Abstract
It’s incredible to be here. I never thought I’d be writing these words in prison and with such fear. It’s (k)not exactly that I hadn’t seen it coming. It was always already there in a way in my dreams. And in those unspeakable places of anxiety that ate me alive while at work or when watching television. And in the tightness of my throat during sex. For far too long I had treated these symptoms as no-thing but sliding signifiers. But tonight, from the perspective of terror in which I find myself imprisoned, I re-member these fleeting sensations as more complex and contradictory. These are (k)not discretely bound texts imagined while asleep in person. These are material prefigurations of what is most unspeakable and symptomatic. In and through HIStory. In and through my body. What’s going on? I ask this question economically, in the most general sense of the word. From my point of view, a human sacrifice, the construction of a church, the dangers of sharing the same needle, or the gift of a jewel were no less interesting than the sale of wheat, international armaments or junk bonds.2 What’s going on?
Subversion is a problem—it implies a dependency on the program that is being critiqued—therefore it’s a parasite of that program. Is there a way to produce a force or an intensity that isn’t merely a reaction (and a very bad and allergic reaction) to what is?—Avital Ronell1
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Notes
Avital Ronell, “Interview with Avital Ronell,” in Andrea Juno and V. Vale, eds., Angry Women, San Francisco: Re/Search Publications, 1991, p. 128.
Michel Foucault, The Order of Things: An Archeology of Knowledge, New York: Vintage Books, 1973.
Georges Bataille, Story of the Eye, trans. Joachim Neugroschal, New York: Penguin Books, 1982, pp. 10–11.
Jean Baudrillard, Simulations, trans. Paul Foss, Paul Patton and Philip Beitchman, New York: Semiotext(e), 1983, p. 3.
Luce Irigaray, Speculum of the Other Woman, trans. Gillian C. Gill, Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1985, pp. 138, 136.
Michel Serres, The Parasite, trans. Lawrence R. Schehr, Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1982, p. 14.
Avery Gordon, Ghostly Memories: Feminist Rituals of Writing the Social Text, Ph.D. Dissertation, Chestnut Hill, MA: Boston College, 1990, p. 25.
Jean Baudrillard, “The Clone Story or the Artificial Child, ZG, (1984), pp. 16–17.
Jean Baudrillard, Seduction, as quoted in Douglas Kellner, Jean Baudrillard: From Marxism to Postmodernism and Beyond, Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1989, p. 102.
For a challenging feminist allegory of the methodological possibilities of conversing with scientific objects as “agents” rather than as passively inscribed “units of analysis” see Donna Haraway, “Situated Knowledges: the Science Question in Feminism and the Privilege of Partial Perspectives,” in Haraway, Simians, Cyborgs and Women: the Reinvention of Nature, New York: Routledge, 1991, pp. 183–201.
Roland Barthes, The Pleasure of the Text, trans. Richard Miller, New York: Hill and Wang, 1975, pp. 59, 61.
Michael Ryan, Politics and Culture: Working Hypotheses for a Post-Revolutionary Society, Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1989, p. 5.
For an extended discussion of the relation between normal social science and paranoia see Paul Smith, Discerning the Subject, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1988.
Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment, trans. John Cumming, New York: The Seabury Press, 1972, pp. 83–84.
For an elaboration see Stephen Pfohl and Avery Gordon, “Criminological Displacements: a Sociological Deconstruction,” Social Problems, Vol. 33, No. 6 (October/December 1986), pp. S94–S113. A video cassette version of this text is also available in VHS format. For a copy send $10.00 (U.S. currency) to Parasite Cafe Productions, c/o Stephen Pfohl, Dept. of Sociology, Boston College, Chestnut Hill, MA 02167, USA.
Dorothy Smith, The Everyday World as Problematic: a Feminist Sociology, Boston: Northeastern University Press, 1987.
Julia Kristeva, Desire in Language: A Semiotic Approach in Literature and Art, ed. Leon S. Roudiez, trans. Richard Miller, New York: Hill and Wang, 1975, pp. 59, 61.
Jacques Attali, Noise: The Political Economy of Music, trans. Brian Massumi, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1985, p. 5;
see also Hal Foster, Recodings, Port Townsend, WA: Bay Press, 1985.
Edward Said, “Opponents, Audiences, Constituencies and Community,” in Hal Foster, ed., The Anti-Aesthetic: Essays on Postmodern Culture, Port Townsend, WA: Bay Press, 1983, p. 157.
Stephen Pfohl, Images of Deviance and Social Control: A Sociological History, New York: McGraw-Hill, 1985.
Frigga Haug, et. al., “Memory-Work as Social Science Writing,” in Female Sexualization, trans. Erica Carter, New York: Verso, 1987, p. 36.
Jackie Orr, “Autobiographical Essay: Assignment #1,” from course syllabus for Technologies of Control, Boston College, Fall 1989.
See, for instance, Jean-Francois Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge, trans. Geoff Bennington and Brian Massumi, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984;
and Linda J. Nicholson, ed. Feminism/Postmodernism, New York: Routledge, 1990.
Cornel West, “The New Cultural Politics of Difference,” October, 53 (Summer 1990), p. 93.
Donna Haraway, Primate Visions: Gender, Race, and Nature in the World of Modern Science, New York: Routledge, 1990, p. 4.
Georges Bataille, Inner Experience, trans. Leslie Anne Boldt, Albany: State University of New York Press, 1988, p. 81.
Peter Berger and Thomas Luckmann, The Social Construction of Reality, Garden City, NY: Anchor Books, 1967.
Stephen Pfohl, “The ‘Discovery’ of Child Abuse,” Social Problems, Vol. 24, No. 3 (February 1977), pp. 310–322.
Stephen Pfohl, Predicting Dangerousness: the Social Construction of Psychiatric Reality, Lexington, MA: D.C. Heath, 1978.
Steve Woolgar and Dorothy Pawluch, “Ontological Gerrymandering: the Anatomy of Social Problems Explanations,” Social Problems, Vol. 32, No. 3 (February 1985), p. 218.
For a more specific response to questions raised by Woolgar and Pawluch see Stephen Pfohl, “Toward a Sociological Deconstruction of Social Problems,” Social Problems, Vol. 32, No. 32 (February 1985), pp. 228–232.
This is not to suggest that, after World War II and even before, important tendencies within surrealism did not betray its political radicality by the seductive aestheticization of its art. This critique is made nowhere stronger than by members of the Situationist International who, between 1957 and 1971, struggled to advance the radical potential of an art (against art) in the service of social revolution. See, for instance, Guy Debord, Society of the Spectacle, Detroit: Black and Red Press, 1977. At the same time, there is evidence of the continued radicalism of some surrealists well into the 1960s.
This is documented in such works as Helena Lewis, The Politics of Surrealism, New York: Paragon Press, 1988,
and Franklin Rosemont, “Introduction” to Andre Breton, What is Surrealism? Selected Writings, New York: Monad Press, 1978.
For an excellent work situating surrealism within the “interwar” years in France see Sidra Stich, Anxious Visions: Surrealist Art, New York: Abbeville Press, 1990.
For analysis of the role of women in relation to surrealism, see Whitney Chadwick, Women and Surrealism, Boston: Little, Brown and Co., 1985,
and Mary Ann Caws, Rudolf Kuenzli and Gwen Raaberg, eds., Surrealism and Women, Cambridge: The MIT Press, 1991.
Scott Lash, Sociology of Postmodernism, New York: Routledge, 1990, p. 181.
Georges Bataille, Visions of Excess: Selected Writings, 1927–1939, trans. Allan Stoekl, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1985, p. 81.
For a discussion of surrealism’s critique of positivism see Gaeton Picon, Surrealists and Surrealism, New York: Rizzoli, 1977.
Antonin Artaud, The Theater and its Double, trans. Mary Caroline Richards, New York: Grove Press, 1958, p. 13.
For connections between Brecht and critical social theory see Eugene Lunn, Marxism and Modernism: a Historical Study of Lukacs, Brecht, Benjamin and Adorno, Berkeley: University of California Press, 1982.
Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, trans. Alan Sheridan, New York: Vintage, 1977, p. 31.
Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, “Translator’s Introduction,” to Jacques Derrida, Of Grammatology, Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1974, p. lxxvii.
See, for instance, Judith Butler, Gender Trouble: Feminism, and the Subversion of Identity, New York: Routledge, 1990;
Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Epistemology of the Closet, Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990;
Jonathan Dollimore, Sexual Dissidence: Augustine to Wilde, Freud to Foucault, New York: Oxford, 1991;
and Diana Fuss, ed., Inside/Out: Lesbian Theories, Gay Theories, New York: Routledge, 1991.
Maya Deren, Divine Horsemen: the Living Gods of Haiti, New Paltz, NY: McPherson and Co., 1953, p. 6.
Luisa Valenzuela, Other Weapons, trans. Deborah Bonner, Hanover, NH: Ediciones Norte, 1985, p. 105.
Gloria Anzaldúa, Borderlands/La Frontera: the New Mestiza, San Francisco: Spinsters/Aunt Lute, 1987.
Nancy Harstock, “The Feminist Standpoint: Developing the Ground for a Specifically Feminist Historical Materialism,” in Sandra Harding and Merill Hintikka, eds., Discovering Reality: Feminist Perspectives on Epistemology, Metaphysics, Methodology, and Philosophy of Science, Dordrecht: Reidel, 1981, pp. 283–310.
Patricia Hill Collins, Black Feminist Thought: Knowledge, Consciousness and the Politics of Empowerment, Boston: Unwin Hyman, 1990, p. 234.
For a critical discussion of “postmodern pastiche” see Fredric Jameson, “Postmodernism and the Logic of Late Capitalism,” New Left Review, 146 (1984), pp. 53–92.
Michel Foucault, The Order of Things, trans. Alan Sheridan, New York: Vintage Books, 1970, p. 379.
Georges Bataille, “Attraction and Repulsion II,” in Denis Hollier, ed., The College of Sociology, 1937–39, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1988, p. 115.
Avery Gordon, “Feminism, Writing, Ghosts,” Social Problems, 37, 4, (November 1990), p. 488.
Jacqueline Rose, Sexuality in the Field of Vision, London: Verso, 1987, p. 14.
See, for instance, Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, In Other Worlds: Essays in Cultural Politics, New York: Metheun, 1987;
Trinh T. Minh-ha, Woman, Native, Other: Writing Postcoloniality and Feminism, Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1989;
Homi K. Bhabha, “Remembering Fanon: Self, Psyche, and the Colonial Condition,” in Barbara Kruger and Phil Mariani, eds., Remaking History, Port Townsend, WA: Bay Press, 1989, pp. 131–150;
and Michael Taussig, Shamanism, Colonialism and the Wildman: A Study in Terror and Healing, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987.
Simon Watney, Policing Desire: Pornography, AIDS and the Media, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1989.
John and Joan Digby, The Collage Handbook, London: Thames and Hudson, 1985, p. 10.
Max Ernst, “What is the Mechanism of Collage?” as quoted in James Clifford, “On Ethnographic Surrealism,” in The Predicament of Culture: Twentieth Century Ethnography, Art and Literature, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1988, p. 117.
My own immersion in collage methods dates back to my collaboration with Joseph LaMantia in the design and production of photomontages included in my book Images of Deviance and Social Control: a Sociological History, New York: McGraw-Hill, 1985. Shortly thereafter I began to work with collage and montage as aspects in the sociological construction of analytic texts. The influence of Kathy Acker’s critical (w)ritings were, at that point, enormous, as were the works of Berlin Dadaists Hannah Hoch and John Heartfield. For a mix of visual, auditory and analytic collage work see the video-text I produced in collaboration with Avery Gordon, Criminological Displacements.
Dawn Ades, Photomontage, London: Thames and Hudson, 1976, pp. 12–13.
Gregory L. Ulmer, “The Object of Post-Criticism,” in Hal Foster, ed., The Anti-Aesthetic: Essays on Postmodern Culture, Port Townsend, Washington: Bay Press, 1983, p. 84.
Ulmer here “collages” into his text a quote from Eddie Wolfram, History of Collage, New York: Macmillan, 1975, pp. 17–18.
Michael Taussig, Shamanism, Colonialism and the Wild Man: A Study in Terror and Healing, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987, pp. xiii–xiv.
Gregory L. Ulmer, “The Object of Post-Criticism,” p. 84; includes quote from Group Mu, eds., Collages, Paris: Union Generale, 1978, pp. 13–14.
Jacques Derrida, “The Law of Genre,” Glyph 7 (1980), p. 206.
This italicized sentence and the following italicized parts of this section are from Christa Wolf, “A Letter, about Unequivocal and Ambigous Meaning, Definiteness and Indefiniteness; about Ancient Conditions and New Viewscopes; about Objectivity,” in Gisela Ecker, ed., Feminist Aesthetics, trans. Harriet Anderson, London: The Women’s Press, 1985, pp. 98–99. p. 90. Group Mu, Collages, as quoted in Gregory L. Ulmer, “The Object of Post-Criticism,” p. 88.
James Clifford, “Introduction: Partial Truths,” in James Clifford and George E. Marcus, Writing Culture, Berkeley: University of California Press, 1986, p. 7.
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© 1992 Stephen Pfohl
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Pfohl, S. (1992). A Story of the Eye/“I” the Parasitism of Postmodern Sociology. In: Death at the Parasite Cafe. Culture Texts. Palgrave, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-22129-5_6
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