Postmodern Turn Research Articles

The AIDS Conspiracy: Science Fights Back by Nicoli Nattrass (review)

Reviewed by: The AIDS Conspiracy: Science Fights Back by Nicoli Nattrass Susan Levine Nicoli Nattrass. The AIDS Conspiracy: Science Fights Back. New York: Columbia University Press, 2012. viii + 225 pp. Ill. $34.50 (978-0-231-14912-9). The AIDS Conspiracy: Science Fights Back is Nicoli Nattrass’s third book that details the devastating consequences of AIDS conspiracy theories and AIDS denialist tactics in South Africa. Based on quantitative research data in South Africa and the United States, Nattrass argues that belief in AIDS origin conspiracy theories, including the idea that “HIV is a man-made bioweapon” (p. 1), is highly racialized, with “black” people in both countries believing to a larger extent than “white” people [End Page 492] that “AIDS was invented to kill black people” by scientists in America (p. 12). In her rigorous investigation of the social schemas in both countries that supported the rise of such beliefs. Nattrass identifies the reviled character of Dr. Wouter Basson, the head of the apartheid government’s chemical and biological warfare program. Given Basson’s pernicious role, the conspiracy that he was working in a postapartheid context with the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency to further racist projects such as the now infamous Tuskegee Study where black syphilis patients in rural Alabama were deliberately untreated for three decades between 1937 and 1972 in order to study the progression of the disease, is rendered legible. But the legibility that Nattrass offers is not to be confused with what she identifies as the dangers of relativist approaches to the truth. In rather broad brush strokes, Nattrass claims that postmodernism and anthropological relativism have led to the undermining of the truth value of science, and that scholars cannot afford to hold a multiplicity of views on equal footing when human lives are at stake. Her critique rests on a rather thin reading of the “postmodern turn” in anthropology and confuses the project of relativism with the kinds of political engagement, medical interventions, and activism that often underpin such projects.1The AIDS Conspiracy will thus prove a frustrating read for some, but should not detract attention from the central claims in the book, which offer a comprehensive account of conspiracy theories and AIDS denialism on two interconnected continents. In a chapter titled “Hero Scientists, Cultroprenuers, Living Icons, and Praise Singers,” Nattrass links South Africa’s former president Thabo Mbeki’s ill-informed ideas about the HIV virus with American-based virologist and leading proponent of AIDS denialism Peter Duesberg. Nattrass argues that the dissident movement relied on the credibility of such “hero scientists” to legitimate denialist claims that antiretrovirals (ARVs) are “toxic” drugs. The conspiracy theory promoted by Duesberg, and later adopted by Mbeki, that ARVs were invented to produce profit for big pharmaceutical companies, is not incompatible with such a formulation. Such claims about the toxicity of ARV treatment opened the way for the opportunistic punting of alternative therapies to deal with weakened immune systems. Mbeki’s health minister, Manto Tshabalala-Msimang, was one of the key players in this deadly play, whereby she rejected reports from South Africa’s Medicines Control Council that ARV treatment was safe and effective medicine for people living with HIV and AIDS. Tshabalala-Msimang drew on a range of American “hero scientists” and “living icons” to support her position that “African remedies” including garlic, the African potato, lemon juice, and beetroot, along with micronutrients such as those offered to poor South Africans by the notorious German “vitamin magnet,” Mattias Rath, offered a less “toxic” solution to ARV treatment.2 Given the climate of AIDS conspiracy theories and dissident positions [End Page 493] at the top levels of governance in the country, Nattrass’s intolerance for any kind of apology by way of explaining the internal logic of these positions is understandable. For Nattrass, the analysis of irrational rejections of biomedical science must be the foundation for action rather than reflection, and her book certainly works effectively to promote radical critique. An intriguing finding in the study under investigation reflects that people in South Africa who had never heard of the Treatment Action Campaign (TAC), the social movement that fought the government’s (ANC) AIDS policies, were...

Homeland Security and the State of (American) Exception(alism): Jess Walter’s The Zero and the Ethical Possibilities of Postmodern Irony

Our complicity begins with our country's reaction to [the attacks] our failure ... to debate the response honestly. The war in Iraq, the abuse of detainees, electronic eavesdropping, Guantanamo Bay--these things were all done on our behalf they may turn out in the end to have created more terrorists. --Jess Walter, Conversation with Jess Walter In 1991, Fredric Jameson opened his famous study of postmodernism by claiming that the concept served attempt to think the present historically in age that has forgotten how to think historically in the first place (Postmodernism ix). Although there is little evidence that Americans have suddenly remembered how to think historically, the post-9/11 period has not been kind to postmodernism, which was already on the wane in the 1990s with the rise of postcolonial studies. Two theses regarding post-9/11 cultural production work against a serious consideration of twenty-first-century postmodern narrative, despite the potential it has to open ethical discussion of America's ongoing state of exception initiated by the Bush Administration continued by the Obama Administration. (1) The first thesis, initially articulated in the days following the terrorist attacks, claims that irony died on 9/11. While by now the end-of-irony thesis has largely been laughed out of court in the media, it has a certain resiliency in academic criticism. (2) In a 2009 survey of American fiction, David Wyatt reiterates this totalizing claim, one oddly complicit with Dick Cheney's political canard that 9/11 changed everything: On September 11, any reign of irony ended (Wyatt 139). For Wyatt, the terrorist attacks and the imaginings arising out of them mark a turn toward 'seriousness,' a turn away from modern irony the lightness of the postmodern turn, a seriousness marked by an upwelling of unironized emotion (140). However, to claim that irony died on is to selectively read the fiction published since 2002. Two novels that appeared in 2006, both finalists for the American Book Award, deploy irony to explore the aftermath of the terrorist attacks--Ken Kalfus's A Disorder Peculiar to the Country Jess Waiter's The Zero. Just five years removed from the event, both novels satirize Americans' responses to the terrorist attacks, a risky move in Bush's America where a new form of PC (Patriotic Correctness) shaped most discussions of the US response to terrorism domestically globally. Kalfus's novel opens with a wonderful premise that challenges the pieties constituting the discourses of grief commemoration of the victims: a Manhattan husband wife in the midst of messy divorce proceedings can barely suppress their joy when each supposes that the other has been killed in the terrorist attacks. Unfortunately, the novel remains so claustrophobically focused on the couple's domestic problems that this early promise is undercut. If the beginning of the novel clearly ironizes the affective response to victimhood collective trauma identity, the abrupt ending of the final eight pages merely shifts the ground from naughty personal wish-fulfillment to political fantasy: America quickly effortlessly wins the war in Iraq; the Iraqi people universally embrace their liberation; Osama bin Laden is captured a spontaneous celebration erupts near Ground Zero. But it is a fantasy that leaves the reader wondering what one should be laughing at. The novel's ending becomes instance of Jameson's pastiche, amputated of its satiric impulse (17), inasmuch as the object of its critique becomes almost impossible to discern: is it the Bush Administration, American jingoism more broadly, or perhaps those who protested the war on terror? Despite its inability to articulate a clear political or ethical vision, Kalfus's novel has been incorporated into discussions of fiction, perhaps because it confirms the second near-consensus thesis about this body of fiction, namely, that it is a failure because, instead of depicting the geopolitical or imagining the other, it merely focuses on domesticity. …

Family of Origin Coaching for Clinicians in a Child and Adolescent Mental Health Service

The role of the therapist as a person rather than only as a technician has become increasingly important in family therapy since the post-modern turn. Despite this there is a paucity of research exploring supervision models that focus on self-reflection, as opposed to clinical competence. This study documents the experience of a Family of Origin Coaching group, conducted with six clinicians and one supervisor working in a child and adolescent mental health service. A participatory action framework was used, with data analysed using grounded theory. A variety of benefits were reported, including personal development, an enhanced empathy towards clients and an ability to better cope with stressful team dynamics. Family of Origin coaching has the potential to yield benefits for clinicians as a compliment to traditional supervision. Issues of confidentiality and safety need to be addressed carefully, especially during times of organisational change or stress.

The Demonization and Recovery of Religion: Villains and the Transformation of Narrative

IntroductionReading religious history, ethics, biblical scholarship, along with a host of other disciplines, what one discovers is a consensus that there is no value free, objective, non-interpretive experience of the world. Hermeneutics in particular raises consciousness of the complexity of human engagement with the world.1 While hermeneutics has been focused on the understanding of texts, authors, and readers, the field of hermeneutics need not be limited in this way. Forrest Clingerman (Interpreting Heaven and Earth), for example, has taken hermeneutics into nature where interpretation of place and oneself in relation to place is a broadening of the hermeneutical enterprise. Hermeneutics an art and science of interpretation opens up understanding and meaningfulness one takes in and makes meaning out of our reality we see it.The as we see is important. Interpretation does not happen by simply taking in data. Interpretation comes within the context of the values and perspectives already present to a person, Gadamer (Truth and Method) pointed out, each person has a hermeneutical horizon. Moreover, seen in the work of thinkers such John D. Caputo (More Radical Hermeneutics), each person's horizon is distinct, which creates a gap between one's own horizon and that of the other. Living in the world requires sorting through the information constantly being received, and the only way to do that is through the lens already given to each person. This unfolding of interpretation is the creation of narrative.This narrative is one's worldview. One does not simply interpret individual bits of information but unfolds them in relation to each other, into the story that shapes one's identity. Narrative, then, is how one experiences the world. Each of us has a narrative identity, to borrow a phrase from Ricoeur {Oneself Another). Each person understands him or herself through the way that person unfolds the interpretation of history, the present, and the possibilities for the future in constant interaction with the other. As Philip Davies describes it:Stories are never innocent of point of view, plot, ideology, or cultural value. We tell our stories of the past in a historical context, looking at the past from a particular point: the present. We cannot be objective, neutral observers. We ourselves are in history, in the sense both of events happening and of the stories (news, gossip, history books) that interpret these events- not to mention our own memories. {Memories 11)Our narrative identity is not simply the past of ourselves, it is culturally constructed-what Davies calls cultural memory and others (including myself) call sacred history. Within the life of a person who considers him or herself religious, there is a particular quality to the narrative, and that is the relationship with the holy or sacred the driving force of the narrative. In such narratives, everything is at stake. The unfolding of one's story in relation to the holy, one's narrative identity, is in relation to one's community, cultural period, and place in time. And these narratives point to the future of how the narrative will continue to unfold. As Ricoeur pointed out, the process of hermeneutics is a dialogue, a continual back and forth with that which one is interpreting (What Is A Text). And in the case of personal and communal identity, one is always adding to the story of life itself and its telos by every interaction with the world. Others, then, are characters in our own stories.The underlying assumption of this essay is that there is no non-narrative engagement with the world. One is always in the process of interpreting the world in light of the pre-existing narrative and adding to that narrative through new experiences. But there is a problem with the assumption. In the postmodern turn of the mid and late 20th century, narrative was challenged. In terms or religious narrative, Mark C. …

From Ericksonian Roots to Postmodern Futures. Part I: Finding Postmodernism

As part of a larger project reviewing the 20 years since the first Therapeutic Conversations conference in Tulsa, Oklahoma, we reflect on developments in the postmodern therapies. We discuss the evolution in the interviewees’ respective clinical work and the future of the field. The interviewees describe how they “found” solution-focused and narrative therapy and what it was they each found compelling about these approaches; discuss the postmodern turn that both approaches exemplify; and reflect on the rapprochement and distinctions between the narrative and solution-focused approaches.

Moving beyond Edward Said: Homi Bhabha and the Problem of Postcolonial Representation

The essay takes up the issue of postcolonial representation in terms of a critique of European modernism that has been symptomatic of much postcolonial theoretical debates in the recent years. It tries to enumerate the epistemic changes within the paradigm of postcolonial theoretical writing that began tentatively with the publication of Edward Said’s Orientalism in 1978 and has taken a curious postmodern turn in recent years with the writings of Gayatri Spivak and Homi Bhabha. The essay primarily focuses on Bhabha’s concepts of ambivalence and mimicry and his politics of theoretical anarchism that take the representation debate to a newer height vis-ŕ-vis modes of religious nationalism and Freudian psychoanalysis. It is interesting to see how Bhabha locates these within a postmodern paradigm.

Future(s) of American Legal History

Critical Legal History (CLH) is currently being subjected to sustained critique and re-examination by some legal historians. This review essay looks at this debate in the context of two recent books on American legal history: Christopher Tomlins’s Freedom Bound: Law, Labor, and Civic Identity in Colonizing English America, 1580–1865 (2010) and Laura Edwards’s The People and Their Peace: Legal Culture and the Transformation of Inequality in the Post-Revolutionary South (2009). In keeping with the thrust of CLH scholarship, both books problematize the connection between law and narratives of freedom and equality in American history, and both show law as a significant force for non-freedom and inequality. Yet, in a recent symposium on Robert Gordon’s classic article ‘Critical Legal Histories’ (1984), both authors chose to distance themselves from CLH. After explaining what is significant and important about each book, this review essay describes the debate in that symposium. Notwithstanding the extensive disagreement between the contributors over the use of so-called ‘mandarin’ legal materials in historical research (sources like legal treatises that reflect elite perspectives), the review essay makes the point that this disagreement is much less important than the challenge raised about the long-term tendencies and preoccupations of CLH and asks what difference it might make to take the postmodern turn advocated by these authors.

Sociology and the Twenty-First Century: Breaking the Deadlock and Going Beyond the Postmodern Meta-reflection Through the Relational Paradigm

The fact that sociology was born during the period of the Industrial Revolution does not authorize us to consider its discourse as lacking in philosophical elements that are rooted in a previous age. Neither can we consider as fully accomplished its role for modernity, nonetheless today, in an after-modern climate (in the sense of Donati 2009), sociology is trying to escape the prejudice of modern ethics to go beyond the clichés of postmodernity (Ardigò 1989). Filled with self-reflexivity and reductionist dichotomies, the twenty-first-century sociologist feels the need to “own factual reality again” and to rediscover “a new metaphysics of the social world” (Donati 1993). If self-consciousness is in the world, sociology, perhaps, has to go beyond science and turn into “globology” (Arnason 1990), or into a sociology on a global scale, which looks at how world unification has occurred. In order to accomplish this, it has to be careful about what it was able to do best in the past: “to foresee and to enhance sustainable change,” to be aware of the “relational connections,” which no mathematics will ever be able to show, to build new “memes,” and to decide to accelerate or to go against the phenomena it encounters in its observation. Society in the twenty-first century will go beyond postmodern stagnation and turn into something new (After-modernity? Hyper-modernity? Trans-modernity?) if it is to be helped by the interpretations of sociology. Notwithstanding the endeavors to change, most Westernized countries are trapped in the lib-lab model, while China argues for a complete reconfiguration of the concepts of public and private, states and market, freedom and controls, copyright and copyleft. What is going to happen in the future? Are we going to fall into a technocratic and authoritarian form of neo-modernization? Are we going to rediscover the system of exchanging gifts? Are we going to create a fully “relational” society, going beyond the Hegelian categories of right and left? It will be the role of a “strong and relational” sociology to identify all the “viable” scenarios and to prepare its advent in symbolic terms.

A Revolution Reconsidered? Examining the Practice of Qualitative Research in Feminist Scholarship

One of feminism’s most notable objectives is to revolutionize the practice of empirical inquiry. Many feminist scholars have advocated the adoption of qualitative research methods based on standpoint epistemology as a means of reducing power imbalances and giving voice to participants. However, there has been little attempt to systematically address the extent to which qualitative methods have been integrated into feminist social science research. There are a number of key factors that suggest that such a review is both timely and relevant for a reflexive feminist inquiry. Numerous scholars have drawn attention to the rigid and onerous ethical demands that feminist qualitative methodologies may entail, and the postmodern turn has challenged feminist standpoint underpinnings by asserting the discursiveness and ephemerality of all knowledge and experience. This article assesses the impact of these epistemological and methodological challenges on the ways in which feminist qualitative research is undertaken by summarizing a content analysis of recent academic feminist literature. We ask whether qualitative research continues to predominate in feminist social science research and, if so, which methods, in particular, are most prominent. We characterize the overall epistemological and methodological trends and implications based on a sample of mainstream feminist social science journals, noting congruence and divergence in theoretical and methodological advances in the field.

The Contributions of Postmodernism to the Analysis of Virtual Worlds as a Consumption Experience. The Case of Second Life

In this paper, we examine the virtual life of Second Life avatars, which are simultaneously “consumed” and consumers. After a theoretical framing of the postmodern turn, the themes emerging from the qualitative analysis of individual and group interviews with residents of this virtual world and non-participating observation of blogs and discussion forums, reveal, sometimes in extreme ways, the presence of several features characteristic of postmodern consumption. For entrepreneurs interested in Second Life, the findings suggest adapting traditional strategies to this particular clientele.

Book Review: P. Vannini and J.P. Williams (eds) Authenticity in Culture, Self, and Society Ashgate, Aldershot, 2009, £60 hbk, 276 pp. ISBN: 978—0—7546—7516—7

The concept of authenticity lies, often unrecognized, at the heart of a good deal of cultural research and is a crucial ingredient of sociality. It is also a concept apparently straightforwardly undermined by simplistic barbs, centred on its supposed limited applicability to varieties of subculture research. Perhaps more tellingly, its’ sociological utility and relevance is largely seen to have collapsed in the wake of the cultural and postmodern turn; as in the perennial rhetorical seminar question, ‘what is authentic nowadays, anyway’? Such a query of course begs many more questions that it satisfactorily answers and suggests the need for a serious theoretical and empirical treatment of the topic. In their introductory chapter Vannini and Williams make it clear that their approach to this collection seeks to advance a social constructionist theory of authenticity. For them, and their collaborating authors, authenticity is something tacitly organized, performed and ultimately agreed upon by members within particular cultural settings and scenes. All this is not exactly new for cultural sociologists, but it is in the empirical and conceptual details where innovations and discoveries are made, and in the championing of the authentic as a viable and indeed central conceptual dimension of any account of social life. Such a task is attempted in the first third of the collection, which succeeds in establishing the conceptual and theoretical bases of authenticity and contains some particularly instructive and erudite contributions which situate the philosophical and theoretical bases of the concept in imaginative ways.

Digression, Ethical Work, and Salinger's Postmodern Turn

Many contributors to Wisconsin Studies in Contemporary Literature’s 1963 special issue on J.D. Salinger found themselves dealing with the sticky fact that his writing after The Catcher in the Rye (1951) had grown increasingly unconventional and, for numerous readers, off-putting. In the lead essay, for example, Ihab Hassan focused on ‘‘certain peculiarities of form in these stories, a form that is so asymmetrical, so tolerant of chance and digression, as to warrant the name of antiform’’ (5). Salinger’s asymmetries and digressions were of interest to Hassan because they exemplified a ‘‘new conception of form, particularly suitable to their vision, which is becoming rife in current literature’’ (6). Although today any critical attention paid to Salinger is centered almost exclusively on The Catcher in the Rye, it is worth asking how his later work could be representative of a new antiform becoming ‘‘rife’’ in American literature. This later work is indeed significant because its digressive sensibility can be read as a response to the influence of New Critical attitudes toward narrative fiction, which held that to be successful, fiction must exhibit a unity (‘‘The sense of wholeness or oneness’’) which digression would disrupt (Brooks and Warren, Understanding Fiction 608). 1 Salinger’s aesthetic, on the other hand, emphasized that far from being a rhetorical device that merely distracts from the main point of the work, digression could be significant in and of itself. In fact, insofar as his highly digressive work disrupts the sense of unity described by the New Criticism, it encourages readers to re-evaluate how they assign meaning and significance in and for the work, a task that amounts to what I will term ethical work. In its interest in antiform more broadly and digression specifically, Salinger’s later work, dismissed though it has been by those critics working from New Critical standards of evaluation, actually anticipates the postmodern turn of the later 1960s and beyond. This essay first describes a New Critical Steven Belletto is assistant professor of English and chair of the American Studies program at Lafayette College. His essays on postwar American literature and culture have appeared in such journals as American Quarterly, ELH, Clio, and Criticism. His book, No Accident, Comrade: Chance and Design in Cold War American Narratives, is forthcoming from Oxford University Press.

Do We Need a Postmodern Anthropology for Mission in a Postcolonial World?

Abstract There was a time when mission studies benefitted from a symbiotic relationship with the social sciences. However, it appears that relationship has stagnated and now is waning. The argument is made here, in the case of cultural anthropology both in Europe and the United States, that a once mutually beneficial though sometimes strained relationship has suffered a parting of the ways in recent decades. First, the article reviews the relationships between missionaries and anthropologists before World War II when it was possible to be a ‘missionary anthropologist’ with a foot in both disciplines. In that period, the conversation went two ways with missionary anthropologists making important contributions to anthropology. Then, the article reviews some aspects of the development of the two disciplines after World War II when increasing professionalism in both disciplines and a postmodern turn in anthropology took the disciplines in different directions. Finally, the article asks whether or not the conversation, and thus the cross-fertilization, can be restarted, especially since the youngest generation of anthropologists has recognized the reality of local Christianities in their fields of study.

The Dadaist Prose of Williams and Cummings: <i>A Novelette</i> and [<i>No Title</i>

The Dadaist Prose of Williams and Cummings: A Novelette and [No Title] Antonio Ruiz One of the most famous and polemic catalogues in postmodern theory was proposed by Ihab Hassan in his study of postmodernism: Modernism Postmodernism Romanticism/Symbolism Pataphysics/Dadaism Form (conjunctive, closed) Antiform (disjunctive, open) Purpose Play Design Chance Hierarchy Anarchy Mastery/Logos Exhaustion/Silence Art Object/Finished Work Process/Performance/Happening Distance Participation Creation/Totalization Decreation/Deconstruction Synthesis Antithesis Presence Absence Centering Dispersal (Dismemberment 267–68) These often quoted dichotomies have always attracted my attention, particularly the first one, as it represents a Damocles sword constantly threatening the claim of originality promoted by the high priests of postmodernism. Even Hassan himself has recognized the avant-garde spirit of the concept he is trying to define: “But if much of modernism appears hieratic, hypotactical, and formalist, postmodernism strikes us by contrast as playful, paratactical, and deconstructionist. In this it recalls [End Page 101] the irreverent spirit of the avant-garde, and so carries sometimes the label of neoavant-garde” (Postmodern Turn 121). The case of Dada’s inclusion in the cataloguing of postmodern traits is significant. Dada was a movement of reaction against the rationalist tradition of Western thought (Rubin, 1967). Tzara said that “Dada doubts all” (Tzara 92). Similarly, deconstructive postmodern thought is seen by some as nihilistic: “it partakes of uncertainty and doubt, and accepts ambiguity” (Sanouillet 226). Like Dada, postmodernism is defined by rejection: “The rejection of all-encompassing, teleological theories of human and social change associated with Enlightenment ideas about reason and progress” (Locher, 1999). Postmodernism also strives to achieve other major goals: “linking claims about social life, human nature, and criteria of truth and validity with strategies of power; and replacing the emphasis on subject and consciousness with an emphasis on language as intersubjective” (Locher, 1999). Like David Locher, I also claim that these goals were previously proposed by Dada. The Dadaists, for example, believed that meaning was arbitrary. As language signified nothing, it could be manipulated in any way desired (Richter, 1965). They also believed that there is no absolute truth and abolished the distinction between the concepts of high and low (or popular) art and culture. As a matter of fact, most of the features assigned to postmodernism can also be applied to Dadaism (paraphysics/Dadaism, chance, antiform, play, anarchy, exhaustion/silence, performance, participation, deconstruction, antithesis, absence, dispersal, combination, against interpretation . . .).1 My intention in proposing these parallels is not to suggest the lack of originality of prior proposals in the field of postmodernist theory but rather to reflect upon the debt that postmodernism, as also modernism, owes this avant-garde movement. Dada “was neither a school nor a movement but rather an essentially chaotic phenomenon that cut across art forms and national boundaries” (Tashjian xii). Zurich, Berlin, Cologne, Paris, and Hanover are some of the cities that are usually mentioned in relation to Dadaism. However, “even before the highly publicized activities at the Cabaret Voltaire in Zurich in 1916, a loosely organized collection of New York avant-garde artists offended the New York critics with their antics and their suspiciously foreign names—Benjamin de Casseres, Jean Crotti, Marius de Zayas, Marcel Duchamp, Francis Picabia—” (Schmidt 92).2 These artists were associated with Walter Arensberg’s circle and connected with Stieglitz’s gallery and his magazine Camera Work. Eventually they founded several short-lived little magazines, including Picabia’s 391, de Zaya’s 291, Man Ray’s TNT, and Man Ray and Duchamp’s The Blind Man and New York Dada. These magazines preceded the release of other publications, edited by Americans, that flirted with Dadaism. I refer, for example, to Broom and Secession. In these magazines, writers like E. E. [End Page 102] Cummings, William Carlos Williams, and Mina Loy found an ideal forum in which to publish their most radical writing. The relation of Williams and Cummings with Dadaism is complex, replete with curiosities and contradictions. In the case of Williams—although it can also be said of Cummings—the desire to affirm his American identity—Whitman’s “barbaric yawp”—led him to take on the anti-art Dadaist attitudes and use them to break from structures and conventions...

Michel Foucault's archaeology of knowledge and economic discourse

The literature in economic methodology has witnessed an increase in the number of studies which, drawing upon the postmodern turn in social sciences, pay serious attention to the non-epistemological-discursive elements of economic theorizing. This recent work on the "economic discourse" has thus added a new dimension to economic methodology by analyzing various discursive aspects of the construction of scientific meanings in economics. Taking a similar stance, this paper explores Michel Foucault's archaeological analysis of scientific discourses. It aims to show that his archaeological reading of the history of economic thought provides an articulate non-epistemological framework for the analysis of the discursive elements in the history of economics and contemporary economic theorizing.

Rumi: Teachings (review)

Reviewed by: Rumi: Teachings James Bockmier Rumi: Teachings. Edited by Sayed Gahreman Safavi. London: London Academy of Iranian Studies, 2008. Pp. 292. Rumi: Teachings, edited by Sayed Gahreman Safavi, is a collection of two dozen or so thematically linked essays from various authors, among whom are some of the established names in the field of Islamic philosophy including Nasr, Chittick, and Leaman. All the essays proved to be equally rewarding to this reader. The editor groups them into five sections titled as follows: "Principles and Style," "The Structure and Methodology of Mathnawi," "The Relationship between Man and God," "Love in Mawlawi Rumi's Works," and "The Interrelation and Influence of Mawlawi with and upon other Scholars." This book is as concerned with Rumi's poetic teaching methods as with his doctrinal teachings. For at least one reader this is a welcome departure from whatever expectations the title engenders. While most of the two dozen or so essays deal primarily with the subject matter and themes of Rumi's poetry, a number of what may well be the most intriguing contributions focus on its form, structure, and composition. Prima facie this may appear to be of interest only to the literary specialist, and even then nothing particularly earth-shattering. After all, this is the sort of stuff so much literary criticism dwells upon generally (albeit somewhat less so since the discipline's postmodern turn). Yet such a response neglects one crucial variable: Rumi's reputation for "unstructured" and "formless" poetry. Normally, calling poetry "unstructured" and "formless" might as well equate to calling it "bad." Given the universal acclaim affording Rumi the status of a great poet, this would make him an exception to what should be a truly exceptionless rule. However, the essays in this volume explain that this is only an apparent exception. In recent years researchers at the School of Oriental and African Studies at the University of London have uncovered a "macro-compositional" pattern in Rumi's Mathnawi. This pattern appears on a number of different structural levels (as in fractal "self-similarity") and is empirically testable—it has, in fact, passed many such tests. The pattern itself is a symmetrical arrangement of parallel passages, much like an "arch form" in musical composition. For instance, Weightman's essay analyzes the structure of Mathnawi's first discourse (comprising its first nine sections) as A-B-C-D-E-D*-C*-B*-A*. Unfortunately, the essays addressing the aesthetic structure of Rumi's poetry are rather distinct from those addressing the doctrinal dimensions. Little in this collection links the two. Yet the SOAS researchers' findings may perhaps have as great a potential for contributing to our understanding of the philosophy of Rumi's poetics as the art of Rumi's poetry. One best makes such a strong, organic connection between the two for Muslims and other religiously or spiritually oriented people who see art as a [End Page 551] means rather than an end, an instrumental good conducive to God-qua-Sumum-Bonum. An autonomist approach of pure aestheticism fails to ascend the ladder of Beauty, but stops to permanently admire a single rung. Meanwhile, a purely philosophic or religious approach to criticism may climb other ladders toward God, yet neglect the one that art best and most directly serves. At least in art objects, as hylomorphic beings, beauty reveals itself as a property of form and—more specifically—of proportion. Plotinus made sharp and astute criticisms of the idea of the beauty-means-proportion doctrine as it precludes the beauty of the simple and immaterial. However, at least at the level of hylomorphic objects (natural or artistic), the doctrine appears sound. The trick is correlating the proportion doctrine with the insights of Plotinus. The words of the medieval Christian Neoplatonist philosopher Robert Grosseteste—as Umberto Eco quotes him in the Aesthetics of Thomas Aquinas—appear to do so beautifully: [Light] is beautiful in itself, for its nature is simple and all of it is there at once. Wherefore it is integrated in the highest degree and most harmoniously proportioned and equal to itself, for beauty is a harmony of proportions.1 According to Grosseteste's example of light (standing...

Positioning Oneself Within an Epistemology: Refining Our Thinking About Integrative Approaches

Integrative approaches seem to be paramount in the current climate of family therapy and other psychotherapies. However, integration between and among theories and practices can only occur within a specific epistemology. This article makes a distinction between three different epistemologies: individualizing, systems, and poststructural. It then makes the argument that one can integrate theories within epistemologies and one can adopt practices and some theoretical concepts across theories and across epistemologies, but that it is impossible to integrate theories across epistemologies. It further states that although social constructionism has influenced much of contemporary psychological thinking, because of the divergence between a structural and a poststructural approach, constructionism looks different depending upon one's epistemological stance. Examples of integration within epistemologies and of what looks like integration across epistemologies (but is not) further illustrate these important distinctions. The conclusions reached here are crucial to our philosophical considerations, our pedagogical assumptions, and implications for both research and a reflexive clinical practice.

Do Androids Dream of Anna Karenina?

Do Androids Dream of Anna Karenina? Jeffrey R. Di Leo, Editor and Publisher In an age where the classic literary masterpieces have lost their cache, who would have thought that a book series based in the classics of Western literature would be a publishing mega-success? Note: these classics are not your great-grandfather's classics, but no one seems to be complaining. In 2009, Quirk Books launched Quirk Classics, a series of books which aims—in the words of their mission statement—"To enhance classic novels with pop culture phenomena." The books in this series intermingle "the work of classic literary masters with new scenes of horrific creatures and grue-some action." Fortunately for the publishers, all of the works they blend are already in the public domain. Consequently, Quirk is free to publish them in whatever form they see fit—or perhaps more accurately, whatever form they see sales. And they do. The first volume in the series, Pride and Prejudice and Zombies, released in April of 2009, has become wildly popular. According to the Guardian, in a little over a year, over 50,000 copies have been sold in the UK—and 600,000 copies in the US. In addition, a film version starring and produced by Natalie Portman is already in the works. A few weeks ago, the latest installment in the series, Android Karenina, was released. According to the promotional materials for the book, "As in the original novel, our story follows two relationships: the tragic adulterous romance of Anna Karenina and Count Alexei Vronsky, and the much more hopeful marriage of Nikolai Levin and Kitty Shcherbatskaya." However, as with the other novels in the series, the book then takes a decidedly postmodern turn by having the four "live in a steampunk-inspired 19th century of mechanical butlers, extraterrestrial-worshiping cults, and airborne debutante balls." Leo Tolstoy believed that one could not add or delete sentences from his novels without a resultant change in meaning. One can safely assume that deleting large sections of the novel and replacing them with text from contemporary writer Ben H. Winters would probably horrify him. But even though Tolstoy would not see the blending of his classic as preserving in some way the meaning of his novel, others might. The contemporary critic Hans-Georg Gadamer believed that meaning is never exhausted by the intentions of the author—even if the author was Tolstoy. For Gadamer, interpretation of literary works from the past necessarily involves a dialogue with the present. One might argue then that "mashing-up" of classic voices from the past with ones from the present is the kind of dialogue that epitomizes the fusion of horizons that Gadamer believes is typical of productive understanding. By bringing Tolstoy into dialogue with present concerns and interests, the Quirk Classics are literally doing the cultural work necessary for understanding the past. Regardless of how these mash-up novels square up with their originals, they are bringing an entirely new audience to authors like Jane Austen and Tolstoy. What is also clear it that this new audience wants more of the present—and less of the past—in these classics. For example, the first novel in the series, Pride and Prejudice and Zombies, was 85 percent vintage Austen. Readers however complained that this was too much Austen—that they wanted more zombies in the novel. Let the monsters multiply. Subsequent volumes correct this by straying further from the original. Sense and Sensibility and Sea Monsters (2009), for example, maintains the plot lines of the original as well as many of the more well-known passages, but also replaces much more of the original text than Pride and Prejudice and Zombies. Estimates put over 40 percent of this mash-up novel as new material, which Publishers Weekly says replaces vintage Austen dialogue with "monsters, vulgarity, and violence." Now that we know that people are interested in recombined classics, and that there is a legitimate way to make them dialogue in a significant way with present concerns and interests, why not expand efforts to mash-up the classics, particularly if we still believe that they are the centerpiece of a liberal education? Harvard...

From Le roi des aulnes to Sweetness: The Allegory of St. Christopher

This article examines the legend of St. Christopher (the Christ carrier) as an allegory of the postmodern critique of logocentrism through readings of two novels: Michel Tournier's Le roi des aulnes (1970) and Torgny Lindgren's Sweetness (Hummelhonung, 1995). In the first, the saint becomes an emblem of Nazism as an inversion of the “proper” relationship between truth and power; in the second, he becomes emblematic of representation itself. St. Christopher's entry into contemporary fiction coincides with the “postmodern turn” toward an emphasis on the signifier (the “carrier” of the Logos) at the expense of the signified (the “carried,” Logos). St. Christopher's status as an emblem of the “postmodern turn” continues in two Hollywood cameos, in Norman Jewison's The Statement (2003) and Paul Haggis's Crash (2005). In all of these representations, St. Christopher retains the status of an allegorical emblem of the postmodern battle between truth and power, and between subjectivity and agency.

Living in the Theme Park: A Textual Tour of Savannah’s Public Squares

About the Paper In drafting this essay, the author has counter-posed two compositional strategies, one based on conventional rhetorical structures, founded in enlightenment concepts of sequential logic, rationality, and isomorphism—i.e., the standard, academically sanctioned thesis essay form, proceeding in an orderly and hierarchical manner from head (main idea) through body (detailed breakdown and investigation of thesis points— equivalent to scientific testing or proof of an initial hypothesis/proposal, deploying transitions and focal topics to govern and control the content of each subsequent investigative unit (paragraph). From this perspective, the essay structure is very much the rhetorical double of the city plan it proposes to elucidate. Working against this more panoptically controlled hierarchical structure, is a postmodern turn toward [Internet] wwwbased, non-sequential organization. Hence, certain sections of the essay are potentially arrived at via mock-URLs, suggesting the tentative, self-consciously constructed, unnatural nature of the smoothly flowing logical structure; at any moment, a different link could be selected, interrupting/disrupting/complicating the logical and sequential arrangement. Also along these alinear lines are bolded fragments of text, suggesting an associational pattern of connectivity among images and ideas destabilizing and rendering motile the more static, rationally secured surface of the final product.