” (p. 561). This epistemological shift and its promise of new insights are manifested impressively by the collection’s essays. The first section, “Imperial Optic,” introduces scholarship that, taken together, traces out “the lineaments of an optical theory of colonial power” (p. 2). These essays ask how European empires were implicated in images’ production, consumption, dispersal, accumulation, and collation. They examine how image-making technologies, such as paintings, prints, maps, photographs, and films are transformed through their peregrinations between the metropole and colonies. The essays challenge the notion that these transformations simply produced tools of repression or of resistance. Rather, the life courses of imperial imagery reveal what Ramaswamy describes as “a messy business of mutual entanglements and imbrications, of collisions and compromises, and of desiring-while-disavowing and disavowing-while-desiring” (p. 4). The second section, “Postcolonial Looking,” is composed of scholarship that supplements Spivak’s epochal query “Can the subaltern speak?” with the question: “Does the empire not only speak and write back but also look back in unexpected ways, and at whom and with what effect?” (p. 3). In these essays, the colonial image-worker makes Europe the object of regard and turns the imperial eye back upon itself. It is the strength of these essays’ epistemological and theoretical frameworks...

The Collaboration: Hollywood's Pact with Hitler

<i>The Collaboration: Hollywood's Pact with Hitler</i>

Materijalistička istorija ideja i studija arhitekture i urbanizma - slučaj Martina Džeja

History of ideas is a sub-discipline of history that deals with description and interpretation of creative work of thinkers and artists of the past. Martin Jay, as a central aspect of his theoretical work points out two Marxist thesis. 1. Ideas have, as products of intellectual labor, their own material foundation: this means that social reality is determined by those products as much as by economy - in that way, materialist history of ideas is constituted on the shift from the analysis of the economy (base) to the analysis of culture (superstructure). 2. Ideas are related to social practices: ideas within a society are not separate from material reality, but they actively shape social relations, i.e. there is a link between intellectual labor and political conditions of life within a given historical society. The paper examines the connection that Jay established between the history of ideas and the history of architecture and urbanism.

Sebald’s Apparitional Nabokov

When truly approaches Other he is uprooted from history. --Levinas, Totality and Infinity However fleetingly, various incarnations of Vladimir Nabokov materialize within four segments of W. G. Sebald's hybrid 1992 work, The Emigrants (Die Ausgewanderten). To begin with some details: Nabokov appears photographically in Henry Selwyn section of Tim Emigrants (Figure 1) in which Dr. Selwyn presides over showing of glass slides, an activity which itself echoes chapter in Speak, Memory (1967); when Lucy Landau first meets Paul Bereyter, she been reading precisely Nabokov's autobiography (43); Ambros Adelwarth, following his self-incarceration in an Ithaca, New York sanatorium (a city where Nabokov once lived), is preoccupied with apparition of the man (a title Nabokov might bear) who acquires for him totemic significance; Max Ferber recalls being restrained from self-destructive impulse on Swiss peak Grammont by carrying large white gauze net who becomes subject of his agonized, unfinished painting, with Butterfly Net (173-74); finally, embedded in diary of Ferber's mother, Luisa Lanzberg, is her recollection of a boy of about ten who had been chasing butterflies during youthful encounter, whom she retrospectively characterizes as a messenger of joy (214). (1) Nabokov is named only once (in connection with photograph, which is ambiguously designated), and after that, apparitional butterfly man is never directly identified. The purposes of these individual moments are not immediately legible, nor are these appearances suggestive of any obvious cumulative or retrospective understanding. What, then, do these details mean? [FIGURE 1 OMITTED] While number of critics have explored dimensions of this question, I'd prefer to locate those dimensions in broader synthesizing and philosophical framework. (2) Sebald's inclusion of Nabokov as sequence of textual details, I would suggest, is more than just clever homage to Speak, Memory, work which, in its fusion of autobiographical and fictional elements, its incorporation of photographs, its obsession with exile and memory, and its prefiguring of such episodes as showing of glass slides, undoubtedly exerted an enormous imaginative and formal influence on The Emigrants. (3) Nor is it enough to presume that textual intrusions are primarily meant to destabilize realist dimensions of text in favor of more postmodern, constructed understandings of subjectivity and history--though, to be sure, these should be counted among their narrative effects. Certainly of some importance is way that Nabokov is chiefly incarnated indirectly as the Butterfly Man or with Butterfly Net, language which reminds us of his lifelong obsession with lepidoptera at same time that it exploits butterfly's numerous resonances for Sebald's text: from evocation of processes of metamorphosis and migration that speak to questions of emigre subjectivity; (4) to capture and preservation of fleeting, which corresponds to The Emigrants's obsessive quest to see and to know past; to refiguration of medium of photography, butterfly's linkage to which is made most conspicuously in Speak, Memory through an emphasis on butterfly's mimetic powers, and through ways butterfly's metamorphic form residually preserves, like photography, both spatial immediacy and temporal anteriority, as Barthes describes it in Camera Lucida. But Sebald's engagement with Nabokov is still more profound than this inventory of connections would suggest. To begin with, The Emigrants fundamentally revises career of detail in Speak, Memory, and its complex relations to ideas of totality--that state, associated with coherence, primal unity, wholeness, order, harmony, plenitude, and community, that is, as Martin Jay articulates it, typically opposed to alienation, fragmentation, disorder, conflict, contradiction, atomization, and estrangement (21). …

Uživanje u pogledu / Pleasure in the Gaze

This work examines a system of signals whose perception is founded upon the sense of sight. Different analyses in regard to seeing, the theory of the view, and reflection are investigated through the works of Ernest Gombrich, Nelson Goodman, Martin Jay, and Norman Bryson. The exploration of their theories relates to discourse in the art world (the language of art), the language of critique, and the language of the theory of art. The question of visual presentation, and visual semantics are posited; in that, a difference between the actual state of affairs (that which is perceived) and the its possible view is also demonstrated.

Toward an Embodied Utopia: Marcuse, The Re-Ordering of Desire, and the "Broken" Promise of Post-Liberal Practices

Introduction Perhaps more than any other member of the Frankfurt School, Herbert Marcuse articulated a hope for a radically transfigured world. He imagined a world characterized by receptive, generous relationships rather than domination and violence. Yet Marcuse’s philosophy of liberation has been placed on trial within various critical circles. Michel Foucault’s rejection of the “repressive hypothesis” and his concomitant analysis of power as generative is typically interpreted as an indirect response to Marcuse’s tendency to treat the social order as a primarily repressive force vis-a-vis our instincts and desires. Martin Jay has expressed concerns about the function of anamnesis in Marcuse’s utopian framework since memory for the latter is often directed toward some imaginary lost time, a time of plenitude and happiness. Jay therefore worries that Marcuse’s vision of the future, because it retrieves and re-collects this previous state of happiness, might be too conciliatory and totalizing. In general, those who have been influenced by post-structuralism cast a suspicious eye on any position that affirms the possibility of organizing human desires and relationships

Stupider and Worse: The Cultural Politics of Stupidity

Stupidity consists in wanting to draw conclusions. Gustav Flaubert I've been to the movies. I saw a very long picture about a dog–the moral of which is that a dog is man's best fri...

Didaktikk – i spennet mellom klassisk formidling og performativ praksis

Denne artikkelen argumenterer for at overgripende vitenskapsteoretiske forhold ligger til grunn for forståelser av kunst og kunnskap. En eksponent for dette synet er Martin Jay slik han klassifiserer ulike former for kunstoppfatninger med utgangspunkt i disse forståelsesformenes vesensforskjellige epistemologiske tilhørighet (Jay 1995). Å vise til nivåsammenhengen mellom epistemologi og kunnskaps- og kunstforståelse kan vel nærmest fremstå som innlysende. Likevel er det sjelden å se at dette synspunktet, som vanligvis uttrykkes på et metaplan med generelle formuleringer om nivåsammenhenger, blir fulgt opp i form av mer spesifikke analyser av de påståtte relasjonene. Derfor vil jeg i denne innledende artikkelen konkret analysere og utvikle et teoretisk rammeverk for å undersøke sammenhengen mellom kunstdidaktiske forhold og epistemologi. Intensjonen er å bidra til en drøfting av hva en didaktikk på kunstens premisser kan innebære. Avslutningsvis sees dette temanummerets øvrige artikler i tilknytning til det teoretiske rammeverket som presenteres.

Confusing Senses and Tirso de Molina's La celosa de sí misma

The role of the senses in Early Modern European literature all too often has been treated in a cursory manner given the noteworthy sensuousness of the Baroque. The senses as expressed in myriad texts define in both a personal and material way the relationship between the individual and society. Literary studies of late have responded to these questions and recent anthropological approaches to human sensorial experience has resulted in a growing interdisciplinary view of early modern life. How one learns, perceives objects, responds to social stimuli or approaches the universal questions of existence, is always taken in by the senses, and as a result our understanding of them requires ever-widening contexts. Spain's Early Modern period, like England's or France's, is characterized by what Lisa Vollendorf has summarized as an ‘intense self-consciousness with regard to the customs and taste of the age’. Tirso de Molina's La celosa de sí misma provides an excellent textual opportunity to read both the self (human aspects) and self-consciousness (recognition of writing's artifice) through a portrayal of the senses, a powerful combination that poses challenges in how to ‘read’ the senses and reach a fuller understanding of the individual's search for identity in a world where desengaño constitutes a shifting ground. The five senses are located, as Martin Jay argues, ‘at the unstable crossroads of nature and culture’; the comedia is situated precisely at that point as the self-reflecting title of Tirso's play suggests, where the senses both define and confound.

The Limitations of Vision and the Power of Folklore in John Dos Passos’s U.S.A.

The Limitations of Vision and the Power of Folklore in John Dos Passos’s U.S.A. Angela Frattarola In Downcast Eyes: The Denigration of Vision in Twentieth-Century French Thought, Martin Jay argues that from Plato to Descartes, sight has generally been the privileged sense. Although the primacy of vision was not without its complications and exceptions, thinkers such as John Locke and Descartes “maintained a faith in the linkage between lucidity and rationality, which gave the Enlightenment its name. And both distrusted the evidence of the competing major sense organ, the ear, which absorbed only unreliable ‘hearsay’” (Jay 85). Jay registers a shift, however, in this privileging of sight at the end of the nineteenth century. Photography, which nurtured the proliferation of images and the desire to gaze, also taught viewers to be skeptical of images, which could be manipulated by artists through techniques such as double exposure. Similarly, Jay posits that the Impressionist and Post-Impressionist art movements, “broadly construed, can be understood as a laboratory of postperspectivalist optical experimentation, with a subcurrent of outright antiretinalism culminating in Duchamp” (170). Visual technologies and art movements thus aided in “the dethroning of the dominant scopic regime” (150), opening the way, one could infer, for the exploration of other senses. Although, for Jay, the pinnacle of visual skepticism manifests in the late twentieth century, with post-structuralist French thinkers such as Georges Bataille, Michel Foucault, and Jacques Lacan—to name only a few—he locates the beginning of this skepticism at the turn of the century, with modernism. According to Jay, though fin de siècle visual art and literature exhibited a flurry of innovation around “new visual experiences,” “this initially euphoric exploration of new visual practices ultimately led to a certain disillusionment” [End Page 80] (150). Building on Jay’s study, this essay will examine how one modernist writer, John Dos Passos, expresses his disillusion with vision through negative representations of lighting technology in his U.S.A. trilogy. Turning to “the competing major sense organ, the ear,” Dos Passos offers a murmur of hope in his story of America only through what Jay terms the “unreliable ‘hearsay’” (85) of speech. From Jay’s perspective, Dos Passos is a modernist writer who was very much situated in the “laboratory of postperspectival optical experimentation” (170). In a 1967 address, Dos Passos recounts how after the World War I armistice, many writers were influenced by the “simultaneity” of cubism (“What Makes a Novelist” 272). He continues, however, by emphasizing the influence of the cinema: “The artist must record the fleeting world the way the motion picture film recorded it. Somewhere along the way I had been impressed by Eisenstein’s motion pictures, by his version of old D. W. Griffith’s technique. Montage was his key word” (272). Referencing this passage in his comprehensive study of U.S.A., Donald Pizer proposes: “The key terms in Dos Passos’ recollection of the art scene of the early 1920s—simultaneity, juxtaposition, and montage—can serve as guides to an understanding of the impact of visual forms on his work of this period” (14; see also Spindler, Suarez, Seed, and Schloss). Cinematic forms, particularly montage, did indeed have an impact on Dos Passos’s fiction, and a direct connection can be established between Dos Passos and Eisenstein, as well as other movie directors he met during his 1928 visit to the Soviet Union. Dos Passos, however, also fits into Jay’s study of modernists who were skeptical of vision. In his insightful analysis of U.S.A., Michael North rightly points out that there is a paradox within Dos Passos’s writing, which is shaped by visual technologies but simultaneously is “politically and socially mistrustful of the very techniques he put to such innovative use” (142). Examining how the “Camera Eye” sections separate the spectator from the action, North argues that they indicate “the way the progressive possibilities of the new visual media give way to isolation, impotence, and retrogression” (147). This astute assessment of the camera and spectatorship can be enhanced if we examine the ways in which Dos Passos represents visual technologies beyond the camera. More specifically, Dos Passos subtly indicates...

Objects of vision: the polymorphic cinema of Michael Snow

This paper explores how the sensory spaces within the works of Michael Snow represent kinesthetic and audile-tactile modes of vision, proposing an integrated form of visuality that functions in tandem with the other senses, relating to the sensus communis proposed by Aristotle. While Snow’s cinema is often characterized as more objective, technological, and immaterial than the subjective and poetic aesthetic of Brakhage, Snow’s films present a similar yet distinctly idiosyncratic paradigm of multisensory perception through their sculptural, deconstructive nature. While Snow’s camera lens remains focused on the exterior world, his films present spaces that journey far from the illusory and disembod ied nature of the scopic regime that Martin Jay (1988) terms “Cartesian dualism,” instead seeking out a unified field of energetic vision through relationships between movement, duration, sight, sound, and the embodied limits of vision itself, and are deeply informed by a sustained multidisciplinary approach.

BECKETT’S : A POLYCENTRIC PARODIC PICTORIAL PARABLE FOR PERENNIAL PARADOXES

We put forth the proposition that Beckett's Film adroitly parodies Russell's paradox in order to call into question the normative claims of metaphysical posturing and to disrupt the prevalent philosophical paradigms. Film instantiates the pitfalls of dogmatic certainties by dint of humor, which the sole set that contains itself.At the epicenter of the design of Stephen Hawking's Grand Design there are grand epistemological and ontological conundrums, as evidenced by the questions Hawking poses right off the bat: How can we understand the world in which we find ourselves?, What the nature of reality? or Did the universe need a creator? (5). It a philosopher, Nietzsche, who first proclaimed the demise of (a shared belief in) God. It a scientist, Hawking, who embarks upon endeavor to answer the aforementioned questions by stipulating that only scientists be assigned this task, as (ontotheology would have been more precise in this context) is dead owing to the fact that it has not kept up with modem developments in science, particularly physics (5), and he arrives at the conclusion that the primum movens not God, but gravity (180). It a literary figure (erudite in both philosophy and science), Beckett, who accords emphasis to the fallacies inherent in the interpretations executed by the trifecta, namely philosophy, science and literature. We contend that Film the work wherein Beckett's humotopia, an immanent topos at one remove from immanence, with humor as its emergent property [...] whose contingent flux reflects the differentiated multiplicity which the resultant of the interactions between concretely existent human beings, attains its apogee (Tsakalakis, 7). We pursue the hypothesis that Beckett proffers a cinematic variation on Bertrand Russell's paradox, which pertains to the problematic character of the set of all sets that are not elements of themselves, inasmuch as a member of itself if and only if it's not a member of itself' (Gold- stein, 91). Beckett thereby stages a parodie game wherein the object/subject of the movie the self-perception of a bifurcated subject/object, which to say that the camera, qua a Panopticon, substantialized as active subject (E), whereas the assumed subject (O) both de-subjectified and objectified via intersubjective perception that occurs within a framework delimited by a concatenation of recursions.Beckett's atypical anti-ocularcentrim takes many shapes. Martin Jay explicates how the advent of perspective in art during the Renaissance, and the attendant denarrativation of the ocular (51), led to a rationalization of sight (49). Film sternly contradicts the naturalistic conventions of linear perspective; in the movie, the outlook may be perspectivist but the vision anything but perspectival insofar as depth perception rendered unattainable on account of O's (and E's) monocular vision; and the photographs eloquently narrate the adventures of /'/rational sight. Aside from the fact that Beckett specifies that the goings-on of the film take place in the period about 1929 (1967, 164), the year Un chien andalou was released, there may also be intertextual affinity between the opening scenes of the two short movies (see Brater, 76); yet Beckett does not slice through the eye as Bunuel and Dali, and also Descartes, while working on his La Dioptrique (Jay, 75) had done. Applicable to the point at issue Rudy Rucker's notion of the hypersphere, which he introduces in his exploration of spatial infinities: The reason that the two-dimensional surface of the Earth finite but unbounded that it bent, in three-dimensional space, into the shape of a sphere. In the same way, it possible to imagine the three-dimensional space of our universe as being bent, in some fourdimensional space, into the shape of a hypersphere (17). Rucker correctly indicates that the precursor of this concept a saying ascribed to Hermes Trismegistus: God intelligible sphere whose center everywhere and whose circumference nowhere (17). …

THINKING HISTORICALLY WHEN THE MARGINS BECOME THE CENTER: INTELLECTUAL HISTORY AS HISTORICAL CRITIQUE IN MARTIN JAY'S ESSAYS FROM THE EDGE

ABSTRACTThis review of Martin Jay's recent published collection of essays examines his ongoing rethinking, supplementation, and revision of central themes—the negative and positive dialectics of historical totalization, the varieties and uses of conceptions of experience, the nature of visual cultures and scopic regimes, and the ambiguities of truth‐construction in the public realm—that have been the focus of his major works since the 1970s. It argues that his more recent work indicates a gradual shift toward an affirmation of the kinds of paratactic and deconstructive thinking of Adorno and Derrida as models for producing appropriate forms of historical consciousness and historical critique in the present, and it raises the question of how the issues of historical truth‐telling, consensual collective identity, ethical action, and the cultural role of the critical intellectual are reformulated in this process.

Legs in Lukács

Timothy Bewes and Timothy Hall (eds), Georg Lukacs: The Fundamental Dissonance of Existence: Aesthetics, Politics, Literature, London, Continuum, 2011, 239 pp; 60 [pounds sterling] hardback As one thinker put it, the significance of past movements in thought is established only when the present requires them for understanding its own, defining upheavals. (1) With the work of Fredric Jameson, Martin Jay, and Lukacs's Budapest School inheritors, Georg Lukacs never entirely disappeared from notice. But now from within the crisis not of waning capitalism, but of capitalism's relentless ascendance, theorists are re-establishing our need for Lukacs, and his claim on us. This past year (2011), Continuum released two self-contained edited volumes on Lukacs: Michael J. Thompson's Georg Lukacs Reconsidered: Critical Essays in Politics, Philosophy and Aesthetics, and the collection under review here, Timothy Bewes' and Timothy Hall's Georg Lukacs: The Fundamental Dissonance of Existence. Although three contributors have chapters in both volumes, each book is comprised of new and differently oriented essays. In addition to an introduction and twelve chapters, this volume also contains translations of two pithy and--especially in light of their application in several of these essays--extremely valuable works by Lukacs: 'Art for Art's Sake and Proletarian Writing' (1926) and 'An Entire Epoch of Inhumanity' (1964). In their Introduction, the editors appropriate an Adornian design to ask what the present might mean 'in the face of Lukacs'. They sketch compellingly the character of a contemporary situation in need of Lukacsian analysis, but which demands, too, that Lukacs be rendered operational: rethought, critically revised, and perhaps most helpfully, read against himself. The Lukacsian principle of totality is presented as crucial to our judgment of current challenges, precisely insofar as Lukacsian totality interacts with the disunity or dissonance upon which it is established. At the level of interpretation, Bewes and Hall also show that the notion of totality develops out of Lukacs's earliest consideration of aesthetic form, for which contingency is constitutive. I find these to be fine points; I expand upon them in the Afterword to the 2010 edition of Lukacs's Soul and Form. (2) A short review cannot dojustice to any single essay, let alone a multifaceted collection of them, so here I will only mention several connected, axial points from which much of the collection drives forward. There are productive interpretative divergences, for example, between Neil Larson's magnificent analysis of labour and class struggle as fetish categories, David Cunningham's argument that capital, rather than the proletariat, is the subject of history given expressive form by the novel, and Patrick Eiden-Offe's fresh portrayal of the way that class functions as a matrix of imputed, revolutionary consciousness. Yet these essays and others share an essentially Lukacsian insight about the task of the critic, and thus about the critical authority that roots the whole book: for given the long reach of reifying and ideological practices, the responsibility to define existing contradictions and to help engender alternative ways of life is a necessary intellectual condition of any non-reactionary rejection of the status-quo. Andrew Feenberg's rethinking of reification, the cornerstone of Lukacs's legacy, embodies a related theme embedded throughout the collection. Feenberg confronts the economic, administrative, and technological faces of reification, cogently responding to Axel Honneth's recent appropriation. Feenberg deploys reification together with the equally Lukacsian notion of mediation to outline a philosophy of technology sensitive to the underdetermination of technological systems, and thus to their potential for organizing collective action. Feenberg's discussion of the way technical networks construct social collectives and may yet advance their shared interests is invigorating. …

“One Cannot Look at This” / “I Saw It”: Pat Barker’s Double Vision and the Ethics of Visuality

Questions about the ethics of visuality have become particularly urgent in recent years, owing not only to the increasing prominence of visual culture as a field of inquiry, but also to public debate about U.S. government censorship of images from the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and outrage over the Abu Graibh atrocity photos released in 2004. Par Barker's Double Vision (2003) actively explores such questions, which include the following: When is the suffering of others an ethical imperative, and when is it merely voyeuristic? If the visual often produces a false of problematic sense of mastery, how can it be an ethical mode? And how do we properly after people who are quite distant from us (in time, in space, of culturally)--as opposed to overlooking of simply looking at them--particularly when our relation to them is mediated by visual technologies? (See Jay, That Visual Turn 89.) Whereas the critical conversation has often boiled the complexity of the relationship between visuality and violence down to a debate for or against the viewing of images of violence, Barker's quintessentially narrative and dialogic solution suggests a new and unusual way to come to terms with the problem. Rather than simply rehashing the debate, Double Vision proposes a process of insistent self-interrogation--an ongoing engagement in the production and consumption of images concurrent with an unrelenting critique. Taking the visual and the interrogation of visual imagery together produces an ethical visual practice that enables productive responses to geopolitical violence without the epistemic and aesthetic violente that too often attends them. Barker's novel opens with an epigraph from the artist Francisco Goya: No se puede mirar. One cannot look this. Yo lo vi. I saw it. Esto es lo verdadero. This is the truth. Readers familiar with Goya's oeuvre will recognize these phrases as captions for etchings from the series Los Desastres de la Guerra (1863). The epigraph thus inaugurates the novel's central concern with the ethics of witnessing violence, while also establishing an insistent doubleness in the novel's discourse on witnessing: a simultaneous distaste for and sense of the necessity of seeing violence and suffering through images. Further impressing upon readers the significance of this doubleness, Barker returns to the captions again later in the novel when former war correspondent Stephen Sharkey reflects: It's that argument [Goya's] having with himself, all the time, between the ethical problems of showing the atrocities and yet the need to say, 'Look, this is what's happening' ... and I thought, My God, we're still facing exactly the same problem. There's always this tension between wanting to show the truth, and yet being skeptical about what the effects of showing it are going to be. (100) Double Vision ultimately suggests that ethical vision requires an embrace of this tension, manifested as an insistence on seeing doubly in a number of senses: in the sense of seeing the dangerous and beneficial sides of vision; of seeing with feeling and seeing disinterestedly; and of seeing ourselves seeing and seeing ourselves being seen. (1) Seeing doubly as Barker conceives it should not, however, be understood as an ambivalent refusal to take a position; rather, this way of seeing is a necessary precondition for responding ethically to violence. Much critical writing since the 1970s has treated vision and visual representations as highly suspect, leading many contemporary experts to diagnose an iconophobic trend in theory and criticism. Famous examples of critical iconophobia include Laura Mulvey's critique of the scopophilic and voyeuristic masculine gaze in narrative cinema and Susan Sontag's profoundly suspicious treatment of photographic vision in her influential essays on photography. More recently, though, prominent figures like Rey Chow, Martin Jay, and W.J.T. Mitchell, wary of what they perceive as a facile vilification of vision, have called for a reevaluation of the visual that demands greater attention to its ethical potential. …

Superflat and the Postmodern Gothic: Images of Western Modernity in &lt;i&gt;Kuroshitsuji&lt;/i&gt;

Superflat and the Postmodern Gothic: Images of Western Modernity in Kuroshitsuji Waiyee Loh (bio) In 2007, Toboso Yana began publishing Kuroshitsuji (Black Butler), a manga series set in late Victorian England about a beautiful butler named Sebastian, who is actually a devil in disguise, and his young master, Count Ciel Phantomhive. With its Western European setting, its aestheticization of the demonic and the deathly, and its penchant for roses, Rococo motifs, and the color black, Kuroshitsuji exemplifies a type of “Gothic” style that has become popular in postwar Japanese shōjo culture since Hagio Moto’s classic vampire manga Pō no ichizoku (1972–76, The clan of Poe).1 Through a reading of Kuroshitsuji as a representative case study, I examine this shōjo Gothic style and its relation to Japanese national identity in the age of postmodern globalization and post-colonial reevaluations of the legacy of nineteenth-century Western imperialism.2 In the first part of the essay, I consider the relationship between the superflat visual aesthetic and the postmodern condition of simulation, which the shōjo Gothic style makes explicit. I then discuss how the shōjo Gothic style, as a postmodern and postcolonial practice of enunciation, simulates, recontextualizes, and reinvents a Western European past in order to articulate the enduring desire of the contemporary Japanese nation for an idealized “Western modernity,” characterized by “tasteful” consumption. In the last [End Page 111] part of the essay, I argue that Kuroshitsuji, through its Gothic style, paradoxically intervenes in its own idealization of Western modernity to celebrate contemporary Japan’s ability to hybridize different cultures and to disseminate its hybrid cultural commodities around the world as a cultural superpower in the age of postmodern globalization. The shōjo Gothic style in Kuroshitsuji thus expresses the profound ambivalence of postcolonial Japanese national identity vis-à-vis the West in the twenty-first century. Through reinscribing the signs of a Western European past, Kuroshitsuji articulates the split in the Japanese “Self” between the endless striving for the ideal of “Western” modernity and the nationalistic affirmation of an empowered “Japanese” (post)modernity, while eliding the inherent cultural hybridity of the shōjo Gothic style and of the national identity articulated through this style. Lastly, it is important to note that Japan was (and is) a (neo)colonial power in Asia, and I touch on the significance of this double postcolonial relationship at the end of the essay. Murakami Takashi first introduced the concept of “superflat” within the context of an art exhibition titled Super Flat, which was presented in 2000 at the PARCO department store gallery. He later developed the concept through two more exhibitions: Coloriage (2002) and Little Boy: The Arts of Japan’s Exploding Subculture (2005). Murakami and several other critics, including Azuma Hiroki and Sawaragi Noi, interpret superflatness as a visual manifestation of the postmodern collapse of hierarchies and the fragmentation of the modern Cartesian subject.3 In this essay, I will argue that the shōjo Gothic style points to a connection between superflatness and another principal element of the postmodern condition: simulation. In “Postmodernism, or The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism” (1984), Fredric Jameson reads the formal planarity of Andy Warhol’s Diamond Dust Shoes as a symbolic expression of “the emergence of a new kind of flatness or depthlessness, a new kind of superficiality” in our world where objects “now become a set of texts or simulacra.” 4 Likewise, the shōjo Gothic style suggests that the superflat visual aesthetic implies a particular postmodern mode of vision and knowledge—a “way of seeing” (John Berger) or “scopic regime” (Martin Jay)—that “flattens” all “real” phenomena in the world into hyperreal signifiers “without origin or reality.” 5 Kuroshitsuji illustrates this connection between literal and figurative flattening through its depiction of the Undertaker’s shop. In Figure 1, the façade of the shop is depicted in a highly planar, nongeometric perspectival [End Page 112] style. The figures of the characters, the door of the shop, and the coffin and tombstones flanking the door are positioned in a highly linear arrangement, and the speech bubbles add to the planarity through their superimposition, also in a linear fashion, over the picture...

Radical Perspectivalism

Radical Perspectivalism Thomas Lamarre (bio) Lines of Sight sounds a call for radical perspectivalism. It calls for getting to the root of perspective and aims for a transfiguration of the values associated with a regime initially articulated by René Descartes in the registers of one-point perspective, coordinate geometry, and rationalist dualism. It may seem odd to make so much fuss about a mode or system dating from the seventeenth century. After all, subsequent developments in science and mathematics may be said to have surpassed Cartesian geometry and perspective, or at least to have shown their restrictions and limitations. The Cartesian paradigm may thus appear outdated today, easily relegated to a transitional role within classical or early modern sciences, or to the status of a precursor, an incomplete articulation outstripped by modern and contemporary forms of knowledge. But Lines of Sight is not first and foremost concerned with the bare materiality or scientific accuracy of Cartesian geometry or one-point perspective. Rather it is concerned with Cartesianism. As Martin Jay reminds us in the context of visual culture, Cartesianism is not simply a structurally determined outcome of the use of one-point perspective or coordinate geometry. It is the combination of this mathematical mode with “Cartesian ideas of subjective rationality in philosophy” that served to make Cartesianism appear to be “the dominant, and even totally hegemonic, visual model of the modern era.” 1 In other words, Cartesianism is a historically articulated mode of rationalism, implying a highly specific field of rationality. Central to Cartesian rationality [End Page ix] is the establishment of a series of conceptual and practical divides—between space and time, between body and mind, between object and subject. These divides became so entrenched and so identified with Enlightenment thought and rational thinking that modern Western thought is still frequently characterized in terms of such unrelenting dualism with its corresponding sense of a subjective mastery over nature implicit in certain modes of visual ordering, scaling, and mapping. The problem, however, is not only that Cartesianism has dominated conceptualizations of modernity, providing the hegemonic model. But also, as a systematic attempt to ground various forms of inquiry, Cartesianism has shaped the ways in which we make connections across different disciplines or domains of knowledge—aesthetics, mathematics, history, biology, ethnography, physics, and philosophy. Nonetheless, while this collection of essays on Japanese media and popular culture proposes to go to the root of perspective and thus to overturn key aspects of Cartesianism, its goal is not, for instance, to denounce one-point perspective as inherently or deterministically fated to produce a hegemonic regime of modernity. Instead, the aim is to get to the root of this received regime of perspective in order to explore other modes and practices, other potentialities of perspective, which may have radical implications for determining what counts as art, or what makes for identity, and how we work across disciplines today. Indeed, as the use of the term “radical perspectivalism” indicates, Lines of Sight does not dispense with perspective. It is concerned with the radical potentiality of perspective, and not only in the field of vision. The emphasis on sight in the title is a lure or point of departure, designed to attract and activate a broader engagement with questions pertaining to aesthetics and to multisensory operations across fields of inquiry. As such, even as it aims to uproot and overturn Cartesianism, Lines of Sight makes no claims to supersede or overcome it. This is not because we feel that Cartesianism plays such a deterministic role in modernity that it can never be overcome but only incessantly displaced or deconstructed. Rather the problem for us is that Japan has so often been situated outside Western modernity, as a site of overcoming Western modernity, that is, Cartesian dualism—yet such a gesture merely reinscribes and reinforces Cartesian dualism in a geopolitical register, usually in the form of an opposition between the spirituality and nondualism of the “Orient” or “Asia” versus the materiality and dualism of the West. The effect, if not the intent, of such a gesture is to shore up a divide between Japan and the West in order to consolidate their identities. Take, for instance, a...

Descartes’s Resonant Subject

Almost four centuries after his death, René Descartes remains one of the most reviled figures in the history of Western thought. Whether as the father of the “modernist visualist paradigm” (Martin Jay) or the main instigator of a “masculinization of thought” (Susan Bordo), intellectual historians, students of sound, and feminists tend to dismiss the philosopher’s work as incompatible with the critical agenda they espouse. Yet there exists a surprising, if largely unacknowledged, parallel between the unstable place of Cartesian thought within the feminist project and the troubled relationship of the emerging field of sound studies to Descartes’s views of the sense of hearing. Descartes’s acoustic studies and anatomical work on the fetus reveal a persistent concern with resonance. But instead of subsuming resonance and its rich metaphorical field (which comprises vibration, sympathy, and consonance) under his infamous mind-body dualism, Descartes invokes resonance to think through what is his most important project—to model the unity of body and mind.