POSTMODERN CULTURE

G Douglas BarrettG Douglas Barrett is Assistant Professor of Communication Arts at Salisbury University. He has enjoyed lives past and present as an artist, composer, writer, and tech worker. He has published in Mosaic, Tacet, and Contemporary Music Review and is the author of After Sound: Toward a Critical Music (Bloomsbury, 2016). The current article […]

David Parry (bio)Saint Joseph’s University As review of Jordan, Tim. Information Politics: Liberation and Exploitation in the Digital Society. Pluto Press, 2015. You can order the hardback of Tim Jordan’s Information Politics: Liberation and Exploitation in the Digital Society from Amazon.com for $60.19, or you can pay $21.98 for the paperback. That the two versions […]

Dorin Smith (bio)Brown A review of Weatherby, Leif. Transplanting the Metaphysical Organ: German Romanticism between Leibniz and Marx. Fordham UP, 2016. The place of critique has, perhaps, been in question for too long; not that it was wrong to critique critique but that the activity has exhausted itself. While publications on the topic mount and […]

Herman Rapaport (bio)Wake Forest University A review of Eyers, Tom. Speculative Formalism: Literature, Theory, and the Critical Present. Northwestern UP, 2017. Some ninety years ago, C.D. Broad argues in “Critical and Speculative Philosophy” that “the discursive form of cognition by means of general concepts” can never “be completely adequate to the concrete Reality which it […]

Peter Paik (bio)Yonsei University A review of Hicks, Heather. The Post-Apocalyptic Novel in the Twenty-First Century: Modernity Beyond Salvage. Palgrave Macmillan, 2016. Post-apocalyptic fiction has become arguably the defining genre of the contemporary period. A search on WorldCat reveals that Margaret Atwood’s novel Oryx and Crake (2003) — which depicts the near-total extinction of the […]

Warren Montag (bio)Occidental College A review of Martel, James R. The Misinterpellated Subject. Duke UP, 2017. James R. Martel’s The Misinterpellated Subject is a work of great interest, and not simply for those seeking to apply Althusser’s theory of interpellation beyond its sphere of origin. For those of us who, more cautiously (perhaps too cautiously), […]

Ronald Mendoza-de Jesús (bio)University of Southern California A review of Bradatan, Costica. Dying for Ideas: The Dangerous Lives of the Philosophers. Bloomsbury, 2015. What kind of book is Dying for Ideas: The Dangerous Lives of the Philosophers? Although in Costica Bradatan characterizes his book its opening pages as “an exercise in an as yet uncharted […]

G Douglas Barrett (bio)Salisbury University Abstract This essay examines cognitive labor and the posthuman brain in composer Alvin Lucier’s Music for Solo Performer (1965). Alongside a discussion of the historical relationships between cybernetics, posthumanism, and political economy, it contextualizes Lucier’s neurofeedback experiments in light of the expansion of the military-industrial complex and the large-scale labor […]

Michelle Chihara (bio)Whittier College Two hit reality television shows, just before 2008 and in the foreclosure crisis just after, disciplined particular economic subjects and naturalized historically specific immanent power structures. Extreme Makeover: Home Edition re-imagined the leveraged construction of massive houses in the exurbs. Its sentimentality and its reliance on ethnic minorities dove-tailed with the […]

Alexander Hirsch (bio)University of Alaska Fairbanks The artist Jason Lazarus collects and displays photographs deemed “too hard to keep.” This essay contrasts Lazarus’s exhibitions with Dawoud Bey’s Birmingham Project, which commemorates the 1963 bombing of a Baptist Church in Alabama by exhibiting photographs of present-day residents of Birmingham. What contributions do these photo projects make […]

Christopher Breu is Professor of English at Illinois State University. He is author of Insistence of the Material: Literature in the Age of Biopolitics (Minnesota, 2014) and Hard-Boiled Masculinities (Minnesota, 2005). Judith Goldman is the author of Vocoder (Roof 2001), DeathStar/rico-chet (O Books 2006), l.b.; or, catenaries (Krupskaya 2011), and agon (The Operating System 2017). […]

Adam R. Rosenthal (bio)Texas A&M University A review of Wills, David. Inanimation: Theories of Inorganic Life. U of Minnesota P, 2016. Inanimation is the third installment of David Wills’s technological trilogy of the human, which began with Prosthesis (1995) and Dorsality: Thinking Back through Technology and Politics (2008). Like those prior works, Inanimation traces the […]

James D. Lilley (bio)University at Albany A review of Agamben, Giorgio. The Use of Bodies. Trans. Adam Kotsko. Stanford UP, 2016. At the close of The Use of Bodies, Giorgio Agamben describes a peculiar mode of thinking that is less concerned with any fixed outcome, goal, or particular purpose than it is with the purely […]

Christopher Breu (bio)Illinois State University A review of Di Leo, Jeffrey R. Corporate Humanities in Higher Education: Moving Beyond the Neoliberal Academy. Palgrave MacMillan, 2013. Academia has been embattled for the last forty years. Uncoincidentally, this same time span has seen the rise of neoliberalism as a cultural ideology, a political practice, and, most devastatingly, […]

Lauren Shufran (bio)UC Santa Cruz Recording 1“To Thee Old Cause.” “To Thee Old Cause” Walt Whitman is on Tinder in India. He can’t Stop swiping right; everyone is divine. His lone Grievance is with the screen, the absence Of bodies, of embodiments. The body is where Walt’s poems Begin, after all; like when he claims, […]

Judith Goldman (bio)SUNY Buffalo Passage to more than India!Walt Whitman, “Passage to India” (line 224) It is not an obvious time to return to Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass (1855-1892).1 Though, as we witness the United States venture ever closer to what seems like civil war and/or the dissolution of a nation, taking insistent strides, […]

Robert S. Lehman (bio)Boston College This essay examines the relationship between beauty and violence in the taxidermy sculptures of the contemporary American artist Bruce Nauman. It addresses how these sculptures, specifically Carousel (Stainless Steel Version) (1988), succeed in bringing together two incompatible models of the beautiful: the neo-classical beauty of well-ordered bodies, and the beauty […]

Ramsey McGlazer (bio)University of California, Berkeley Abstract Repeatedly, Pier Paolo Pasolini’s last film, Salò o le 120 giornate di Sodoma (1975), has been read as prophesying later political realities. This essay instead analyzes Salò‘s insistent backwardness: its interest in dated rituals, fascist politics, “regressive” sexual practices, and outmoded pedagogical forms. By these backward means, the […]

Susan Vanderborg (bio)University of South Carolina Abstract Transgenic poetry, in which a verbal text is coded as DNA and placed within a life form, has both extended and called into question some of the most basic generic conventions of poetry. This essay uses theories of parasitic language to examine transgenic poetry’s emphasis on noise and […]