Valdemar’s Abjection: Poe,Kristeva, Masculinity,and Victim-Monsters

This article explores intersections between Edgar Allan Poe’s 1845 tale “The Facts in the Case of M. Valdemar” and Julia Kristeva’s Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection (1982). Highly influential, Kristeva’s work illuminates Poe’s depiction of a man mesmerized on the point of death, his vibrating tongue the only indication of life. In his liminal condition between life and death, Valdemar transforms into a spectacle witnessed over time by a male group whose members remain intimately tied to yet always distant and aloof from him. As a spectacle of body horror, Valdemar evokes many of the attributes of Kristevan abjection theory, especially the fluids and waste materials associated with the maternal body. Challenging the maternal focus of abjection theory and its reception, I track the ways in which Poe’s tale locates abject affect in the fears of the male body and in the male group’s relationship to the expulsed, isolate male. Another antebellum author, the health reformer Sylvester Graham, provides a striking point of comparison in his focus on the young male onanist. Through Kristeva’s and Poe’s works, I develop a theory of the victim-monster, a being whose suffering initially incites sympathy but ultimately repels the spectator; the victim becomes monstrous, his or her suffering the true site of a horror that must be transcended to ensure the survival of the spectator. The victim-monster of Poe’s tale intersects with the figure of the grotesque and anti-Semitic caricature.     

Meaning-Making,Negotiation, and Change in School Accountability,Or What Sociology Can Offer Policy Studies

In school systems around the world, countless reform strategies have focused on school and teacher accountability—the process of evaluating schools’ performance on the basis of student measures. Policy and education research has been dominated by debates on its effectiveness, where advocates highlight the positive effects on achievement while critics emphasize the negative consequences on pressure, morale, and autonomy. Yet the question is not so much whether to have accountability, but what form it should take. To answer this, sociologists contribute through their study of accountability’s organizational and ecological dynamics—key facets that are sidelined when researchers only focus on quantitative program evaluation. An organizational perspective highlights the meaning-making school actors and the general public have of the policy, viewing it through technical-rationalist and institutional-performative lenses. An ecological perspective highlights how the form of accountability is a negotiated outcome of larger macrosocial forces, and how accountability is itself contributive to larger social changes. This review suggests a broader conceptualization of accountability regimes, and the unique contribution of critical, organizational, and sociological perspectives to the study of public policies.     

Redefining the American Revolutionary: Gabriela Mistral on José Martí

Abstract

This essay criticizes the historical investment of Martí's readers in a discourse that values conservative, sexually unambiguous femininity and masculinity. The essay grapples with the vituperative register of José Martí's misogyny in order to reveal another version of the American revolutionary. Drawing on one of his earliest feminist critics, Gabriela Mistral, I show how corporeal tropes in Martí's rhetoric betray instances of empathy with emerging alternative practices of femininity and masculinity. Assisted by Mistral's overlooked and overtly gendered critique, this essay limns a tropical Martí — an embodied, sensual, demonumentalized poet who plays with language. In readings of Mistral's several essays devoted to Martí, the essay shows how Mistral's Martí represents an alternative to the heroic masculinism and violent militarism of a longstanding revolutionary American tradition.     

A trembling voice in the desert: Jean‐Luc Nancy's rethinking of the space of the political

Abstract

This essay explores Jean‐Luc Nancy's rethinking of political space in terms of an ontological ‘being‐with’. It elucidates how Nancy's thinking of community emerges out of the French philosopher's reworking of Heidegger's crucial notion of Mitsein. For Nancy, although Heidegger argues that Dasein is always already also Mitsein, Mitsein is nonetheless also occluded by the priority accorded to Dasein. The consequences for the way in which community or the space of the political is configured are profound since traditional conceptions of the subject of community thus remain unreconstructed. Nancy however does reconstruct community by emphasising that the primal ontological conditions of community are not conceived as the One, the Other or the We, but as the ‘with’, ‘relationality’, and the ‘between’. The question of being (Seinsfrage) thereby becomes the question of being‐with (Mitseinsfrage).     

Effort on Display: Unemployment and the Interactional Management of Moral Accountability

In this study of moral accountability in vocational guidance conversations at a public employment office in Sweden, I adopt a combination of approaches to explore implicit accounts as intrinsic to institutional activities. In this setting, participants managed moral accountability by normalizing a person's conduct, preempting potential critique, and marking transgression. Clients were never held accountable for lack of competence, knowledge, or skill or for failing to get a job. A critical element in sustaining oneself as a morally accountable client in this setting is to successfully display one's efforts properly in situ as well as through the institutional record.     

Satori in Paris: Deconstructing the French Connection or the Legend’s Satori

Abstract

The deconstruction of Kerouac’s trip to France in search of his family name and lineage as described in Satori in Paris, published in 1966, is examined, and consideration is also given to the very process of redefining French connections. The novel — a voyage to the end of the night trying to decipher, redefine, and blur the French signs that Kerouac had scattered his Duluoz Legend with — is riddled with many deconstructing elements, which allow for better insight into both the quest Kerouac had set for himself and the meaning of French connections throughout the Legend. ‘What’s in a name’ could precisely be the question and possibly the answer. The deconstructing process initiated in Big Sur is now reaching its ultimate step, jeopardizing the stability of the creation of Duluoz’s and Kerouac’s legend altogether.     

The deskilling thesis revisited: on Peter Armstrong's defence of Braverman

Peter Armstrong's recent defence of Braverman's deskilling theory argues that most critics misinterpret its logical nature. Consequently, the bulk of empirical research indicating short term changes in skill levels cannot be accepted as disconfirming evidence. Armstrong's argument brings out some overlooked elements in the deskilling thesis and points out important limitations of the studies critical of it. At the same time, Armstrong's clarification of the character of Braverman's theory also exposes some of the problems in the deskilling thesis itself. Armstrong correctly points out the long term, tendential character of the theory but fails to confront some central methodological problems in the study of long term shifts in work skills. This paper looks at three issues which Armstrong's argument raises: i) the nature of a ‘law of motion’ which is claimed to be the logical status of the theory; ii) Braverman's very specific notion of skill; iii) the methodological issues associated with analysis of long term changes in skills. Additionally, I explore the issue of technological change which, I argue, constitutes a ‘relatively autonomous’ source of constraints and pressures on capitalism management, not to be treated as a weapon or outcome in management's struggles to control labour.     

What does it mean to be a ‘European’?

The paper explores the notion of Europeanism, asking the question: what does it mean to be a European? In much the same terms as in Michael Walzer's often-cited essay ‘What does it mean to be an American?’, Walzer's analysis will serve as a point of departure for a discussion of different conceptions of European self-understanding. Some points of contrast will be made between American hyphenated identities and European identity, conceived of in terms of a notion of cosmopolitanism.     

Toward A Renewed Sociological Jurisprudence: From Roscoe Pound to Herbert Blumer and Beyond

This article, based on the Distinguished Lecture presented on August 21, 2001, at the annual meeting of the Society for the Study of Symbolic Interaction in Anaheim, California, proposes a synthesis of Herbert Blumer's macrosociological perspective on the race question with Roscoe Pound's philosophy and science of law (i.e., his so‐called sociological jurisprudence), Joseph Tussman's and Jacobus tenBroek's juridical methodology, and Philip Selznick's sociology of responsive law. The compound so produced will help to establish a foundation for a praxiological sociology of American constitutional law. The article focuses on the problem of legislative‐made “classifications” and their relations to the legitimate public purposes entailed in the enactment of statutes, laws, and decrees. Such classifications become problematic when they are said to be “underinclusive,” “over‐inclusive,” or both in seeking to effect their aims. Strategic research sites for this issue are racial and ethnic classifications that single out one or a limited cluster of racial or ethnic groups for special benefits (“affirmative action”) or restitution (“reparations”). Calling for a reinvigoration of Pound's pragmatic approach to sociological jurisprudence, I show how Blumer's analysis of the “color line”—when seen in relation to the original intent of the makers of the Thirteenth, Fourteenth, and Fifteenth post‐Civil War Amendments to the U.S. Constitution and, using Tussman's and tenBroek's showing of how such categorizations might be both methodically evaluated and applied to the challenged classifications—provides grounds for reconsidering whether the latter are instances of “reverse discrimination” and, hence, violations of the constitutional requirement of “equal protection of the law.” The science of law is a science of social engineering having to do with that part of the whole field which may be achieved by the ordering of human relations through the action of politically organized society. —Roscoe Pound, Justice According to Law We did not hold it necessary to wait for nature to put a canal across the Isthmus of Panama, and we shall not much longer hold it necessary to wait for nature to dig the legal canals that will give security to neglected human interests which clamor for recognition and protection. —Roscoe Pound, “Juristic Problems of National Progress”     

EARLY CINEMA'S HEYDAY OF COPYING

Between 1895 and 1909, new American film entrepreneurs complained that ‘copying’ was out of control. Although ‘copying’ may have been widespread, and sometimes referred to as ‘theft’, it was more a worldwide industry practice than an extralegal operation. Before the 1909 US court case that decided the question of copyright in the motion picture, movie producers copied in an attempt to meet the demand for product. My discussion of the notion of ‘copying’, however, is somewhat ambiguous in that I need to make the term cover motion picture print duplication (‘duping’) as well as remaking. Framed by Lawrence Lessig's statement about the contemporary period, ‘copyright is out of control’, I wonder here if today's excessive use of copyright could be foretold in the way in which early cinema pioneers talked about the order that regulation would bring to the new industry. I ask, more specifically, if this early period of unfettered reproduction can tell us anything about contemporary conditions in which the technological capacity to duplicate has outstripped the state's capacity to regulate duplication.     

Castration and Medusa: Orlan's Art on the Cutting Edge

French multimedia artist Orlan (b. 1947) literally altered her body and identity in the name of art by undergoing multiple cosmetic surgeries that replaced her features with those from art historical masterpieces. She transformed herself into an objet d'art as well as a site for public debate, thereby injecting a radical sensibility into Western art and its history. The provocative surgeries at the core of Orlan's “carnal art” both exemplify and expand Freud's notion of castration to include the wish to transcend gender and even the body itself. Like Medusa, Orlan confronts us with blinding images that compel us to question our assumptions about art, beauty, gender, identity, and technology. Her project shows us the fate of human embodiment in a posthuman age. In addition to elucidating her social, feminist, and aesthetic agenda, this paper clarifies her personal psychology and her work's effect on the audience.     

Captivating debris: Unearthing a world war two internment camp

Abstract

This article explores the potent force of material objects in testimional culture by enacting an encounter with the ‘debris’ of a World War Two internment camp for Japanese Canadians. Pushing beyond the limits of the repetition of linear history, the article moves instead towards a phenomenological analysis of how yielding to remains of the past might allow us to reconnect with the destroyed worlds from which they were removed. Using Michel Taussig's notion of mimesis and Peggy Phelan's work on mimicry, alongside Merleau‐Ponty's work on the habit‐body, this article brings into relief the neglected place of material objects collected by archives and brought to memorials in testimonial culture.     

Desire,death and wonder: Reading Simone de Beauvoir's narratives of travel

Abstract

This article draws upon the work of contemporary French feminist philosopher Luce Irigaray in developing a post‐structuralist analysis of travel within the autobiographies of the second wave feminist philosopher Simone de Beauvoir. Travel and the experience of wonder at the otherness of the world figure as important self shaping experiences within the four volumes of Beauvoir's life narrative (1958, 1960, 1963, 1972). Travel has a metonymic relation to the passage of Beauvoir's life, in which the existential extremes of anguish and ecstasy are played out in a (feminine) quest for self knowledge. Through a close reading of Beauvoir's writing I analyse the different formations of desire that structure the experience of wonder in relation to the otherness of the world and death. I also draw upon debates within feminist philosophy about the nature of subjectivity and knowledge that were, in Beauvoir's time, ordered around an Hegelian opposition between immanence and transcendence. I take up Irigaray's notion of the sensible transcendental to explore another way of conceptualising the feminine subject's desire to know and value the world differently.     

Demonstrating Professional Vision: The Work of Critique in Architectural Education

This study provides an account of how architectural competencies are made visible in the work of critique in architectural education. It shows how critics enact a set of disciplined visual practices through which architectural qualities of proposed buildings become available for competent remark. Particularly prominent among these practices is the seamless fusion of gestural elaborations of architecture's designed objects with the envisaged spaces of a hypothetically perceived built environment. Furthermore, critics topicalize the communicative and rhetorical organization of the presentation as a designed object in itself. In shifts between topicalizations of proposed buildings and the designed representations of those buildings, critics construe qualities of the buildings as simultaneously visible and invisible: visible to the critic, but invisible to potential other viewers. This practice subjects students' work to a variety of pedagogically configured gazes. The student's socialization into a specialized field of practice, in which objects are designed according to professional rationalities that go beyond what is readily visible or accessible to the nonarchitect, is thereby made accountable for the communicative demands of professional practice.     

'Exchange is Creation': The Revolutionary Poetics of Muriel Rukeyser and Hugh MacDiarmid

Abstract

The increased cultural authority of science in the early decades of the twentieth century called into question prior cultural assumptions regarding the status of poetry as an important discipline. The debate about the changed nature of the relations between the arts and sciences assumed particular importance for the literary left, as writers, critics and intellectuals debated the role which culture would play in political revolution. In order to broaden our understanding of the left's engagement with the problem of the relationship between the arts and sciences, this article will compare the work of the leftist American poet Muriel Rukeyser with that of the Scottish nationalist and Communist poet Hugh MacDiarmid. In particular, I will explore the ways in which their understanding of the essential similarities between the arts and sciences informed their conception of the relationship between poetics and political praxis.     

Sacred lambencies and thin crusts: Scottish writers,industrialisation and anomie, 1785–1914

Abstract

You think that a wall as solid as the earth separates civilisation from barbarism. I tell you the division is a thread, a sheet of glass’ ... This essay is a biography of this traumatic Edwrdian image, expressed in J. G. Fraser and H. G. Wells as well as in John Buchan's first thriller, The Power‐House of 1913. It traces the creer of the volcanic metaphor, particularly eruptive in Scotland, beyond Carlyle's French Revolution to the scientific controversies of the Enlightenment.