Abstract
This text is an ethnographic text, if somewhat surreally. It invites you, its readers, not so much to agree with the evidence and the analysis set forth by me, its author, as to enter actively into the process of re-searching your own Historical and biographically given positions within what might be described provisionally as the postmodern scene of contemporary North America.2 For it is indeed within the Historical materiality of this powerful scene that some (of us) are in contradictory ways struggling repeatedly to define, defend, and reconstruct the social forms in which we live and die; and to do this in relation to and often against others (of us) who feed parasitically off the flesh of those whose material chances they economically restrict and militaristically reduce. I am here (w)riting of (and against) those most privileged by current hierarchies of power, hierarchies that today operate under the nightmarish sacrificial sign-work of cybernetic-like compulsions toward a New World Order of systematic overdevelopment, transglobal CAPITAList hegemony and straight whitemale economies of logic, morality and pleasure. The technologically driven and culturally orchestrated shifts in the command, control and communicative character of such inFORMational hierarchies separate them from modern forms of power. Does this mean these forms of power are postmodern? Or is it better to designate such contemporary modalities of power as ultramodern? Although throughout this text these two terms are use somewhat interchangeably, I believe the term ultramodern to be more adequate.
To write ethnographies in the model of collage would be to avoid the portrayal of cultures as organic wholes, or as unified realistic worlds subject to a continuous explanatory discourse.... The ethnography as collage would leave manifest the constructionist procedures of ethnographic knowledge, it would be an assemblage containing voices other than the ethnographer’s, as well as examples of ‘found’ evidence, data not fully integrated within the works governing interpretation. Finally it would not explain away those elements in the foreign culture which render the investigator’s own culture newly incomprehensible. —James Clifford1
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Notes
James Clifford, “On Ethnographic Surrealism,” in The Predicament of Culture: Twentieth Century Ethnography, Literature and Art, Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1988, pp. 146–147.
Arthur Kroker and David Cook, The Postmodern Scene: Excremental Culture and Hyper-Aesthetics, New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1986.
Oliver L. North, Taking the Stand: The Testimony of Lieutenant Colonel Oliver L. Norths. New York: Pocket Books, 1987, pp. 13, 43, 49.
Michel Foucault, Foucault Live (Interviews, 1966–84), trans. John Johnston, New York: Semiotext(e), 1989, p. 150.
Claude Levi-Strauss, Structures Elementaires de la Parente, as quoted in Helene Cixous and Catherine Clément, The Newly Born Woman, trans. Betsy Wing, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1986, p. 22.
Henri Lefebvre, Everyday Life in the Modern World, trans. Sara Rabinovitch, New Brunswick: New Transition Books, 1984.
C. Wright Mills, White Collar, New York: Oxford University Press, 1956, p. 233.
Jean Baudrillard, Simulations, trans. Paul Foss, Paul Patton and Philip Beitchman, New York: Semiotext(e), 1983.
James Clifford, “Partial Truths,” in James Clifford and George E. Marcus, eds., Writing Culture: The Poetics and Politics of Ethnography, Berkeley: University of California Press, 1986, pp. 6–7.
Avery Gordon, “Feminism, Writing, and Ghosts,” Social Problems, Vol. 37, No. 4 (November 1990), p. 488.
Stephen Pfohl and Avery Gordon, “Criminological Displacements: A Sociological Deconstruction,” Social Problems, Vol. 33, No. 6 (October/December 1986), p. S95.
See Denis Hollier, ed., The College of Sociology 1937–39, trans. Betsy Wing, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1988;
James Clifford, “On Ethnographic Surrealism;” and Michele Richman, Reading Georges Bataille: Beyond the Gift, Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1984.
For a discussion of the political subversion of “self-evidency” in the writings of Bataille, Leiris and others, see Allan Stoekl, Politics, Writing, Mutilation: The Cases of Bataille, Blanchot, Roussel, Leiris and Ponge, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1985.
James Clifford, “On Ethnographic Surrealism,” pp. 129–34. This is not to deny the projective exoticization of nonwestern cultural practices that resulted from certain surrealist appropriations. For a much needed critique of both artistic and anthropological fascination with “primitiveness” see Marianna Torgovnick, Gone Primitive: Savage Intellects, Modern Lives, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990.
Jackie Orr, “Theory on the Market: Panic, Incorporating,” Social Problems, Vol. 37, No. 4 (November 1990), p. 482.
Monique Wittig, Les Guérillères, trans. David LeVay, New York, Avon Books, 1971, p. 134.
Donna Haraway, “A Cyborg Manifesto: Science, Technology and Socialist Feminism in the Late Twentieth Century,” in Linda J. Nicholson, ed., Feminism/Postmodernism, New York: Routledge, 1985, p. 196–197.
Judith Butler, “Gender Trouble, Feminist Theory, and Psychoanalytic Discourse,” in Linda J. Nicholson ed., Feminism/Postmodernism, New York: Routledge, 1990, p. 336.
Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, “Feminism and Critical Theory,” in In Other Worlds: Essays in Cultural Politics, New York: Methuen, 1987, p. 84.
bell hooks, Yearning: Race, Gender, and Cultural Politics, Boston: The South End Press, 1990, p. 27.
Patricia Hill Collins, Black Feminist Thought: Knowledge, Consciousness and the Politics of Empowerment, Boston: Unwin Hyman, 1990, pp. 201–220.
Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Epistemology of the Closet, Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990;
Michael Warner, “Fear of a Queer Planet,” Social Text, Vol. 9, No. 4 (1991), pp. 3–17.
Mary Daly, in cahoots with Jane Caputi, Websters’ First New Intergalactic Wickedary of the English Language, Boston: Beacon Press, 1987, p. 250.
Monique Wittig The Lesbian Body, trans. Peter Owen, New York: Avon, 1976.
Kathy Acker, Don Quixote, New York: Grove Press, 1986, p. 39.
Trinh T. Minh-ha, When the Moon Waxes Red: Representation, Gender and Cultural Politics, New York: Routledge, 1991, p. 84.
Luce Irigaray, Speculum of the Other Woman, as quoted in Jane Gallop, The Daughter’s Seduction: Feminism and Psychoanalysis, Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1982, p. 178.
Ishmael Reed, Mumbo Jumbo, Garden City, NY: Bantam Books, 1972, p. 17.
For a related thesis see Tzvetan Todorov, The Conquest of America, trans. Richard Howard, New York: Harper and Row, 1984.
Toni Morrison, The Bluest Eye, New York: Washington Square Press, 1970, p. 7.
George Jackson, Soledad Brother: the Prison Letters of George Jackson, New York: Coward-McCann, 1970, p. 184.
See, for instance, Zora Neale Hurston, Tell My Horse, Berkeley: Turtle Island, 1981;
Ishmael Reed, Mumbo Jumbo; Michael Ventura, “Hear that Long Snake Moan,” in Shadow Dancing in America, Los Angeles: Jeremy P. Tarcher Inc., 1985, pp. 103–162.
Houston Baker, Jr., Blues, Ideology and Afro-American Literature, Chicago: University of Chicago, 1984.
Gloria Anzaldúa, “haciendo caras, una entrada,” in Gloria Anzaldúa, ed., Making Face, Making Soul: Haciendo Caras, San Francisco: Aunt Lute Foundation, 1990, p. xxv.
Franz Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, trans. Charles Laun Markmann, New York: Grove Press, 1967, p. 18.
Henry Louis Gates, Jr., “Talkin’ That Talk,” in Henry Louis Gates, Jr., ed., “Race,” Writing and Difference, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1985, p. 408.
bell hooks, “On Cultural Interrogations,” Artforum, Vol. XXVII, No. 9 (May 1989), p. 20.
For a reflexive interrogation of the white feminist shadows haunting a critical sociological reading of African-American texts, consider Avery Gordon’s engagement with Toni Morrison’s Beloved in Avery Gordon, Ghostly Memories: Feminist Rituals of Writing the Social Text, Ph.D. Dissertation, Chestnut Hill, MA: Boston College, 1990.
Trinh T. Minh-ha, “Grandma’s Story,” in Brian Wallis ed., Blasted Allegories, New York: The New Museum of Contemporary Art and Cambridge: The MIT Press, 1987, pp. 3, 2–3.
Gil Scott-Heron, lyrics from “‘B’ Movie,” on album Reflections, New York: Arista Records, 1981.
Susan Sontag, “Fascinating Fascism,” in Under the Sign of Saturn, New York: Vintage Books, 1981, p. 91.
Jean Baudrillard, Forget Foucault, trans. Nichole Dufresne, New York: Semiotext(e), 1987.
Walter Benjamin, “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,” in Illuminations, trans. Harry Zohn, New York: Schocken Books, 1969, p. 241.
For descriptions of this “simulation,” see both Sontag, “Fascinating Fascism” and Hal Foster, Recodings: Art, Spectacle, Cultural Politics, Port Townsend, WA: Bay Press, 1985.
David Harvey, The Conditions of Postmodernity, New York: Basil Blackwell, 1989, pp. 160, 159.
Arthur Kroker and Marilouise Kroker, “Thesis on the Disappearing Body in the Hyper-Modern Condition,” in Arthur Kroker and Marilouise Kroker, eds., Body Invaders: Panic Sex in America, New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1987, p. 21.
Ice-T, Lyrics to “Colors,” Produced by Ice-T and Africa Islam, New York: Rhyme Syndicate Productions, 1988.
Noam Chomsky, The Culture of Terrorism, Boston: South End Press, 1988.
William Bogard, “Closing Down the Social: Baudrillard’s Challenge to Contemporary Sociology,” Sociological Theory, 8 (1990), pp. 1–15.
Jean Baudrillard, “Astral America,” trans. Lisa Liebmann, Artforum, 23 (1984), p. 74.
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© 1992 Stephen Pfohl
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Pfohl, S. (1992). Questions of Access and Excess a Translator’s Preface. In: Death at the Parasite Cafe. Culture Texts. Palgrave, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-22129-5_2
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