Thursday, 31 March 2005

The Valve

Call it the Return of the Little Magazine.  An impressive list of contributors including Mark Bauerlein and Sean McCann.  From John Holbo's introduction:

How many members of the MLA? 30,000? That a nation can support a standing army of literary critics is a wondrous fact, and quite explicable with reference to the volume of freshman papers, etc. that must be marked. The number is inexplicable with reference to any critical project. Yes, we need new scholarship (don't bother me with more false dichotomies, please.) The point is: no one has a clear (or even unclear) sense of what work in the humanities presently needs approximately 30,000 hands to complete. I don't mean we should therefore hang our heads in shame, although being a member of a standing army of literary critics must be a semi-comic fate, at least on occasion. But the utter lack of any justification for 30,000 literary critics assiduously beavering away explicating, interpreting, erecting new frameworks, interrogating the boundaries, etc., has consequences. Notably, when a book or article is up for publication and the hurdle is set, 'if it has real scholarly value', we discover this condition is just not as intelligible as we would like, conditions being what they are. It isn't true that literary scholars value the output of 30,000 other literary scholars. They just don't, and that is quite sensible of them, really.

So stop reading what I've written.  Go to The Valve. 

Mar 31, 2005 1:19:46 PM | Academia

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CFP: Transgendered Trans/Portation: "The El Word" The inimitable David followed his early morning scorching of Soviet Realism with a screed I present untranslated, unaltered and unadulterated: Speaking of, are Some Gay Guy and Some Guy one and the same? (I mean the folks leaving comments on your blog; no grand, sweeping comment on society and sexuality was implied. Normally I wouldn't need to say that, but you spend all day surrounded by people who say things like "queering " and really mean it. Any day now your English department will hold a conference on queering public transport systems. The keynote speaker will ask the provocative question, "Are city buses gendered, and if so, does that imply the existence of /trans/gendered city buses? What radical, transgressive artists have addressed the plight of transgendered city buses in their work?" Then he'd be interrupted when half the audience walked out in protest, because by discussing city buses, he was marginalizing schoolbuses and even subway trains. Then my fucking head would explode from the sheer pointlessness and, if there was any justice, so would all of theirs.) -- Anyway, if Some Gay Guy and Some Guy are indeed one and the same, would you pass on my sincere compliments on his /unbelievable/ laziness, per the "Things I haven't read" thread? I'm so tempted to write a CFP for a panel on "Transgendered Trans/Portation: 'The El Word.'" It'd look like this: CFP: Transgendered Trans/Portation: "The El Word" In multiple locations, activists and scholars are currently mapping the intersections of queer theory and public transportation. Recent years have seen an efflorescence of queer work on "the gaze" as a site of resistance for queer and transgendered commuters. Papers should explore how this gaze implicates voyeurs and exhibitionists in power dynamics and interrogate the dynamics these looking relations entail and cultivate. Topics may include: An analysis of gazing queerly, Queer gazes, gazes in queer spaces. The interuption of the transgendered gaze by ruffled newspapers, staring out the window, moving to the other side of the bus. Performativity of transgendered identity and its relation to the gazes of bewildered old widows who lost children in Korea and Vietnam and who wish this once they could get to Macy's and back without a counter-hegemonic force invading her personal space. Looking at "Others" as a tool of identity construction. Conversely the psychological effect of the gaze of the other. The ways in which specific theories of transgendered spectatorship affect interactions between characters in the text. The specular relationship between the reader and characters in books cleverly marketed as "subway fare." Disrupting the gaze: fragmentized narratives of missed stops, appointments and opportunities for radical performances of transgendered identities before captive audiences in buses/trams/subways/airplanes. Transcontinental performances of transgendered identities. You know what's really sad? I could go all night. Jesus Creeping Shit!
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The Elvis of Cultural Theory Has Left the Building... ...with bride in tow, no less. A couple of questions for his new bride: Do you really like him, or do you also believe "marriage appears as an act which belongs to the domain of universal symbolic determinations and should as such be independent of personal idiosyncrasies--as if the very notion of marriage does not involve precisely the 'pathological' fact of liking a particular person for no particular rational reason." Do you know that his "ideal couple" consists of Kant and Sade? Do you know who wears the pants in that household? Or are Kant and Sade just another "everyday aseptic/impotent modern couple" incapable of transposing the vertical into the horizontal? How is Zizek at transposing the vertical into the horizontal? Does he "stage these fantasies openly, without the secondary perlaboration which usually masks inconsistensies" or are his secondary perlaborations vital to his operationalizations? How long can he operationalize before pure egotistic fear gets the best of him? How do you feel about "deadlocks"? You like 'em too? Thought so. I'd love to hear your stance on, say, "the deadlock of desire," "the deadlock of the transcendental imagination," "the deadlock of today's Left," "the deadlock of the superego," "the deadlock of the dialogue between the Western New Left and the Eastern European dissisdents," "the deadlock of masculine subjectivity," "the deadlock of symbolization onto the biological opposition of male and female," "the deadlock of the pseudo-revolutionary critics of religion," "the deadlocks of sexual relationship," "the deadlock of the Tarkovskian hero," "the deadlock of post-politics," "the deadloack of repressive desublimation," "the deadlock of sexuality or art today," "the deadlock of multicultural intolerance," "the deadlock of impossibility,""the deadlock of global capitalism," "the deadlock of cultural resistence to capitalism," "the deadlock of formalization in le symbolique," "the deadlock of the contemporary world," "the deadlock of the 90's," "the deadlock of upper-class myths of power lost," "the deadlock of positing," "the deadlock of the dialectic," "the deadlock of the subject's radical uncertainty as to its status (what I am qua object for the Other," "the deadlock of human thought," "the deadlock of an essentialist subjectivity," "the deadlock of circularity," "the deadlock of 1914," "the deadlock of depoliticisation," "the deadlock of sexuation," "the deadlock of language," and most importantly, "the deadlock of his [i.e. your new beau's] previous positions." Do you realize that's how he looks all gussied up?

Scott Eric Kaufman

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