Utopian Possibilities Research Articles

Utopian Visions in Cold War Documentary : Joris Ivens, Paul Robeson and Song of the Rivers (1954)

This essay reconsiders several documentary projects in film and photography that sought to articulate utopian possibilities at the height of the Cold War, when ideological imperatives constrained artists of all political persuasions. The central art work is Joris Ivens’ Song of the Rivers (1954), which is analysed and then juxtaposed to Edward Steichen’s Family of Man (1955) photography exhibition. In seeking to reclaim the textual complexity and dialectics of Ivens’ work, this analysis looks at the personal narratives that are threaded through the film’s epic aspirations. Involving Ivens and Paul Robeson, these narratives mobilize the trope of the river that recurs in both Soviet film and Robeson’s performances. Ivens and Robeson both returned to, and so refigured, elements of Song of the Rivers in two much smaller and more intimate film projects : Ivens’ La Seine a rencontré Paris ( The Seine Meets Paris, 1957) and Robeson’s Brücke über den Ozean ( Bridge Over the Ocean, 1958), made with Earl Robinson.

The Footprint of the Twentieth Century: The American Skyscraper and the Modernist Poem

In the early 1910s, a vastly divergent range of American poets suddenly embraced the milieu of the machine-age metropolis-a shift as crucial to poetry's modernist rejuvenation as the adoption of new formal techniques. The most potent and yet paradoxical icon of this decade's urban verse was the skyscraper, which both promised its "cliff-dwelling" inhabitants a rationalist modernity without boundaries, and created a body of hermetic knowledge beyond most people's comprehension. Some verses read skyscrapers as symbols of capitalist depersonalization, others as loci of utopian possibility. Many see them as liminal, offering access to new dimensions of experience or knowledge-yet still wonder whether their transformative power will carry humans places we would want to inhabit.

German Women for Empire, 1884-1945 (review)

Reviewed by: German Women for Empire, 1884–1945 Lara Kriegel German Women for Empire, 1884–1945. By Lora Wildenthal. Durham: Duke University Press, 2002. Scholars have faced two challenges in writing the histories of Germany’s modern empire. First, students of other empires have dismissed the German story as “too late and too brief” to provide effective points of comparison. Second, the ascent of the Nazi racial state has overshadowed earlier developments. By adopting insights and approaches from the “new imperial history” that have proven so fruitful for the British case, and more recently for the French, Dutch, and Belgian stories, Lora Wildenthal invigorates the German experience and places it firmly on the map of imperial scholarship. Her groundbreaking and engaging monograph rejects the two constricting options of limited relevance or seeming overdetermination in favor of “political ambiguity” (8). Wildenthal addresses colonialism’s ambiguity by focusing on the role of women as both “symbols and agents” of Germany’s imperial project (1). A feminist historian and an archival pioneer, she examines texts produced by German colonialist women, including travel journals, fiction, records of voluntary organizations, and personal correspondence. Wildenthal mobilizes these texts to address the rise, development, and persistence of imperialism’s gendered politics between 1885 and 1945. The five chapters of her monograph deftly and provokingly traverse the imperial domains of the intimate, the civic, and the governmental. Wildenthal locates the first successful strategy for German women’s imperial activity in a secular nationalist version of nursing; she examines the life and the writings of Frieda von Bülow, who looked, albeit in frustration, to empire as a way out of a conventional middle-class femininity; she analyzes the foreclosure of interracial marriage and the resulting ascent of white German women to the status of “necessary partners” in colonialism (130); she traces women’s own adoption and adaptation of this role, exemplified by the figure of the farmersfrau; and she tracks the persistence of a gendered imperial sentiment in the face of Germany’s unique history of forced decolonization and Nazism. This persistence is exemplified by the Colonial School for Women, which inculcated a sense of rational domesticity in its students until 1945. Wildenthal casts the Colonial School as the “final setting” for German women’s “dreams of freedom as independent colonizers” (200). Her characterization of the Colonial School points to one of the central themes and intellectual contributions of the text. Wildenthal echoes scholars of modern British imperialism, including Antoinette Burton, Philippa Levine, and Angela Woollacott, who have demonstrated the fraught nature of empire as a generator of political possibilities for women. Wildenthal pushes this discussion in a fruitful direction through her conception of “colonial space.” Material and imaginary realms located “far from Germany’s social strife,” the colonies appeared as utopias offering economic opportunity, sexual freedom, or political agency (3). However, as the case of Frieda von Bülow demonstrates so well, women of all classes frequently found the “fantasyland” of colonial space foreclosed by ideological and intimate contests with German men (201). A provocative contribution to colonial history, Wildenthal’s analysis of colonial space as a geographical and imaginary realm bears similarities to Mrinalini Sinha’s notion of “imperial social formation.” Her text might benefit by directly addressing Sinha’s rubric. Such an engagement would intensify a dialogue with other colonial histories, press the significance of Wildenthal’s own conception, and foreground gender—rather than women—as one of the text’s analytical categories. It was not only “imperial patriarchy” that transformed the utopian possibilities of colonial space, but also the “continuous intensification of racism” as a governing colonial logic (201). In another crucial interpretive line, Wildenthal charts the development of a twentieth-century racism based on “blood percentages” that usurped the nineteenth-century constellation of “morality, rights, upbringing, and appearance” (93). Colonial policy did not instantiate a “sharp boundary line” of race until the early twentieth century, when legislation prohibiting race mixing proliferated (47). While it protected male sexual privilege, such legislation restricted the radical possibilities of colonialism. This partnership between race and gender privilege did not exclude white German women from colonial space. Instead, it simultaneously increased and regimented their roles. As the “helpmeets...

Desert Pilgrim

After the crisis of representation, alternative forms of research representation have appeared increasingly within the social sciences. This poem with accompanying photographs is based on consumer research fieldwork conducted in 1999 at the Burning Man project, a countercultural and antimarketing event that occurs annually near Gerlach, Nevada. Incorporating informant interview data, the poem is intended to reflexively capture some of the emotional intensity, creative, Utopian and self-transformative possibilities of attending the event, and to simultaneously reflect upon the self-conscious tensions inherent in ethnographic fieldwork.

From kino-eye to anime -eye/ ai : the filmed and the animated in Imamura Taihei's media theory

As a contribution to the new critical work on animation and new media, this article re-animates the forgotten Japanese philosopher of media Imamura Taihei. Imamura'swork of the late 1930s and 1940s is not only the first attempt in Japanese to conceptualize the difference between film and animation, but his two major works Theory of Animation (1948) and Theory of Documentary Film (1940) represent the earliest philosophical attempt to think through the difference between film and animation in any language. Tracking Imamura's deployment of the notion of the filmed and the animated through these two books, I attempt to demonstrate the utility of these concepts for contemporary understandings of digital phenomena of all kinds. Imamura's analysis advances current understanding of visual media in that he shows the ways in which filmed and animated images are immanent to shifts in capitalism. In so doing, he provides a framework that, with just a small upgrade, can be redeployed to configure the visual logics of the so-called new economy and e-commerce. Finally, although Imamura reads animation as in some sense epiphenomenal to Fordism and Taylorism, he also provides critical maps and escape routes from these capitalist techniques by arguing that animation points to utopian possibilities beyond and between regimes that demand the extraction of surplus from disciplined, laboring bodies.

Making Jews, Making Culture: The Poetics and Politics of Identity

A Right to Sing the Blues: African Americans, Jews, and American Popular Song. By Jeffrey Melnick. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1999. 277 pages. $29.95 (cloth). $16.95 (paper). The Temple of Culture: Assimilation and Anti-Semitism in Literary Anglo-America. By Jonathan Freedman. New York: Oxford University Press, 2000. 264 pages. $45.00 (cloth). In his 1955 book Protestant-Catholic-Jew, the sociologist of religion Will Herberg commented on the post-World War II rise in synagogue membership, particularly "In the smaller towns and in the suburbs." He noted that: In the city, living in a "Jewish" neighborhood, one may unconsciously continue to accept one's Jewishness in residual terms of ethnic "belonging"; in the suburbs and in most smaller towns this is no longer possible: one must begin to think "seriously" of his Jewishness, and the only possible outcome of such thinking in present-day America is identification with the Jewish religious community, frequently leading to affiliation with the synagogue. 1 Contrary to standard narratives of postwar assimilation-as-deracination, Herberg proposes that third-generation Jews actually became, in some respects, more Jewish than their parents as a result of their move to the suburbs. "Jewishness," in this account, emerges as a particular thing--as an identity--in the absence of the quotidian framework provided by the urban Jewish neighborhood. [End Page 553] Jeffrey Melnick tells a related story in A Right to Sing the Blues, his new book about the relationship between Jews and African Americans in the music industry of the early twentieth century. Melnick presents his account as a prehistory of "Black-Jewish relations," which he contends "needs to be approached--not exclusively, but still significantly--as a story told by Jews about interracial relations." 2 This discourse emerges as a recognizable phenomenon, Melnick argues, in the late 1960s, just as relationships between the two groups were breaking down under pressure of increasing "economic disparity" and "different levels of cultural power." 3 In the face of this widening gap--which Karen Brodkin and George Lipsitz have related to suburbanization and other material events in the postwar United States 4 --"Black-Jewish relations" emerged as a "romantic tale about the relative unimportance of class status in melting pot America." 5 With its "basic plot . . . about the comparative suffering of Jews and Blacks," 6 the discourse of black-Jewish relations mobilized another potent identity formation--this one grounded in canons of "authentic" suffering--in order to "argue[ ] for the utopian (post-class or trans-class) possibilities of liberal democracy." 7 Thinking about these issues usefully refines our conception of identity politics. This seems particularly necessary at the current moment because the project of identity politics has recently taken a number of hits--not, as it happens, from the right, but from other factions of the left. From the liberal left, scholars such as Walter Benn Michaels and Ross Posnock have argued that identity politics, like the early twentieth-century cultural pluralism it grew out of, reproduces the logic of the "racialist, nativist thinking" it sets out to repudiate. 8 From the Marxist left, meanwhile, Rosemary Hennessy has repeated the longstanding assertion that political movements grounded in identity categories like race, gender, and sexuality fail to recognize the "determining force" of class and thus run the risk of commodified complicity with neo-liberal capitalism. 9 Both these lines of argument make key points about the project of identity politics that dominated the American left roughly from the late 1960s through the late 1990s, in particular taking to task identity politics' problematic tendencies towards either rigid essentialism or the facile celebration of diversity. It may be, though, that the critique of identity politics has become reflexive enough in the contemporary academy to itself raise suspicions. At the very least, we need to press [End Page 554] critics of identity politics to complicate their object of study in ways that they have not done. Certainly Michaels...

Deleuzism: A Metacommentary (review)

Reviewed by: Deleuzism: A Metacommentary Kalliopi Nikolopoulou Ian Buchanan. Deleuzism: A Metacommentary. Durham, NC: Duke UP, 2000. 209 pp. Deleuzism addresses two questions: “How should we read Deleuze?” and “How should we read with Deleuze?” (196). As such, the book navigates two different—if not even opposed—courses. It presents a philosophical exegesis, and at the same time it translates (or transcodes, in its terminology) a philo-sophical method into cultural studies. This latter sociopolitical application often surfaces under the philosophical alias of “transcendental empiricism,” and the book’s underlying premise is that philosophy should be understood in the Marxian sense of praxis, a “chosen tool” for the “transformation of the society itself” (32). Indeed, the figure of the twofold is prominent throughout. The book opens with a claim that every written book has a silent, unwritten twin, and it concludes by inscribing Deleuze within a dialectical tradition, albeit an anti-Hegelian one that resists the third moment of synthesis. Both these claims spring from Deleuze’s and Buchanan’s dislike of what they see as philosophical expressionism—the attempt to bridge two incommensurable registers (psychoanalysis’s manifestation of the latent, Platonism’s representation of the origin, and Hegel’s correspondence of appearance to reality). Although this wholesale critique is debatable (Lacan, for instance, is all but blind to the excess of the signifier), Buchanan’s charge against expressionism begins with an eloquent claim shared by Deleuze, Melville, Borges, and Blanchot: “Every writer writes two books . . . one for which we need only ink, and another which is inscribed in blood and anguish on our soul” (3). A belief in expression, for Buchanan, “amounts to thinking one can read the book of the soul in the book written in ink, which cannot be done because that book, as Blanchot said, is defined by its absence” (3). However, Buchanan immediately concedes this strongest of his claims by bypassing Blanchot’s radicalism and admitting to “still want[ing] to read that other book” (3). His term for this “new hermeneutic” of reading absence is Deleuzism. If not expressionist in its interpretive devices, Buchanan’s surmounting of unreadability is still expressionist in its motivation and desire. The author remains tempted by the translation into ink, since otherwise he would have to betray his Deleuzian loyalty to immanence —readability as empiricism’s imperative call—for a transcendental and infinite sense of absence. Worse, despite the pessimism Buchanan sees in Deleuze, such [End Page 213] a position would be a truly pessimist one, for it would deny any utopian impulse the author also attaches to Deleuze’s thought. Politics cannot rely on unreadability, and in the last instance the book must instrumentalize its most radical claim and sacrifice the anti-expressionist Deleuze to get to the political Deleuze. In reading this “other book,” Deleuzism attempts a systematization and historicization of the “private” categories and style of Deleuze while showing how this privacy can be mobilized toward transformative readings of culture: for example, Deleuze’s “becoming-woman” read as the utopian possibility of a universe beyond gender difference, or the relation of desire and schizophrenia to capitalism in analyses of Blade Runner, the Bonaventure Hotel, and popular music. At times, Deleuze’s figure recedes behind these analyses, which seem more responses to or defenses of Jamesonian cultural studies. In particular, the analysis of the relation between capitalism and schizophrenia develops problematically. Schizophrenia, for Deleuze an unsynthesizable disjunction and a genuine mode of resistance against capitalism (and perhaps against Hegelian totalization) is at the same time the very mechanism through which capitalism proliferates its flows. Schizophrenia is loudly applauded as the most privileged and “pure” act of resistance against capitalism (164) and only grudgingly recognized as capitalism’s most growing investment (162). He criticizes the fragility of capitalism, which demands the regulation of the very flows, currents, and currency that make it possible, implying with Deleuze a privileging of schizophrenic disjunction, yet Buchanan’s own continuing investment in the Deleuzian vocabulary of “flows” and “schizzes” reaches here its own need for damming and channeling. Without either justifying the conditions of capitalism or dismissing the revolutionary potential of the pathologized, it seems that only a somewhat controlled hydrography could...

"The Night Witch Did It": Villainy and Narrative in the Leo Frank Case

This essay uses the example of the Leo Frank case to get at the central question of black-Jewish relations: how have African Americans and Jews (frequently through their diverse reified images as blackness and Jewishness) been paired—as part- ners or competitors or some blend thereof—within the control- ling American racial system of black and white? With its pitting of a Jewish factory manager (Leo Frank) against the factory's African-American janitor (Jim Conley) in a contest to decide who was responsible for the murder of young Mary Phagan in a factory managed by Frank in 1913, the case is a perfect emblem for the erratic and dense history of Jews and African Ameri- cans, a history that might be condensed in the image of a long and sturdy rope—some tie strong bonds with it; others get hanged. My investigation of the Frank case is meant to call into question the obsessive narrativizing of black-Jewish relations; a new look at this matter will destabilize those narratives of a shared black-Jewish history that are organized around an unten- able concept of a rational unfolding of a sequence of clearly de- fined events. Rather than the utopian possibilities so often pre- sented by accounts of black-Jewish relations, the Frank case promoted the provocative notion that this specialized interracial association functioned mostly to advance illicit (or at least un- healthy) social behaviors. 1 For instance, at Frank's trial and in the media coverage and folklore surrounding it, it was argued that Frank had been committing perverse acts in the National Pencil Company factory he managed while Conley served as his lookout. The perversion charges made against Frank (with Con- ley as his accomplice) show clearly how an insistence upon a relationship between an African American and a Jew—even one that might have been imaginary—could be used to marginalize

Cães Canibais, Homens Simiescos, Harmonia da Criação. Representações da Alteridade na Alemanha do Século XVIII

The paper deals with the representation of otherness in 18th Century Germany. Departing from an episode narrated in Georg Forster’s account of James Cook’s second voyage around the world, attention is paid to the way in which an uncanny experience for Europeans - eating dog food - is narrated, and translated according to European discursive premises. The analysis of Forster’s considerations on the relativity of customs, on what is to be attributed to nature or culture, on what is to be considered innate or acquired provide the departing point for the reconstruction (and questioning) of strategies of representing of otherness. In the following parts, diverse ways of representing otherness are briefly analyzed (anatomical studies, collections of bodies and artifacts in natural history cabinets) and emphasis is put on the way in which non-European peoples are always ultimately the object of a process of reification. The scientific implications of Contemporary debates on race are also taken into account, namely the controversy between Georg Forster and Kant. The tension between ethnographie empiricism (Forster) and anthropological rationalism (Kant) is stressed and brought onto relation with the Enlightenment discourse on the “Other”. The conclusion focuses on the limits and utopian possibilities of the Enlightenment discourse, by juxtaposing it to the critique of Western rationalism as proposed by postcolonial studies.

Falling into Theory: Simulation, Terraformation, and Eco-Economics in Kim Stanley Robinson's Martian Trilogy

Falling into Theory: Simulation, Terraformation, and Eco-Economics in Kim Stanley Robinson’s Martian Trilogy Robert Markley (bio) In the introduction to Future Primitive: The New Ecotopias, an anthology of “green” science fiction stories, Kim Stanley Robinson defines science fiction as “a collection of thought experiments that propose scenarios of the future. . . . They are historical simulations . . . images, endlessly reiterated, [that] have come to form in our imagination a kind of consensus vision of the future” (9). In his own novels, as well as in this collection, Robinson offers alternatives to the genre’s “consensus vision” of humankind “as the last organic units in [the] denatured, metallic, clean, and artificial world” of a cyber-engineered future (9). In place of this denatured vision, Robinson urges his readers to explore the utopian possibilities of “cobbl[ing] together aspects of the postmodern and the paleolithic” in a “future primitive” that might best be described as an ecocentric turn toward holism (11). This “future primitive,” he implies, can serve as a powerful analytic to reveal—and indeed to gesture beyond—the forms of alienation that [End Page 773] structure and are structured by the deep-seated antiecological values and assumptions characteristic of western thought (9–10). In this context, Robinson’s Martian trilogy, Red Mars (1993), Green Mars (1994), and Blue Mars (1996), constitutes a sustained, theoretically sophisticated attempt to conjure into being a future that resists the romantic dystopianism of cyberpunk, the antitechnological bias of much “green” literature, and the blanket denunciations of capitalist technoscience that have become popular in some left-wing circles. Taken together, though, the three novels demonstrate just how complex a notion “utopia” can become. The “future primitive” that Robinson envisions both exploits and critiques what Don Ihde has called the “doubled desire” of technology (75): technology presents itself as a crucial means to empowerment by allowing humankind to control nature and improve the quality of life; however, the promises that it offers—pleasure, plenty, and self-actualization—ironically render it transparent. Massive investments of labor, capital, and resources, in other words, offer us enhanced versions of a “natural,” pre-technological existence (Ihde 76). In his Martian trilogy, the politics of this doubled desire lead Robinson to explore the consequences of people struggling “to yoke together impossible opposites” (Green Mars 229): mind and body, spirit and matter, nature and culture, and biosphere and technoscience. In the process, his novels call into question two of the constitutive fictions of modernity: the separation of nature and culture and the consequent privileging of contemporary technoculture at the expense of a devalued, technologically primitive past (see Latour 99–100). Robinson’s comments in his introduction to Future Primitive encourage us to consider science fiction as a genre of ideas: sci-fi does not represent historical experience but generates simulations of what that experience may become. This distinction between representation and simulation is crucial to understanding his Martian trilogy as a theoretical intervention in late-twentieth-century debates about ecology, economics, and technology. If representation, as Lacan suggests, is predicated on a fundamental lack, if it entails “the murder of the thing,” simulation, as Steven Shaviro argues, “precedes its object: it doesn’t imitate or stand in for a given thing, but provides a program for generating it. The simulacrum is the birth of the thing, rather than its death” (Doom Patrols). In Shaviro’s sense, the “utopian” possibilities of science fiction occupy a register of simulation: they give imaginative form to the [End Page 774] desire to think beyond the contradictions of historical existence and, as the etymology of the word suggests, beyond our location in time, culture, and geography. Brought into the regime of representation, utopian schemes are always in the process, as Robinson suggests in a chapter title in Red Mars, of “falling into history,” undone by the distance between the idealized operations of a frictionless system and the wear and tear of embodied, historical existence. 1 Utopias can best be understood, then, as expressions of their creators’ (and their cultures’) desires to conjure into being the imaginary conditions which would allow humankind to transcend what the logic of simulation dictates must be an originary alienation—an alienation at once ecological...

Van Gogh's progress: utopia, modernity, and late-nineteenth-century art

This analysis of the life and work of Vincent Van Gogh aims to represent the artist as a determined modern professional, rather than the image of the tortured romantic hero that is common to art history. The author discusses what she sees as a Utopian idealism infusing both the artist's life and his paintings. She looks at Van Gogh's career from 1882 to 1890 through six utopian projects or professional schemes, each embodying a specific societal crisis for Van Gogh's generation: women and sexuality, rural artisan, republican citizanry, professional identity, the burgeoning art market, and the construction of a modern rural ideal. The author aims to reveal how each endeavour, as Van Gogh treated it, offered a vision of utopian possibility. She also analyzes broader historical problems encountered by all avant-garde artisits of the late-19th century.

Playtexts: Ludics in Contemporary Literature (review)

L'Esprit Créateur major players such as Benjamin, de Man, Freud, de Certeau, Ricœur, Kristeva, Quilligan, and a host of others makes her book read at times like a compendium of twentieth-century literary thought and threatens on occasion to overshadow her own insights, a number of stimulating connections are established. Murphy finds fertile analytic ground in the coincidence of Walter Benjamin's views on history and allegory with Gracq's own, as presented in his fiction and critical essays. Independent of each other, but witnessing the same historical events of the first half of the century, "each is caught in the dialectic between a future of catastrophe and a future of Utopian possibilities" (56). Likewise, an examination of Gracq's admiration for Jiinger's Sur les falaises de marbre illuminates the allegorical function of the emblematic in his own novels. In the second half of her study, Murphy concentrates on the allegorization of history (Hitler's rise to power and the drôle de guerre) in Le Rivage des Syrtes and Un balcon en forêt. While the latter is solidly argued from a primarily Freudian perspective, it is the analysis of the first text that draws together—brilliantly—the theoretical and the textual, the real and the fictional. "An allegory of time ... Le Rivage des Syrtes dramatizes narrative allegory as construction and deconstruction of historical and readerly time, opening up fixed oppositions to lay emphasis on possibility and desire" (117). 77ie Allegorical Impulse has the potential to attract more North American readers and critics to Gracq, an author who, despite a career begun in the 1930s and continuing into this decade, has remained relatively unknown stateside. Murphy's book is timely in another sense—an apocalyptic author such as Gracq, who presents history as "an impulse toward catastrophe with an emphasis on regeneration and rebirth" (22), seems particularly appropriate for readers and critics poised on the brink of a new millennium. Herta Rodina Ohio University Warren Motte. Playtexts: Ludics in Contemporary Literature. Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press, 1995. Pp. 233. $30. This thought-provoking collection of eleven loosely-connected essays, which treat the literary process as a form of dynamic play between writer and reader, has the advantage of a perspective which allows us to see how writer and reader "also play each other," as the author tells us. He adds, "It is this level of interplay that I find most intriguing of all." Beginning with a chapter that orients us to his subject, "Reading Games," and that pays particular homage to Johan Huizinga's Homo Ludens: A Study of the Play Element in Culture (1938), Motte introduces some of the more relevant literature on the subject, including a discussion of Roger Caillois, Les Jeux et les hommes (1958) and Jacques Ehrmann, Homo Ludens Revisited (1968), as well as references to several other sources. He particularly tends toward a view of play that collapses the categories between frivolity and seriousness and seems closest to the view expressed by Ehrmann, that "reality is played," rather than the definition of play as separate from reality. In his second chapter, "Novel Breton," Motte focuses on André Breton's Nadja (1928) and the paradox of the work's extra-literary claims versus the traditional literary techniques it reflects but refuses to espouse. This chapter is particularly useful in its taking on of Breton's ceci n'est pas un livre approach to the constructing of Nadja, to paraphrase René Magritte, which allows him "to vilify the novel and its norms ... at the same time appropriating and exploiting novelistic norms and conventions." The tension between author and reader, in this case, the constant change of position which Breton attempts—for, as 100 WINTER 1996 Book Reviews reader, Breton prefers the margins, the space where the reader might make his or her annotations —highlights his ambivalence as author or "authority" versus reader. Breton, however , cannot resist "the grip of the octopus," the name of his favorite film, as he tells us in Nadja, of a Chinese man followed by himself and by himself, etc., as he enters President Wilson's office—an apt metaphor for self-aggrandizement that books make possible...

Making Theory/Constructing Art: On the Authority of the Avant- Garde (review)

Reviewed by: Making Theory/Constructing Art: On the Authority of the Avant-Garde Charles Altieri Making Theory/Constructing Art: On the Authority of the Avant-Garde. Daniel Herwitz. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994. Pp. 353. $34.95. Herwitz’s challenging book develops three basic arguments. The framing thesis is that for much of twentieth-century avant-garde art “what makes an artwork an artwork is the rigorous character of the theory” prefiguring it. This theorizing does not simply lay down aesthetic ideals. Rather it attempts to “reveal the philosophical structure of art” as a condition enabling formal traits to reconfigure our fundamental psychic and social investments, and hence to give abstraction a utopian revolutionary force. Herwitz develops three elaborate examples: Russian Constructivism and the work of Mondrian illustrate how art can anticipate in the Cartesian quest for “total perceptual clarity in which form is transparent to the eye and perceptual knowledge indubitable,” while John Cage clarifies a corresponding, but thoroughly skeptical, recasting of those utopian projects. In each discussion Herwitz’s eye is even better than his lucid mind, making this philosophical art criticism of a very high order. We see clearly how theory becomes fully “determinate in the context of one’s visual experience of the art work”—in the way Gabo renders material dynamic force utterly transparent and transpersonal, Moholy-Nagy gives visual body to biological universals, and Mondrian proves “that the Platonic ‘ought’ can converge with the world’s ‘is’” by making good on his ambition to have art exemplify the law of harmonization constituting the “hidden, inner form of life, its true reality.” Having shown what theory can do, Herwitz devotes the rest of his book to clarifying the price we pay for the dominant role it confers upon itself. Therefore his second basic argument engages Arthur Danto’s influential claims that modern art is itself a fundamentally philosophical enterprise devoted to rendering in self-referential visual form what it takes to be the pure essence of art; his third argument makes Danto’s problems exemplary for dilemmas increasingly evident in postmodern art. According to Danto, modern art elaborates its own inner logic following a Hegelian process until it culminates in Warhol’s Brillo Boxes, where only theory can establish what distinguishes art from ordinary perception. With Warhol the entire modernist project collapses, because the essence of art is manifest as nothing more than the working of institutional practices, so anything is possible and nothing philosophically substantial or exemplary. But, Herwitz shows convincingly, Danto’s claims fail to consider the different levels of theory operating within this art. Consequently Danto equivocates between treating theory as a separate abstract domain and treating it as woven into how we understand the modes of seeing involved in art practices; he completely separates the philosophical from the revolutionary ambitions of the avant-garde; and he ignores the complex features that make Warhol’s work [End Page 170] significant as a singular visual experience that makes “a racket out of underdetermination.” Ironically Danto’s mistakes stem from his being seduced by the abstract theory shaping the avant-garde tradition he wants to describe. In contrast, Herwitz’s superb readings of Warhol show how he brings to the fore a competing strand of the avant-garde’s legacy that engages the intricate space that objects occupy for consciousness and “replaces theory by indecisiveness, complacency, and play.” Danto’s blindness carries general force because it exhibits “a set of conceptual connections” that survives in postmodern work, even though theory’s utopian possibilities have been reduced to an ethos of suspiciousness. We now see a good deal of theoretical art that has lost the visual, has submitted to the rule of theory while insisting on its fundamental undecidability with reference to truth claims, and has tried to “replace concepts and hard visual work” by relying on “personalities (and ideologies and kitsch).” Using as his primary examples Lyotard, Baudrillard, and the exhibition The Forest of Signs (spring 1989 at MOCA), Herwitz argues for continuing “the avant-garde’s spirit of resistance in the mode of theory” while trying to drain such continuations of their traces of the avant-garde’s norms of transparent theoretical...

Women and Soap Opera: A Study of Prime Time Soaps.

Acknowledgements. Introduction. 1. Soap Stories. 2. The Aesthetic Experience. 3. A Women's Space. 4. Family Matters. 5. The Construction of a Community. 6. Utopian Possibilities. 7. Sex, Race and Class: The Pressures for Change. 8. Women's Fiction No More?. Conculsion.

Women and soap opera: a study of prime time soaps

Acknowledgements. Introduction. 1. Soap Stories. 2. The Aesthetic Experience. 3. A Women's Space. 4. Family Matters. 5. The Construction of a Community. 6. Utopian Possibilities. 7. Sex, Race and Class: The Pressures for Change. 8. Women's Fiction No More?. Conculsion.

Mark Twain’s Ambivalent Utopianism

MARK TWAIN’S AMBIVALENT UTOPIANISM Thomas Bulger Siena College Throughout his literary career, the idea of a utopian society fascinated and frustrated Mark Twain. Utopianism is an underlying theme in much of Twain’s fiction, including “The Man That Corrupted Hadleyburg” and Huckleberry Finn. Even in his final diatribes against humanity, there are suggestions of utopian possibilities that mankind has tragically been unwilling to realize. Moreover, in several instances Twain overtly explores the complex ramifications of a utopian community, as in “The Curious Republic of Gondour,” Captain Stormfield’s Visit to Heaven, and A Con­ necticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court. These works reveal Twain’s life­ long ambivalence in his fictional renditions of utopianism. Published anonymously in the October, 1875, issue ofAtlantic, “The Curious Republic” has all the trappings of a straightforward utopian narra­ tive. In many essential respects, it seems like a nineteenth-century update of Plato’s imaginary commonwealth: as in The Republic, justice is Gondour’s cardinal virtue; women in theory have an equal right to govern (though also like Plato’s ideal state, women governors are the exception rather than the rule; Gondour has had the grand total of two female leaders in its history); virtue is rewarded and given a tangible social value; perhaps most importantly, education, also the foundation of Plato’s community, is the cornerstone on which Gondour’s civilization is built. Another similarity between the republics of Plato and Twain is that both reject democracy as the form of their utopian governments. Despite Twain’s many pronouncements on the virtues of democracy (he still speaks of democracy in 1886 as a “new dynasty”1 that will replace the repressive and archaic institution of monarchy), “The Curious Republic” is overtly anti-egalitarian in its advocation of an educated ruling elite. In Gondour, “universal suffrage pure and simple” is abolished because “it had seemed to deliver all power into the hands of the ignorant and non-tax-paying classes.”2 Instead, Gondour operates under a system any academician would subscribe to wholeheartedly: the more education one has, the greater the voting power. Every resident of Gondour has at least one vote, but someone with a university education could possess up to nine votes. Twain, like Plato, regards the establishment of a utopian community as depending on the elevation of the wise to positions of political authority: “Learning goes usually with uprightness, broad views, and humanity; so the learned voters, possessing the balance of power, became the vigilant and efficient protec­ tors of the great lower rank of society” (pp. 3-4). There is no doubt that Twain saw “The Curious Republic” as an off­ shoot ofthe mode ofconventional utopian literature. In one of his notebook entries, he refers to Edward Bellamy’s enormously popular and influential utopian novel Looking Backward as a “fascinating book” and equates “The Curious Republic” with Bellamy’s work.3 It should also be added that Twain by no means starts with the premise that utopianism is inherently absurd; even after he composed the dystopic Connecticut Yankee, he praised Bellamy as “the man who has made the accepted heaven paltry by invent­ ing a better one on earth.”4 Consequently, the satirical thrust in “The Curious Republic” is not directed at the institutions of Gondour but at the narrator who is unable to appreciate the superior values and virtues of Gondour society. Nevertheless, the utopian vision of “The Curious Republic” is sharply qualified. There is a disturbingly Hobbesian pragmatism about this putatively better society. Material possession as well as education is made a fundamental criterion for political power: “brains and property managed the state” (p. 9). This concession to the instinct of self-interest is alien to the communistic impulse of most utopian societies and indicates that Twain is already acknowledging a basic human tendency that he later rails against in What is Man? that the individual is primarily interested not in altruism but in “the content of his own spirit.”3 Twain’s seemingly harmonious republic has other dissonant notes. From its inception, the utopian tradition assumes that human beings could and would act reasonably if provided with the proper circumstances. For Renaissance authors such as More...

A womb of his own.

Although some feminists formerly saw utopian possibilities in reproductive technology, many now fear that the new technologies are turning women's bodies into test tubes. They feel that these technologies are designed less to help infertile women than to appease men's envy of women's reproductive power. The consequences of the new technologies for the psychology of women and children and the future creation of culture are open questions. Should the technologies succeed in taking reproduction out of the body altogether, it remains to be seen whether women will gain in freedom, or whether this will simply fulfill the age-old misogynistic fantasy of depriving women of their central place in procreation.

The musician as programmer

Computers offer the possibility to musicians of creating sounds, instruments, performance styles, and interpretive behaviors with relatively few a priori constraints. We discuss the definition of these terms in the perspective of computer music, and the fact that realization of these utopian possibilities requires the musician to act in some sense as a programmer. The main body of the paper is concerned with issues in the design of programming languages for musicians. As the organization of time is one of the most salient and uniquely musical aspects of music, we will be especially concerned with the problem of time in such languages. A programming language for musicians developed by the author at IRCAM will be described.

The growth of political ideas and their expression among young activists

Two studies were conducted. In the first, developmental information was gathered on young people's efforts to construct and elaborate on an ideal society. The subjects were 54 white middle-class boys, equally divided among 8-, 11-, and 16-year-olds. The interview protocols suggested a typology consisting of (1) a personalistic, nongovernmental construction of society, based on the child's own life space, with a concern for biological needs such as food and shelter; (2) a construction of specific but unrelated governmental institutions; (3) a better-organized conception of how institutions are interrelated; (4) a commitment to abstract principles. In the second investigation, the task and typology were applied to the study of high school left-wing activists and nonactivists -93 in all. The activists were not clearly more committed to abstract principles, although they were entertaining utopian possibilities of a society with few laws. But the surprising finding was the activists' resemblance to the youngest children (type I); they too constructed a personalistic society potentially within their own life space and were concerned with biological life-supportive issues.