Modern Alienation Research Articles

K filosofii zbitého myšlení. Dialektika citovatelného gesta podle Waltera Benjamina

In the 1930s, the playwright Bertolt Brecht had a marked impact on Walter Benjamin’s life and thinking. Brecht’s epic theatre inspired Benjamin to write several texts in which the philosopher explores the concept of the “quotable gesture”. This article aims to offer an interpretation of the quotable gesture as a methodological tool for the critique of the modern alienation of tradition and the crisis of thinking. Drawing on selected essays, I analyse the principle of gestural citation as a critical-hermeneutical principle in which common pre-understanding is to be suspended in favour of particular attention towards the phenomenal and to one’s own thinking.

L'ennui ouvrier dans la pensée de Simone Weil. Cohérence du matériel et du spirituel

This paper focuses on one aspect of Weil's philosophy of labor, which has not been studied until now: the problem of boredom. In a 1938 article, she defines boredom as the main source of suffering for factory-workers. But shouldn't boredom rather occur during leisure-time, when one has nothing to do? In fact, factory work can lead to boredom, despite its frenetic rhythm and the deep concentration it implies. According Weil, boredom in factory has two main causes: monotony, and the fact that, while working, the workers lose the control over their own time. This correlation of boredom with certain conditions of work is nowadays still relevant, and it concerns modern life not only in the working sphere. It implies a critical approach to the conditions of production in the capitalist era. But it also helps to describe the paradoxical state in which, while being active, one suffers from weariness. At last, it shows the relevance of an exploration of the various aspects of modern alienation through the problematic of time. The interest in the problem of boredom therefore allows to explore two complementary sides of Weil's thought: materialism and religious inspiration.

Irony of a Global Village: A Spiritual Remedy for Alienation by Hindu Scriptures

This article attempts to posit that modern people are alienated and so feel sad though they are equipped with modern means of comfort. This is ironical. In this connection, this article also attempts to define the concept of "a global village," discuss the psychological problems of alienation and loneliness, created ironically by globalization, and suggest some measures to cope with them from the perspective of the ancient wisdoms of the Hindu scriptural texts such as the Upanishad, the Bhagavad Gītā, the Pātanjali Yoga Sutras, and others. Unlimited, uncontrolled, and selfish desires are the main causes of modern alienation, triggered by the ideas of individualism, capitalism, consumerism, sexism, classicism, hedonism, and narcissism. Since the problems of alienation and loneliness are psychological ones, they can be best treated with the help of spiritual ideas propounded by ancient sages and seers. The permanent solution to these problems cannot be found outside in our external world. Their solutions can be found only inside our body, mind, and intellect with our inner journey to the Self ("Ātmā"). We can practice having vegetarian food, yoga, meditation, self-control over one's body and mind, mutual help, philanthropic activities, and non-violence by minimizing worldly desires, anger, and avarice to facilitate our journey to the Self. The less desires, the more happiness. This knowledge can inspire us avoid running after the temporary happiness attained by materialistic things. By being desireless and detached, we can remain still in the center of the inner Self inside our heart. This is the process of discovering permanent peace and happiness within ourselves to avoid the state of alienation.

Editor's Introduction

Editor's Introduction

Violence and the Masks of Monsters in José Donoso’s Fiction

In his well-known novel The Obscene Bird of Night (El obsceno pájaro de la noche, 1970) Chilean writer José Donoso analyzed the progressive decay of the old and illustrious family of Jerónimo de Azcoitía, but also the general degradation of Chilean society. Nevertheless, the novel implies a symbolic and allegoric level as such: the author discusses, in a direct or subtextual manner, the implications of the masks within the modern world and the meanings of the monstrous creatures populating the hypnotic universe of Rinconada, imagined and made up by Jerónimo in order to shelter and hide his son, Boy. The monsters prove to be different versions of human identity and they also mark the process of modern alienation, expressing the terror determined by the violence in the Latin American world of the 20th century. KEYWORDS: Latin American Literature, Fiction, Identity, Mask, Monster, Violence.

Kolakowski: How’s the Ontology of Literature? The Tragic Meaning of "Fairy Tales"

As a philosopher and thinker, Kolakowski's literary creation practice in the 1960s had a profound meaning of exploration. He hoped to achieve two goals in the Lailonia world he created: one is to show the modern alienation and the absurdity of the world in his vision, and the second is to seek the resolutions of human spiritual liberation: not only philosophical criticism but also laughter and humor are important elements of it.

James Baldwin and Ernest Hemingway: The Expatriate Artist as Organic Intellectual

Intellectuals are a class of educated and gifted people (writers, scholars, scientists, artists) produced by society to perform social functions and assume a historical responsibility. Their ethically-based competences and prophetic visions are vital to establishing a sustainable social order and promoting the society of justice. Edward Said wrote in Representations of the Intellectual that “the proliferation of intellectuals has expanded into the very large number of fields in which intellectuals—possibly following on Gramsci’s pioneering suggestions in The Prison Notebooks which almost for the first time saw intellectuals, and not social classes, as pivotal to the workings of modern society—have become the object of study.” To exemplify and understand the role of the intellectual vocation, this paper explores the question of organic intellectualism in famous American expatriate writers Ernest Hemingway and James Baldwin using distinguished public intellectuals such as Edward Said and Cornel West as a conceptual framework and theoretical reference. The discussion raises, among others, the following focus questions: what is an intellectual? What is the role and responsibility of this social class in the public domain? How do intellectuals relate to the marketplace, power, and the marginalized? How do intellectuals contribute to social change? The paper argues that both transatlantic authors Ernest Hemingway and James Baldwin were organic intellectuals whose engaged social critique, intellectual expertise, and activism were designed to counter social dysfunction, injustice, and modern alienation.

John Edgar Wideman and Modernity: A Critical Dialogue by Michel Feith

Reviewed by: John Edgar Wideman and Modernity: A Critical Dialogue by Michel Feith Robert Butler Michel Feith. John Edgar Wideman and Modernity: A Critical Dialogue. Knoxville: U of Tennessee P, 2019. 269 pp. $45.00. Since the appearance of A Glance Away in 1967, John Edgar Wideman has published over twenty important books of both fiction and nonfiction. Scholarly interest in his work has remained strong, particularly in recent years, as is evidenced by the appearance of four important book-length studies since 2010. The latest of these books, Michel Feith's John Edgar Wideman and Modernity: A Critical Dialogue, by submitting Wideman's work to a meticulous critical and cultural analysis, will draw added attention to the fact that Wideman is a major American writer who has charted new directions in African American literature with his bold fictional experiments and his unique vision of Black experience. Thematically rather than chronologically organized, Feith's book focuses intensively on Wideman's lucid critiques of certain aspects of modernity that date back to the rise of capitalism, industrialism, and colonialism, and stresses their rootedness in various structures of racial oppression. Feith argues persuasively that Wideman's [End Page 260] response to modernism is kaleidoscopic, providing multiple perspectives that "decenter" narrative (244) and give voice to marginalized people. Viewed from one angle, modernism provides a "harmonious, organized universe ruled by universal, mathematical laws" (207) that promise progress and justice. But when Wideman's kaleidoscopic vision tips and is viewed from "a minority perspective," it reveals "a nightmarish culture of death" (23). Modern rationalism, far from releasing humanity from ignorance and superstition, has created structures of social and political oppression, beginning with slavery and later developing into colonial dominance and ghettoization. Seen from this perspective, "Prison becomes a metaphor for modernity as a whole" (46); Feith persuasively argues from this view that "a continuous thread in Wideman's œuvre" (69) is an intensive scrutiny on how literal and metaphoric prisons function as a way of defining a carceral society. Wideman, like Michel Foucault, envisions the modern prison system as originating with the humanitarian project created by the Philadelphia Quakers, whose progressive reform deteriorated quickly into a brutal means of social control and political repression. Feith's brilliant analysis of Brothers and Keepers discusses Wideman's treatment not only of his brother's unjustly prolonged incarceration but also his vision of prison as "a total institution" (46), which serves as a model of the modern state that is centered in "an enclosed, formally administered life" (47), a "rational plan" (48) designed by a dominant group to control marginalized people. (In this sense, Feith claims that Brothers and Keepers, published in 1984, prefigures Michelle Alexander's landmark 2010 book The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness.) Feith's highly original structural analysis of The Cattle Killing explores another central metaphor in Wideman's books: disease. Wideman's kaleidoscopic imagination is a critical instrument also in this work, as he triangulates Philadelphia during the 1793 Yellow Fever Epidemic, South Africa during its era of slavery, and the contemporary United States. Challenging the modern faith in linear time's unerring ability to produce a steady development of "progress," Wideman draws revealing parallels between a disease devastating eighteenth-century Philadelphia, a "plague" (146) raging through eighteenth-century Africa, and various forms of cultural sicknesses afflicting modern America—urban violence, drug abuse, racial segregation, and family collapse. Ironically, the disease of American racism is traced back to a period when such Enlightenment thinkers as Thomas Jefferson and James Madison were laying the foundation for American democracy while inscribing slavery into the Constitution. Like Paul Gilroy, Wideman makes "a strong connection between the Enlightenment and slavery" (16). Feith traces a clear line of development in Wideman's work from modern alienation and isolation in works such as A Glance Away (1967) and Hurry Home (1970) to a search in his later works for roots in African American history and communal life. He regards the short story "Fever" and the Homewood Trilogy as pivotal texts because they redirect Wideman toward "a recovery of community and oral culture" (41) to which he devoted the remainder of his career. Brothers...

Understanding and deciphering the past in Graham Swift’s Shuttlecock

Like the other influential events in world history, the two world wars of the twentieth century have deeply influenced the following generations and forced them to evaluate their existence and ask epistemological questions about fact and fiction, history and story, and truth and falsity in order to understand and situate themselves in a constructed present world. Shuttlecock, Graham Swift’s second novel, follows a senior police archivist who inherits a past from his veteran father and attempts to reach a natural flow of life by fully grasping the past. He thinks that he can dissolve the unnaturally constructed reality of the present by digging the past but scrutinizing the past does not provide the necessary answers to settle him down in harmony. In the end, he leaves his epistemological quest and seems to come to terms with the fragmented reality between the past and present. However, as Slavoj Žižek notes in The Sublime Object of Ideology, overseeing the modern alienation is a dangerous fantasy and it is impossible to return to a natural balance. This article aims to discuss the relationship between memory, trauma and modernity in order to come to terms with the impossibility of knowing the past.

The Sound Crack in Émile Zola's La Bête humaine

Listening to the rumblings and screeches of trains in Émile Zola's La Bête humaine is a means to understand how railway noise conveys mental fracture and modern alienation—what I am calling the "sound crack" playing on Gilles Deleuze's wellknown essay on the fêlure or crack-up. Although there are a range of sounds in La Bête humaine, attending to the railway soundscape in the novel as well as in the notes, journal entries, and newspaper clippings collected in the Dossier préparatoire allows for critical immersion in the ambience of sonic violence. Whistles and acoustic signaling, as well as infrasound and ground-borne vibration, however, serve not only as evidence of Zola's documentary impulse but also use sound to express order and derailment. The repetition of sound motifs conveys the violent shock that modern technology can inflict on the land and on the human psyche. The sound of doom crackles throughout the narrative which ends with an image of sonic warfare: an out-of-control driverless train full of singing soldiers headed to war.

Li Zehou's notion of subjectality as a new conception of the human self

AbstractLi Zehou stands among the most influential Chinese philosophers in the post‐Mao era. His notion of subjectality (zhutixing 主体性) is of paramount importance for current developments in contemporary Chinese philosophy. It belongs to the central concepts in Li's theoretical framework, around which his entire philosophical system is constructed. With his elaboration of this concept, Li expanded the problem of the self in post‐revolutionary modernism. The present article analyzes the theoretical bases of this concept, exposes its importance in the scope of contemporary Chinese theory and shows why and how it represents a call for a new humanism. Through a multidimensional comparative perspective, the author also explains why the human subject, which is based upon Li's notion of subjectality, has the potential not only to transform (post‐)modern alienation into a real “human condition,” that is, into spiritually fulfilled society of autonomous individuals but also to fill up the prevailing “vacuum of values.”

Lyric Orientations: Hölderlin, Rilke, and the Poetics of Community by Hannah Vandegrift Eldridge

Reviewed by: Lyric Orientations: Hölderlin, Rilke, and the Poetics of Community by Hannah Vandegrift Eldridge May Mergenthaler Hannah Vandegrift Eldridge. Lyric Orientations: Hölderlin, Rilke, and the Poetics of Community. Ithaca, NY: Cornell UP, 2015. 232 pp. The aim of Hannah Eldridge's monograph is to use Stanley Cavell's account of subjectivity and language in order to help "explain the extraordinarily ambitious claims Hölderlin and Rilke make for poetry: that it can create political communities, recast human relationships to death, or unite the sensual and intellectual components of human subjectivity" (2). In her introduction and "Epilogue," Eldridge extends these explanations to the poetry of Paul Celan to demonstrate the continuation of Hölderlin's and Rilke's poetic ambitions after the Second World War. While unifying the senses and intellect and coping with death are important themes in Eldridge's exploration of the three poets, she does not examine the specific "political community" they may envision, since her interest is, more generally, in how they respond to "modern alienation" through lyric representations, or "performances," of "unification," "wholeness," "conversation," or "poetic community." These terms, which take up the poets' own formulations, make their work as well as Eldridge's study sound rather Romantic. The author's intent, however, is the opposite: to distance poetry, in particular Hölderlin's, from specifically Jena/Early Romanticism. While she finds that "[l]ike Hölderlin, the Jena romantics see the absolute as unreachable"; she believes that, unlike Hölderlin, the Romantics [End Page 318] only "imagine" the absolute, resigning themselves to regard and enjoy language as "uncontrolled and self-referential play, leading to the interrelated themes of the fragment and irony or Witz (wit)" (49). Thus, Hölderlin's fragmentary texts are, in Eldridge's view, results of failing to "reach the absolute," whereas the Romantics created fragments, deliberately. The many texts that Hölderlin left incomplete, appear, in fact, to be fragmentary not by design, in contrast to the Athenaeum-Fragments, for example. However, against the long-standing criticism of Early Romanticism, embraced by Eldridge, one can argue that the young Friedrich Schlegel conceived of the "absolute" (or "totality" or "universality") not as "unreachable," but as immanent in the present, finite world. He realized this contradictory and paradoxical project through the similarly contradictory and paradoxical concepts of the fragment as simultaneously complete and incomplete (A206), of irony as a series of endless contradictions (A 51), and of wit as "fragmentary ingenuity" (L 9) or "chemical spirit" (A 366). Novalis' "Monolog," in turn, which Eldridge finds "most clearly" expresses the "Jena romantic relation between language and subjectivity," describes language not just as self-referential, but also as a "mirror" of the world, and as gifted with a "musical spirit." By getting attuned to this spirit, the poet becomes a "prophet" who is "inspired," rather than "fooled" by language, suggesting that he gains, if not "control" over language, at least the capacity to use it adequately (cf. 49). The second, contemporary opponent of Eldridge's study is poststructuralism, and more specifically, Derrida's and de Man's deconstruction, which she believes understands communication and language, similar to Romanticism, as "hopeless," "unreliable," and failing "to engage the world" (1). Eldridge shares with poststructuralism an interest in literary reflections on what she calls "human finitude": "the particularly human condition of uncertainty and mortality" (1). Yet, she believes that a poststructuralist notion of language "absolutely prohibits an understanding of lyric poetry as performing the kinds of orientation for which I argue" (38). This common, uncharitable opinion of poststructuralism mischaracterizes at least Derrida's work, which critically analyzes both the power of language to "engage the world," and the limits of this power. In fact, Derrida's interpretation of Celan's poetics as expressions of individuality and encounter, which Eldridge leaves unmentioned, bear striking similarities to her own. Her claim that "the basis of communication is the impossibility of its certainty" (197) is also reminiscent of Derrida's cherished paradoxical formulation, that the "impossibility" of something is its very "possibility." Moreover, she calls her interpretations "readings" and "experiences," similar to Derrida. Finally, Eldridge interprets several texts by Hölderlin and Rilke as "undermining" their own claims...

Domesticating enchantment: Mediating feminine magic in the interwar French fashion magazine

This article examines men’s writing about women as vectors of enchantment in three interwar French women’s magazines, La Femme Chic à Paris, Vogue and Gazette du Bon Ton. Such articles appeared frequently, and modernised the ancient discourse of feminine enchantment by locating it in tropes of industrial modernity, including women’s fashion and style. While enchantment is a promising concept for feminist and critical scholars, its representation in this genre of men’s writing domesticates its potential to disorient and challenge masculine subjects and conventional knowledges. The essay explores how the generic qualities of the modern women’s magazine contribute to such a domestication, and shows that tropes of modern alienation appear as the underside of feminine enchantment. The analysis suggests that we must view the women’s magazine not as women’s space, but as a heterogeneous cultural space that intermittently reinforces masculine authority.

Role-taking, Emotion and the Two Selves

This note links three hitherto separate subjects: role-taking, meditation, and theories of emotion, in order to conceptualize the makeup of the self. The idea of role-taking plays a central part in sociological theories of the self. Meditation implies the same process in terms of a deep self able to witness itself. Drama theories also depend upon a deep self that establishes a safe zone for resolving intense emotions. All three approaches imply both a creative deep self and the everyday self (ego) that is largely automated. The creativity of the deep self is illustrated with a real life example: an extraordinary psychotherapy experiment appears to have succeeded because it was based entirely on the intuitions of the therapist. At the other end from intuition, in one of her novels, Virginia Woolf suggested three crucial points about automated thought: incredible speed, role-taking, and by implication, the presence of a deep self. This essay goes on to explain how the ego is repetitive to the extent that it becomes mostly, and in unusual cases, completely automated (as in most dreams and all hallucinations). The rapidity of ordinary discourse and thought usually means that it is superficial, leading to greater and greater dysfunction, and less and less emotion. This idea suggests a new approach to the basis of ‘mental illness’ and of modern alienation.

Beyond Nature Writing: The Dark Mountain Project and The Land: An Occasional Magazine About Land Rights

Beyond Nature Writing: The Dark Mountain Project and The Land: An Occasional Magazine About Land Rights

A Dionysian/Thomistic Framework for the Integration of Science and Catholic Tradition

Introduction (1) BISHOP FULTON SHEEN called Book 4, chapter 11 in the Summa contra gentiles by St. Thomas Aquinas among the most brilliant works in all of human thought and the implicit answer to most problems in science and many problems in modern philosophy and theology. (2) This chapter, titled, How generation is to be understood in divinity, and what is said of the Son of God in Scripture, concerns how we are to understand the generation of the Word from the Father in the Trinity. (3) To answer, Aquinas, in part, reaches back to the opposite end of existence and works from minerals (non-living things) up the hierarchy of being to plants, animals, men, angels, and finally God, who exists infinitely and transcendently above his creation. Defining life as which moves itself, he discusses the type of movement or operation found at each level of being, giving a profound insight into the ultimate nature of life. Life, he answers, is an interior act ultimately synonymous, in God, with intelligence (and will (4)). Created beings are arranged hierarchically due to their participation in a greater or lesser degree in this perfect interior act of their Creator. The intellect and knowing capacity become the framework, or cosmology--defined as one's total view of reality, both spiritual and material--to organize reality, one that knows no modern alienation between the material and spiritual world. Today, discussions about the nature of reality are conducted within the framework of modern science, which is seen as the archetype. Central to its strength is that these discussions typically take place in a materialist (atomistic/evolutionary) cosmology. Herein lies the key. The cosmology under which one works leads to the questions asked and the answers received. This is particularly the case with science, which is a collection of facts about reality that of themselves do not contain an inherent philosophy. (5) These facts in a materialistic cosmology lead to scientism, the view of a purely material universe that dominates modern thought. (6) Attempting to fuse this cosmology with one more compatible with religion and higher reality is counterproductive. A defective union results, as the overarching cosmologies are not compatible in the end. What is needed is a new cosmology in which to think, one where science, and by implication, all of modern knowledge is properly ordered. This article proposes such a cosmology, one that is thoroughly compatible with Catholic tradition, and shows how the data of science, removed from the secular paradigms under which it is presented, positively contribute to the Catholic Faith and our understanding of the material world in which we live. The Dionysian/Thomistic Hierarchy In his SCG 4.11, Aquinas provides the needed cosmology, rooted deeply in Catholic tradition--the hierarchy of being (types of being created by God: minerals, plants, animals, men, angels) based on the operations proper to each being. This cosmology implicitly contains the whole of Catholic thought and is fully capable of assimilating all legitimate modern thought and discoveries, including that of science. This framework gives rich meaning, purpose, and completion to our understanding and places that understanding at the service of the Church. Initially synthesized by St. Dionysius the Areopagite (7) and commented on by Aquinas, it prepares a natural foundation for the spiritual life and ultimately leads the mind to receive the deepest teaching of the end and purpose of man: deification and union with God. In his Commentary on the Divine Names of Dionysius, Aquinas, writing on the incomprehensibility of God, states, Therefore, it is necessary that we understand divine things according to this union of grace, not, as it were, dragging divine things to make them fit us but rather by us standing completely outside ourselves in God, so that we are completely deified through the aforementioned union. …

Virtually Alive or Questionably Dead?: The Ambivalence of Modern Korean Identity in Literature and Cinema

Virtually Alive or Questionably Dead? The Ambivalence of Modern Korean Identity in Literature and Cinema Kyu Hyun Kim (bio) Kyung Hyun Kim, Virtual Hallyu: Korean Cinema of the Global Era. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2011, 241 pp. $24.95 (paper). Theodore Hughes, Literature and Film in Cold War South Korea: Freedom’s Frontier. New York: Columbia University Press, 2012, 271 pp. $55.00 (cloth). The studies by Kyung Hyun Kim and Theodore Hughes discussed in this essay are rich with information and insights but are also challenging, almost subversive, to some prevalent views on Korean cinema and literature. While Kim looks into contemporary, post-1990s Korean films operating in the global market as an important (but perhaps since 2000 not the most influential) wing of the hallyu (“Korean Wave”) trend, Hughes deals primarily with early postwar literature and visual arts (including cinema) from 1945 to roughly the early 1970s. Both authors are concerned with the history and contemporaneity of Korean identity and with the manners in which this localized identity is constituted, specifically in relation to colonial modernity, global late capitalism, and ethnocentric nationalism. They also address the problematic status of cinema in the context of Korean culture and history, sometimes developing arguments in unexpected directions. [End Page 419] Kyung Hyun Kim’s Virtual Hallyu, a long-anticipated follow-up to his seminal Remasculinization of Korean Cinema (2004), starts off with a fore-word by Martin Scorsese. Unlike some celebrity endorsements, Scorsese’s mini-essay is astute and thought provoking in its own right. The renowned director speaks of “unease” and “melancholy” in the best Korean films he has seen, regardless of their genre provenances or political orientations, and further questions whether these qualities are produced by certain kinds of friction between Korean cinema and the “culture it sits in” (ix–x). As Scorsese suggests, Virtual Hallyu is in many ways a quest to explain this sense of unease and melancholy. Instead of dismissing it as a symptom of maladjustment or lionizing it as a sign of pointed resistance against the neoliberal hegemony over the global cultural exchange, Kim, taking cues from Gilles Deleuze, characterizes it as reflecting the “virtual” qualities of Korean cinema, in the sense that in the latter, “history and social referents can return only in forms that are both truthful and fantastic” (21). These films supply images that cannot be reduced to simple representations of “actuality,” but allow the past/fantastic, and the present/real, to coexist in the same frame, so to speak. Wielding the arsenal of literary (psycho-)analysis, Kim explicates the traits that enable these films to remain viable products and/or significant works of art in the Hollywood-dominated global market and to avoid being absorbed into the “late-capitalist cultural revolution that unseated Hong Kong in a rotating chair” and eventually being “gobbled up and spat out by Hollywood when [Korean cinema’s] replacement [was] found” (xv). In the context of hallyu, the key cinematic mode of expression has shifted from political allegory and affect to self-reflective irony; thus, the monster that crawls out of the Han River to devour hapless denizens of Seoul in The Host (2006) can no longer be construed simply as a symbol of Korea’s pathological modernization or the mess created by the neo-imperialist United States; a South Korean protagonist trying to apologize to a North Korean student studying abroad in Night and Day (2008) ends up slipping into silly antics more appropriate for a silent comedy, far removed from the elocution and “seriousness” expected from the agents of reunification; and so on. Kim displays the full extent of his intellectual dexterity when he teases out an array of insights from specific cinematic texts, even those works some might think are unlikely to generate fresh interpretations. He proves them [End Page 420] wrong time and again. The most notable examples of his analytic acumen include: an analysis of Hong Sang-soo’s urban landscape as a site of modern alienation as well as of “massive interiorization” suffered by his characters (especially his male protagonists, who remain cringe-worthy—and, for me, vaguely myrmecological—realizations of those “impotent intellectuals” that infest South Korean elite...

Split Level, Or, The Predicament Of Dwelling

Abstract This essay stages a dialogue between a handful of writers and artists whose works dramatize the 'predicament of dwelling'. Soren Kierkegaard, Theodor Adorno, Walter Benjamin, Franz Kafka, Charles Baudelaire, and Gordon Malta-Clark shared a common sensibility with respect to the difficulties of modem life. Benjamin's 'destruction of experience' and Adorno's 'damaged life' evoked images of modern subjectivity as something as deranged and mutilated as the creatures in Kafka's storie. Matta-Clark's lacerated homes and buildings combined the despair and disrepair of the city with complex images of intrusion and redemption in ways that echo the enmeshment of melancholia and delight in Baudelaire's flâneur, in Kierkegaard's interieur. Perhaps it would do to regard these as elaborations on the experience and the ironies of modern alienation, but what interests me here is the way we are presented with a subject that is ruptured, lacerated, and split, and whose splitting is reflected in the places and spaces in which it attempts to live. What is the nature of such living, and of the subjectivities appropriate to it? Keywords Theodor Adorno, dwelling, Gordon Matta-Clark, Kierkegaard, Walter Benjamin, interior This essay stages a dialogue between a handful of writers and artists whose works dramatise what will be called the 'predicament of dwelling'. S0ren Kierkegaard, Theodor Adorno, Walter Benjamin, Franz Kafka, Charles Baudelaire, and Gordon Matta-Clark shared a common sensibility with respect to the difficulties of modern iife. Benjamin's 'destruction of experience' and Adorno's 'damaged life' evoked images of modern subjectivity as something as deranged and mutilated as the creatures in Kafka's stories (Gregor Samsa and Odradek come to mind). Matta-Clark's lacerated homes and buildings combined the despair and disrepair of the city with complex images of intrusion and redemption in ways that echo the enmeshment of melancholia and delight in Baudelaire's flâneur, in Kierkegaard's interieur. Perhaps it would do to regard these as elaborations on the experience and the ironies of modern alienation, but what interests me here is the way we are presented with a subject that is ruptured, lacerated, and split, and whose splitting is reflected in the places and spaces in which it attempts to eke out something like a life for itself. I am going to suggest that we become reacquainted with the concept of 'dwelling', which in times past encompassed more than what its diminished meaning today manages to convey. Drawing from Aristotelian themes, dwelling at one time marked the intersection of life and the political - in the parlance of early Critical Theory: the intersection of 'experience' and the conditions of its (im)possibility. In The Arcades Project Benjamin archived nineteenth-century dwelling (interiors, furnishings, city planning, etc.) as a way to grasp the transformations of subjectivity in modernity. And in Minima Moralia, Adorno defied good, Hegelian dialectical procedure by arguing that in the twentieth century one had to begin with the subject and private life, with the problem of dwelling, if one was to grasp the nature of the Whole. Particularly for Adorno (who occupies the centre of my argument), dwelling became a metaphor for his controversial style of politics. Dwelling today (Adorno emphasised today-ness in what I believe was conscious disagreement with what he thought was Heidegger's ahistorica) treatment of dwelling) was the location of catastrophe where both socialist dwelling and private life were made impossible, and we drudge daily amid the failure of the 'good life' to have taken hold. It is where we pose the question of what forms of life, and what form of the political, are appropriate to the conditions in which we live. I explore the relation between dwelling and the political, inquiring into the politics of dwelling, or, politics as dwelling. Adorno's 'negative utopianism' stands in stark opposition to more robust and optimistic political philosophies in the past and the present, whether those of traditional Marxism, or the more liberal-minded sensibilities of subsequent generations of Critical Theory, or the neo-orthodox movement today, which promotes renewed commitment on the part of philosophy and politics to the notion of the Event. …

New York in 1819: Defining a Local Public in the "Croaker" Poems of Joseph Rodman Drake and Fitz-Greene Halleck

On March 11, 1819, amid the turbulence of the young nation's first great market crash, the New York Evening Post published a poem titled To Ennui, a subtly ironic meditation on a current mood in the city, a mood that today sounds like a kind of modern alienation, but at the time was diagnosed as hypochondria.1 The author signed the poem Croaker, and it immediately generated a sensational buzz that in the next few months, as more poems appeared, reso nated well beyond the boundaries of New York society. The Croaker poems were reprinted in newspapers around the country, and though in most cases they dealt specifically with the current political and climate of New York City, they nevertheless had an enormous appeal for readers, perhaps because the city was rapidly becoming the commercial and cultural center of the new nation. What is more, through their satire, the Croaker poems helped define New York itself. They gave voice to what Michael Warner calls a public, a social space created by the reflexive circulation of discourse.2 The poems engaged the city on a level that converted an inchoate sentiment, en nui, into a well-defined literary voice that expressed the complexities of an emerging metropolis and clearly had an impact on the national imagination. Despite the popularity of the poems and the fame that they later brought to Joseph Rodman Drake and Fitz-Greene Halleck, the two po ets who collaborated on them, the Croakers are mostly forgotten today. They simply do not lend themselves to broad historical surveys, nor do they hold up well for anthologies or collections. Nevertheless, the poems reveal a great deal about how early national literature was inter woven in US culture; moreover, by generating a distinct local public of readers and respondents, the Croaker poems served as an alternative to popular myths that located national identity on the western frontier. Biographies of Drake and Halleck are limited in their assessments of

Glamour in Six Dimensions: Modernism and the Radiance of Form (review)

Reviewed by: Glamour in Six Dimensions: Modernism and the Radiance of Form Siobhan Phillips Judith Brown. Glamour in Six Dimensions: Modernism and the Radiance of Form. Ithaca: Cornell UP, 2009. xiv + 199 pp. As modernist studies continues to seek new approaches, it also continues to revise known categories: they are not outmoded labels to be discarded perhaps, so much as potential descriptions to be probed and recontextualized. In Glamour in Six Dimensions, Judith Brown exemplifies this scholarly tack by looking again at the formalism so important to accounts of twentieth-century aesthetics. Her analysis uses the paradoxes of form, freshly situated, to clarify contradictory affinities in modernist culture. Brown does so through her chosen central term, “glamour.” In her book, this word does not chart an artistic history or recognize modernists’ self-description; rather, and more usefully, “glamour” theorizes a set of interests that unites commerce and art of the period. Glamour is both an ideal and a commodity, in Brown’s presentation; it “names [the] interrelation” of “literary form” and “modern mass culture” (8). Glamour indicates an attraction to what is “cold, indifferent, [End Page 663] and deathly,” a drive toward “abstraction,” and a preference for “blankness, the polished surface, the stance of impenetrability” (5): these are evident in the affective results of Hollywood stills, fashion magazines, and industrial plastics as much as in the poetic practices of Virginia Woolf, F. Scott Fitzgerald, and Wallace Stevens. Glamour therefore refuses to separate cultural contexts from artistic methods, refuting old assumptions about modernism’s remove from markets; with these aims, Brown’s study furthers an important trend of scholarship that includes work by Aaron Jaffe, Douglas Mao, Michael North, and Lawrence Rainey, among others. Glamour marks a valuable extension of this strain, however, in its particular argument about form: “glamour emerges with the modernist attention to aesthetic form,” Brown explains, “and subsequently becomes visible, even most familiar, in the worlds of entertainment and mass culture.” “[R]eading glamour” thus “extends the power of the literary—especially in its attention to form—to translate the world around us” (8). This overview might benefit from a clearer characterization of “form” across the different genres that this book cites, though the omission is less troublesome in specific analyses. As they unfold, Brown’s various descriptions of glamour refute any limits to the possible manifestations of a modernist aesthetics—and resist any generalizations about something like a “culture industry” undermining that aesthetics. Glamour does not want its central concept to be “relegated solely to the service of capitalism and its system of commodity production,” as Brown explains. If it were, critics would “lose glamour’s aesthetic power, as well as its range of pleasures” (12). The power and pleasures are dangerous, often cruel. From ads for cigarettes to sentences by Stein, glamour flirts with “the suspicion of the nothing behind it all”—while turning that absence into “something that is seductive, powerful, and often simply gorgeous” (5). Brown’s study thus supports a detached, nihilistic, and antihumanist version of modernist art. To Brown, in fact, glamour offers a type of twentieth-century sublime: sustaining the attractions of negativity while replacing attention to nature with a focus on technology, preference for the infinite with an attraction to the regulated, and endorsement of transcendent reason with an “obliteration of the subject” (33). Yet if glamorous sublimity “courts danger,” in Brown’s words, it also “finds in it powerful creative potential” (13), and Brown shows that a seemingly indifferent or reactionary effect contains unexpected political possibilities as she articulates the breadth of its instantiation. One chapter, for example, relates T. S. Eliot’s theories of individual talent, Woolf’s ideas of character, and Hollywood’s starmaking apparatus; Brown demonstrates that Greta Garbo’s glamour depended on an impersonal personality akin to high-art aims (101). [End Page 664] The actor’s image, Brown argues, as it uses and indicts processes of technology, diagnoses a modern alienation that is sociologically, aesthetically, and commercially produced. Her discussion casts new light on modernist subjectivity as it articulates a specific relation between mass and high culture that is reductive to neither. Another chapter examines the appeal of “primitive glamour”—which could seem...