Illusion — Money — Illusion: Viktor Pelevin and the 'Closed Loop' of the Vampire Novel

Abstract

A brief contextual discussion is presented of the Russian history of the vampire genre and its spiritual critique of the human condition in both the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, encompassing texts by Gogol, Turgenev and Bulgakov, as well as the well-known Dozor teratology by Sergei Luk'ianenko). It addresses the question of whether the vampire in this context is principally Romantic transgressor, moral object lesson, political metaphor, or capitalist bloodsucker. The principal focus of the article is Viktor Pelevin's 2008 novel Ampir V (Empire V), set in a new Russian empire of 'benevolent' slavery, in which humans are prey to the vampires who live amongst them. The argument is that Pelevin's novel addresses issues such as political predation, capitalism, and consciousness; the mind-capital link can be analysed within a broadly Jamesonian/Deleuzian model of consciousness under late capitalism. Pelevin uses vampires, hidden creatures of the night, to divine the darkness of self-delusion, asking what one might know and how one might know it, given a world of illusions, shadows, and deception. Although (briefly) acknowledging the forces of faith and of love, he concludes that addiction to illusion is the human condition; thus Pelevin's formulation of human destiny as 'illusion–money–illusion'.     

Cultivation and Control: Grape Growing as Expansion in Nineteenth-century United States and Australia

Abstract

This essay proposes that viticulture (growing grapes for wine) was an international set of colonial tactics for transforming landscapes and for propagating a worldview of cultivation and control in the nineteenth century. By virtue of propagating grapes, Americans and Australians sought to prove themselves and their landscapes as solidly located within the accepted Western narrative of world history which claimed that all powerful nations, since antiquity, had successful grape cultures. A study of the international mid-nineteenth century grape craze reveals similarities and crucial differences in colonial viticultural rhetoric and aesthetics. The Western capitalist dedication to growing wine in America and Australia reveals that the eighteenth-century 'ethic of exploration' had successfully transformed into a nineteenth-century ethic of cultivation.     

The Myth of Management: Direction and Failure in Contemporary Organizations

Life in organizations and society appears tomany social commentators as increasingly more demandingand insensitive to the needs of people. In this paper,the Myth of Management is explored to investigate some of the key beliefs and images throughwhich contemporary management is practiced. Myth, inthis context, is understood as consisting of beliefs andvalues which serves to provide meaning for human action. The adoption of a particular mythicframe is argued to direct the management oforganizations to particular ends and purposes. Centralto a Myth of Management are the doctrines of SocialDarwinism and Function Rationality, and these are brieflyevaluated in their impact on organizational life. Anarchetypal approach, with particular reference to thearchetype of the hero, is employed to explore the depth dimensions which underpin the formulationand exercise of the Myth of Management. The conclusionreached is that the myth of management exacts a criticalcost on people and society which can only be addressed through a reflectiveconsciousness.     

The demobilization of diaspora: history,memory and ‘latent identity’

In the context of sustained interest in the mobilization of diasporic identities, I consider how and why diasporic identities might be demobilized over time. I use the case of an Indian Pakistani community in the UK and the USA (sometimes referred to as ‘Bihari’) to examine how historical memories of conflict are narrated in diaspora and the impact this has on the presence or absence of ‘diasporic consciousness'. The significance of memory in diasporic and transnational communities has been neglected, especially where the narration of historical events is concerned. The impact of forgetting has received particularly scant attention. I argue that, in the absence of this story, important lessons about the role of history in the formation of community are obscured. In this example, the ‘latent’ identities created on diaspora's demobilization help us to unpick the dyadic relations of ‘home’ and ‘away’ at the heart of essentialist conceptualizations of the concept.