Stanley Cavell Ugly Duckling, Funny Butterfly: Bette Davis and Now,_Voyager One quality of remarriage comedies is that, for all their ingratiating manners, and for all the ways in which they are among the most beloved of Hollywood films, a moral cloud remains at the end of each of them. And that moral cloud has to do with what is best about them. What is best are the conversations that go on in them, where conversation means of course talk, but means also an entire life of intimate exchange between the principal pair. We are bound to remember from these films, even years after viewing them, something of their sound: of conversation between Cary Grant and Irene Dunne in The Awful Truth,or between Grant and Rosalind Russell in His Girl Friday,or Grant and Katharine in Bringing up Baby,or those two together with James Stewart in The Philadelphia Story,or between Hepburn and Spencer Tracy in Adam's Rib.We feel that these people know one another, and they know how to play together (know and accept, you may say, the role of theater in their mutuality) in a way to make one happy and hope for the best. But the moral cloud has to do with what that conversation is meant to do, and what I say about those films is that the conversation is in service of the woman's sense of herself as in need of an education. Importantly for that reason, I call her a descendent of Nora in Henrik Ibsen's A Doll's House,who in one of the most celebrated moments in modern theater, ends a play by closing a door behind her. She leaves the dollhouse saying to her husband that she requires an education and that he is not the man who can provide it for her. The implication is that since he is not this man, he cannot (in logic) be her husband. And implying the contrary as well: if he were, then he would be, and their relationship would accordingly "miracle of miracles" constitute a marriage.   Stanley Cavell is the Walter M. Cabot Professor of Aesthetics and the General Theory of Value at Harvard University. His most recent works include In Quest of the Ordinary: Lines of Skepticism and Romanticism (1989), This New Yet Unapproachable America (1989), and Conditions Handsome and Unhandsome (forthcoming). Stanley Cavell Postscript (1989): To Whom It May Concern Coming away from a first reading of Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick's "The Beast in the Closet: James and the Writing of Homosexual Panic," my sense of its pertinence to what I have written on film melodrama is so urgent that I find myself unwilling to make public the foregoing latest installment of my thoughts on the subject without including some initial responses, however hurried and improvisatory they must be now, to the material she has so remarkably brought together. Her work, among other matters, proposes an understanding of James's "The Beast in the Jungle" that to my mind cannot sensibly be passed by in thinking further about James's achievement. Since in readdressing James's text in my preceding remarks about Now, Voyager,and specifying my reason in having adduced it at the end of my earlier account Letter from an Unknown Woman by describing that film's philosophical design relating the melodrama of the unknown woman to the woman's assignment (by whom?) to prove the man's existence, or preservation, to him, or for him, hence impossibly attempting to perform his cogito, the taking on of his subjectivity, overcoming his skepticism by accepting that subjectivity as undeniable I am understandably interested, to begin with, in tracing out the connection between things Sedgwick says about John Marcher's "two secrets" and things I have said about secrecy as a cover for the idea of "privacy" in Ludwig Wittgenstein's (skeptical) fantasy of a private language. Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe, Jean-Luc Nancy The Nazi Myth What interests us and claims our attention in Nazism is, essentially, its ideology,in the definition Hannah Arendt has given of this term in her book on The Origins of Totalitarianism.In this work, ideology is defined as the totally self-fulfilling (and willfully self-fulfilling) logic of an idea, an idea "by which the movement of history is explained as one consistent process." "The movement of history and the logical process of this notion," Arendt continues, "are supposed to correspond to each other, so that whatever happens, happens according to the logic of one ‘idea.'"2 Ideology, in other words, interests us and claims our attention insofar as, on the one hand, it always proposes itself as a political explanation of the world, that is, as an explanation of history (or still further, if you wish, as an explanation of Weltgeschichte:not the "history of the world" but rather the "world-as-history," a world consisting only of a process, and the necessity of that process) on the basis of a single concept the concept of race, for example, or the concept of class and insofar as, on the other hand, this ideological explanation or conception of the world(Weltanschauung: vision, intuition, comprehensive grasp of the world a philosophical term of which National Socialism, as you will see, made great use) seeks to be a total explanation or conception. This totality signifies that the explanation is indisputable, leaving neither gaps nor remainders unlike philosophical thought, from which ideology shamelessly draws the greater part of its resources but which is characterized by a risky, problematic style, what Arendt calls the "insecurity" of philosophical questioning (OT,p. 470). (It follows, then, that philosophy is also rejected by the ideology that solicits it, and consigned to the incertitude and the timorous hesitations of "intellectuality.")   2. Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism (1951; New York, 1962), p. 469; hereafter abbreviated OT.   Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe and Jean-Luc Nancy teach at the University of Human Sciences of Strasbourg, France, and are also visiting professors at the University of California, Berkeley. They are coauthors of The Literary Absolute (1988) and, related to the topic of politics, "The Jewish People Don't Dream" (Stanford Literary Review,Fall 1989). Lacoue-Labarthe is also the author of Typography (1989) and La Fiction du politique (1987; forthcoming in English). Nancy has written "Sharing Voices" in Transforming Hermeneutics (1989) and La Communauté désoeuvrée (1986; forthcoming in English). Brian Holmes is a doctoral candidate in romance languages and literatures at the University of California, Berkeley, and editor of the journal Qui Parle.He is currently at work on the parody of authorial identity in Cervantes and Flaubert. Philip Fisher Jasper Johns: Strategies for Making and Effacing Art Within the strategy that we call avant-garde there are two sets of tactics, one immediate, the other long term. One set could be called a tactics of short-term attention, and it is this set that has been most often noticed. Shock, surprise, self-promotion, the baiting of middle-class solemnity, outrage, a subversive playfulness, a deliberate frustration of habitual expectations, an apparent difficult or refusal of communication, a banality where profundity and seriousness were earlier the norm: these are a few of the tactics that again and again appeared as part of the competitive marketplace strategy for advertising the new. To be a notorious artist was always halfway to becoming a famous one, and many were willing to take the chance that once conditions were right the slight move from notoriety to fame could be accomplished. These tactics made it clear that the problem for an artist within the modern period was first of all to stand out within a crowd, within a surplus of candidates for the few places available nationally or internationally. The rivalry for initial attention under modern conditions set every artist the question of how his own work might have clear identity and felt importance. This was, in an age of products and advertising, the problem of how to turn a style into a brand.   Philip Fisher is professor of English at Harvard University and the author of Hard Facts (1985). The essay published here forms part of his forthcoming book Making and Effacing Art.He is currently at work on a book on the philosophical and literary history of the Passions. Thomas McCarthy Private Irony and Public Decency: Richard Rorty's New_Pragmatism The hegemony of logical positivism was already on the wane in the 1960s as a result of penetrating criticisms by thinkers both inside and outside the movement. But its legacy continued to exert a formative influence on the less doctrinaire and more diverse varieties of "analytic philosophy" that succeeded it. For one thing, occasional disclaimers to the contrary notwithstanding, the physical and formal sciences have continued to exercise a stranglehold on philosophical imagination. This has not excluded the development of more or less intimate relations with linguistics, especially formal linguistics, or a current love affair with cognitive science and artificial intelligence. But it has choked off any deep influence from the arts and humanities, as it has from history and the social sciences. And just because these latter domains have continued to be of central importance for Continental philosophy, we are left with the spectacle of "two philosophies" analytic and Continental mirroring the infamous split between the "two cultures." As part of the same syndrome, analytic philosophy has become increasingly professional and technical and, consequently, largely invisible to the wider culture; whereas Continental philosophy, largely invisible to the wider culture; whereas Continental philosophy, while far from popular, has nevertheless maintained its ties to culture and society at large. The public roles of Jean-Paul Sartre and Michel Foucault in France, or of Theodor Adorno and Jürgen Habermas in Germany, have had no equivalent in American philosophy since the death of Dewey. Philosophers here think of themselves as scientists rather than as public intellectuals.   Thomas McCarthy is professor of philosophy at Northwestern University. He is the author of The Critical Theory of Jürgen Habermas (1978). This essay is part of a work-in-progress on philosophy and critical theory. Michael Ann Holly Past Looking The rest of this essay will contribute to the subversion of that distinction in the history of art, with the awareness that this would no longer be a timely issue in any other historical discipline. I engage in this task because of my sense that critical attention to the formal or rhetorical resonances between objects and the histories of art that inscribe them might provide an answer for the kind of historiographic experimentation that Burke and White have obliquely urged upon the historical profession in general. To be fair, the history of art is not exclusively what it once was: the conservator of elite objects and the preserver of a certain canon of values. A variety of critical challenges to this traditional role have animated the discipline during the last two decades, from the revisionism of feminist and Marxist readings to the interpretive paradigms of semiotics and psychoanalysis, and yet one certainly needs to acknowledge that, for the most part, these challenges have originated outside the confines of art history proper. The metahistorical task of discovering some theme or issue shared by this plurality of re-visions need not necessarily prove unilluminating. The concentration on the gaze as an interpretive principle cuts across a wide sampling of recent theoretical perspectives. Paintings are, after all, meant to be looked at, so it should come as no surprise that the investigation of who or what is presumed to be doing the looking is now viewed as a critically unsettling issue in post-structuralist writings on art.   Michael Ann Holly is associate professor and chair of the department of art and art history at the University of Rochester. She is the author of Panofsky and the Foundations of Art History (1984) and co-editor, with Norman Bryson and Keith Moxey, of Visual Theory (1989). Daniel Brudney Knowledge and Silence: The Golden Bowl and Moral_Philosophy When literary texts are included in a course on moral philosophy they tend to be classical tragedies or existentialist novels: texts filled with major moral transgressions and agonized debates over rights, wrongs, and relativism. Recently, however, the focus of much discussion on literature and moral philosophy has been Henry James's last novel, The Golden Bowl.This ought to seem surprising. For The Golden Bowl is a quintessential Jamesian novel. Almost nothing happens.In the course of more than five hundred pages there are two marriages, one affair, and a single act of violence, the smashing of the golden bowl. The rest is reflection, nuance, detail: the creation and preservation of a "‘brilliant, perfect surface,'" one "scarcely more meant to be breathed upon, it would seem, than the cheek of royalty."1 There are no extreme actions or high- flown speculations. The moral issues among the four central characters either go unspoken or are raised expressly to be suppressed, banished from articulation. And what counts as the expression of the moral maturity and insight of the heroine, Maggie Verver, is her extraordinary ability to keep the truth silen00to put it precisely, to lie. If even there was a novel in which the protagonists shied away from moral debate,it is The Golden Bowl. The challenge for the philosophical critic, it seems to me, is to argue that it is just this stress on surface and silence that makes this novel of interest to moral philosophers, that makes it exemplary for how literature can do something philosophically important that philosophy cannot.   1. Henry James, The Golden Bowl (Harmondsworth, 1966), pp. 445, 172; hereafter cited by page number.   Daniel Brudneyis an assistant professor of philosophy at the University of Chicago. Jerome Christensen From Rhetoric to Corporate Populism: A Romantic Critique_of_the Academy in an Age of High Gossip If you are anything like me, you may feel yourself unsure of what, as a critic these days, you ought to be talking about whether literature qua literature, literature as rhetoric, literature as politics or as history, whether about the persistence of romanticism or the waxing of postmodernism, the decline of Yale or the rise of Duke. If, like me, you are puzzled by what we now ought to be about, you may also be like Paul de Man, who bespoke a similar concern: "In a manner that is more acute for theoreticians of literature than for theoreticians of the natural or the social world, it can be said that they do not quite know what it is they are talking about, … that, whenever one is supposed to speak of literature, one speaks of anything under the sun (including, of course, oneself) except literature. The need for determination," de Man concludes, "thus becomes all the stronger as a way to safeguard a discipline which constantly threatens to degenerate into gossip, trivia or self- obsession,"1 De Man's wishes are rarely fulfilled, and this instance is no exception. Despite the critic's determinations, theory, it turns out, is the story of the failure of safeguards to do the job for which they are designed. There is no better instance of that ironic truth than the career of Paul de Man. No critic has fallen farther despite his determination; from a paragon of analytical rigor, he has become the most gossiped about critic of the late 1980s   1. Paul de Man, The Resistance to Theory (Minneapolis, 1986), p. 29; hereafter abbreviated RT.   Jerome Christensen teaches English at The Johns Hopkins University. He is the author of Coleridge's Blessed Machine of language (1981) and Practicing Enlightenment: Hume and the Formation of a Literary Career (1987). This essay is part of a work in progress entitled Prefigurations: Romantic Theory and Romantic Practice. Arnold I. Davidson Spiritual Exercises and Ancient Philosophy: An Introduction to Pierre Hadot Pierre Hadot, whose inaugural lecture to the chair of the History of Hellenistic and Roman Through at the Collège de France we are publishing here, is one of the most significant and wide-ranging historians of ancient philosophy writing today. His work, hardly known in the English-reading world except among specialists, exhibits that rare combination of prodigious historical scholarship and rigorous philosophical argumentation that upsets any preconceived distinction between the history of philosophy and philosophy proper. In addition to being the translator and author of monographs on Plotinus, Vitorinus, Porphyry, and many others, Hadot's most important general philosophical work is entitled Exercises spirituels et philosophie antique.1 Combined with detailed studies of Socrates and Marcus Aurelius, this work presents a history of spiritual exercises from Socrates to early Christianity, an account of their decline in modern philosophy, and a discussion of the different conceptions of philosophy that have companied the trajectory and fate of the theory and practice of spiritual exercises. Hadot's "Forms of Life and Forms of Discourse in Ancient Philosophy" provides an overview of his major themes and preoccupations, and gives some indication of the historical scope of his work. This lecture also illuminates the methodological problems one faces in studying the history of thought, especially problems concerning the evolution, reinterpretation, and even misunderstanding of the meaning and significance of philosophical terminology. In this brief introduction, I can do no more than attempt to provide a context for Hadot's inaugural lecture, by way of summary of his major work, and, more specifically for reader's of Critical Inquiry,to sketch the profound importance that Hadot's writings had for the last works of Michel Foucault.   Arnold I. Davidson,executive editor of ,is associate professor of philosophy and a member of the Committees on the Conceptual Foundations of Science and General Studies in the Humanities at the University of Chicago. He introduced and edited the "Symposium on Heidegger and Nazism" (Critical Inquiry15 [Winter 1989]). He is currently working on the history of horror as it relates to the epistemology of norms and deviations. Pierre Hadot Forms of Life and Forms of Discourse in_Ancient_Philosophy Here we are witness to the great cultural event of the West, the emergence of a Latin philosophical language translated from the Greek. Once again, it would be necessary to make a systematic study of the formation of this technical vocabulary that, thanks to Cicero, Seneca, Tertullian, Victorinus, Calcidius, Augustine, and Boethius, would leave its mark, by way of the Middle Ages, on the birth of modern thought. Can it be hoped that one day, with current technical means, it will be possible to compile a complete lexicon of the correspondences of philosophical terminology in Greek and Latin? Furthermore, lengthy commentaries would be needed, for the most interesting task would be to analyze the shifts in meaning that take place in the movement from one language to another. In the case of the ontological vocabulary the translation of ousia by substantia,for example, is justly famous and has again recently inspired some remarkable studies. This brings us once more to a phenomenon we discretely alluded to earlier with the word philosophia,and which we will encounter throughout the present discussion: the misunderstandings, shifts or losses in meaning, the reinterpretations, sometimes even to the point of misreading, that arise once tradition, translation, and exegesis coexist. So our history of the Hellenistic and Roman thought will consist above all of recognizing and analyzing the evolution of meanings and significance.   Pierre Hadot holds the chair of the History of Hellenistic and Roman Thought at the Collège de France. He is the author of many books and articles on the history of ancient philosophy and theology. Among his works are Plotin et la simplicité du regard, Porphyre et Vitctorinus, Marius Victorinus: Recherches sur sa vie et ses oeuvres,and Exercises spirituels et philosophie antique.Arnold I. Davidson,executive editor of ,is associate professor of philosophy and a member of the Committees on the Conceptual Foundations of Science and General Studies in the Humanities at the University of Chicago. He introduced and edited the "Symposium on Heidegger and Nazism" (Critical Inquiry 15 [Winter 1989]). He is currently working on the history of horror as it relates to the epistemology of norms and deviations. Paula Wissing,a free-lance translator and editor, has recently translated Marcel Detienne and Jean-Pierre Vernant's The Cuisine of Sacrifice among the Greeks(1989). She also contributed translations of articles by Maurice Blanchot, Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe, and Emmanuel Levinas for the "Symposium on Heidegger and Nazism." Mieke Bal De-Disciplining the Eye In this essay I will explore a mode of reading I call "reading for the text." A text is what we make of a work when reading it: roughly, a meaningful, well-structured whole with a beginning and an end. But as a mode of reading, textuality allows for constant activity, a continual shaping nd reshaping of sign-events. I will argue that reading for a sense of textuality, and for the wholeness this simple textuality entails, does not necessarily preclude awareness of a fundamental lack of unity, while reading for the effect of the real, in spite of the promotion of the "realistic detail," tends to do so. The two modes of reading are fundamentally different; yet the conflict between them is not necessarily obvious, nor should such conflict be avoided, ignored, or smoothed out. The goal of this confrontation is not to promote textual reading at the expense of realistic reading. It is the conflict between them I wish to promote. The two modes of reading can be brought to bear on the same work, although they are incompatible. As a result, activating both modes is in itself a critical endeavor: their very combination helps one to avoid the unifying fallacy. Textual and realist readings are a problematic and thereby productive combination.   Mieke Bal is professor of comparative literature and Susan B. Anthony Professor of women's studies at the University of Rochester. The author of Death and Dissymmetry: The Politics of Coherence in the Book of Judges (1988), her forthcoming book is Reading "Rembrandt": Beyond the Word-Image Opposition. Daniel Boyarin The Eye in the Torah: Ocular Desire in_Midrashic_Hermeneutic My construction of the position of the eye in Rabbinic Judaism (and Christianity) represents almost a reversal of the roles "Hebraic" and "Hellenic." A powerful case can be made that only under Hellenic influence do Jewish cultures exhibit any anxiety about the corporeality of visibility of God; the biblical and Rabbinic religions were quite free of such influences and anxieties. Thus I would identify Greek influences on Judaism in the Middle Ages as being the force for repressing the visual. The Neoplatonic and Airstotelian revision of Judaism undertaken by the Jewish scholastics was so successful that it has resulted in the near-total forgetting of the biblical and Rabbinic traditions of God's visibility. W. J. T. Mitchell's characterization of the Rabbinic tradition is a perfect example of this "forgetting." In order to position Judaism in a typology of cultures, Mitchell cites Moses Maimonides. Mitchell's reading of Maimonides is well-founded; the problem lies rather in the identification of Maimonides as if he typified the old Rabbinic tradition. In my view, he represents a distinct departure from that tradition. This Platonic departure was indeed marked and condemned as such by many of his contemporaries, but it has become the almost unchallenged orthodoxy of later Judaism as well as of the critical tradition. The memory of having seen God in the Bible and the desire to have that experience again were a vital part of Rabbinic religion. They constituted, moreover, a key element in the study of Torah, the making of midrash.   Daniel Boyarin,associate professor of Talmud and midrash at Bar- Ilan University, has published essays on midrash and literary theory. His book Intertextuality and the Reading of Midrash is forthcoming. This essay is part of a larger project tentatively entitled Bodies of Torah: Language, Sex and God in Talmudic Judaism. Cheryl Walker Feminist Literary Criticism and the Author The issues that Foucault raises about reception and reading are certainly part of the contemporary discussion of literature. However, they are not the only issues with which we, as today's readers, are concerned. Discussions about the role of the author persist and so we continue to have recourse to the notion of authorship. For instance, in her recent book Sexual / Textual Politics(1985), the feminist critic Toril Moi feels called on to return to these twenty-year-old issues in French theory to tell us what it has meant to speak of the author, when she says: "For the patriarchal critic, the author is the source, origin and meaning of the text. If we are to undo this patriarchal practice of authority,we must take one further step and proclaim with Roland Barthes the death of the author."3 In the course of this essay I wish to reopen the (never fully closed) question of whether it is advisable to speak of the author, orof what Foucault calls "the author function," when querying a text, and I wish to reopen it precisely at the site where feminist criticism and post-structuralism are presently engaged in dialogue. Here in particular we might expect that reasons for rejecting author erasure would appear. However, theoretically informed feminist critics have recently found themselves tempted to agree with Barthes, Foucault, and the Edward Said of Beginnings that the authorial presence is best set aside in order to liberate the text for multiple uses.4   4. See Edward W. Said, Beginnings: Intention and Method (New York, 1975), p. 162.   Cheryl Walker is professor of English and humanities at Scripps College. She is the author of The Nightingale's Burden: Women Poets and American Culture before 1900 (1982) and Masks Outrageous and Austere: Culture, Psyche, and Persona in Modern Women Poets (forthcoming). She is currently editing an anthology of nineteenth- century women poets and a book of essays about feminist criticism in the wake of post-structuralism. Marilynn Desmond The Voice of Exile: Feminist Literary History and_the_Anonymous Anglo-Saxon Elegy In order to recuperate these two representatives of medieval frauenlieder, The Wife's Lament and Wulf and Eadwacer,a feminist poetics must acknowledge the medieval attitudes toward authority and authorship that allow the medievalist to privilege the voice of the text over the historical author or implied author. The modern concept of authorship, derived from a modern concept of the text as private property, valorizes the signature of the author and the author's presumed control over and legal responsibility for his or her text. With reference to modern literature, contemporary theory has interrogated this "author-function" quite aggressively in an attempt to pry the text away from the author and to valorize the functions of the reader, as Roland Barthes's "Death of the Author" illustrates,13 or to reconsider the privileges of the subject, in order to "seize its functions, its interventions in discourse, and its system of dependencies," as Michel Foucault's essay "What Is an Author?" propoes.14 Foucault's proposals concerning the place of the subject and the author-function directly challenge modern assumptions about the text as the property of an author: "We can easily imagine a culture where discourse would circulate without any need for an author. Discourses, whatever their status, form, or value, regardless of our manner of handling them, would unfold in a pervasive anonymity."15   13. See Roland Barthes, "The Death of the Author," Image, Music, Text,trans. Stephen Heath (New York, 1977), pp. 142- 48. 14. Michel Foucault, "What Is an Author?" Language, Counter-Memory, Practice: Selected Essays and Interviews,trans. Donald F. Bouchard and Sherry Simon, ed. Bouchard (Ithaca, N.Y., 1977), p. 137. 15. Ibid., p. 138. Indeed, Foucault does press his argument to the limits of its implications for the subject, and he ends his essay with a question that challenges the voice of a text as well as its author: "‘What Matter who's speaking?'" (Foucault, "What Is an Author?" p. 138). Nancy K. Miller engages directly in the implications of this position for feminist theory. She states: "What matter who's speaking? I would answer it matters, for example, to women who have lost and still routinely lose their proper name in marriage, and whose signature not merely their voice has not been worth the paper it was written on" (Miller, "The Text's Heroine: A Feminist Critic and Her Fictions," Diacritics 12 [Summer 1982]: 53).   Marilynn Desmondis an assistant professor of English, general literature, and rhetoric at the State University of New York Binghamton. She is the author of Reading Dido: Textuality and Sexuality in the Late Medieval Reception of Aeneid 4 (forthcoming); her current work is a study of ekphrasis in late medieval literature. Vincente L. Rafael Nationalism, Imagery, and the Filipino Intelligentsia To see nationalism as a cultural artifact is to argue against attempts at essentializing it. Anderson claims that nationalism can be better understood as obliquely analogous to such categories as religion and kinship. Membership in a nation draws on the vocabulary of filiation whereby one comes to understand oneself in relation to ancestors long gone and generations yet to be born. In addressing pasts and futures, nationalism resituates identity with reference to death, one's own as well as others'. Herein lies nationalism's affective appeal, that which makes it possible to sacrifice oneself for the "motherland." It lends to the accident of birth the sense of continuity and converts mortality into something that is meant for as much as it is realized by one. By placing one in a certain relationship to death and generativity, nationalist discourse therefore frames the arbitrariness of existence. "It is the magic of nationalism to turn chance into destiny" (IC,p. 19). However, while nationalism tends to mine the idioms of kinship and religion, the historical conditions of its emergence undermine the logic and stability of these inherited categories. Thus Anderson defines nations as "imagined communities." Built on the rubble of traditional polities, the nation invokes a radically secular subjectivity that sets it apart from its predecessors. Dynastic states presumed power and privilege as functions of the purity of bloodlines guaranteed by a divine order. Colonial states as dynastic states in drag replicate the obsession with hierarchy by reorganizing social and epistemological categories according to a metaphysics of race and progress. By contrast, the nation envisions a more egalitarian community. "Regardless of the actual inequality and exploitation that may prevail in each, the nation is always conceived as a deep, horizontal comradeship" (IC,p. 16). It thus reveals the mutability of all sorts of hierarchies. Rather than take power for granted as natural and inherited, nationalism asks about "rights" and thereby opens up the problem of representation: who has the right to speak for whom and under what circumstances?   Vincente L. Rafael is assistant professor in the department of communication, University of California, San Diego. He is the author of Contracting Colonialism: Translation and Christian Conversion in Tagalog Society under Early Spanish Rule (1988). Gerald L. Bruns Stanley Cavell's Shakespeare "The Avoidance of Love" is Cavell's magic looking glass onto Shakespeare, where the idea of missing something, not getting what is obvious, is, on Cavell's reading, very close to a philosophical obsession. Shakespeare here means besides Lear Othello, Coriolanus, Hamlet, The Winter's Tale,and Antony and Cleopatra,and what Cavell finds in these plays is an attempt to think through what elsewhere, in the formation of the modern philosophical tradition, was getting formulated as the problem of skepticism, or not being able to know that we know (not being able to be certain). It is not easy to say what this means. As if executing a skeptical decorum, Cavell's writing does not try for transparency, nor does it always coincide with itself, and anyhow Shakespeare is not so much an object as a region of Cavell's thinking, so everyday (nonphilosophical) readers are apt to find themselves a bit at sea with him. Without claiming to match Cavell's views point for point, I would like to give something like a para-Cavellian commentary that tries to say what his thinking, with respect to Shakespeare, seems to be getting at, and also where it leaves us.   Gerald L. Brunsis William and Hazel White Professor of English and Comparative Literature at the University of Notre Dame. His most recent book is Heidegger's Estrangements: Language, Truth, and Poetry in the Later Writings(1989). Richard Rorty Truth and Freedom: A Reply to Thomas McCarthy McCarthy thinks truth more important than I do. Specifically, he thinks that " ‘truth' … functions as an ‘idea of reason' with respect to which we can criticize not only particular claims within our language but the very standards of truth we have inherited" (p. 369). By contrast, I think that what enables us to make such criticism is concrete alternative suggestions suggestions about how to redescribe what we are talking about. Some examples are Galileo's suggestions about how to redescribe the Aristotelian universe, Marx's suggestions about how to redescribe the nineteenth century, Heidegger's suggestions about how to redescribe the West as a whole, Dickens's suggestions about how to redescribe chancery law, Rabelais's suggestions about how to redescriibe monasteries, and Virginia Woolf's suggestions about how to redescribe women writing. Such fresh descriptions, such new suggestions of things to say, sentences to consider, vocabularies to employ, are what do the work. All that the idea of truth does is to say, "Bethink yourself that you might be mistaken; remember that your beliefs may be justified by your other belies in the area, but that the whole kit and caboodle might be misguided, and in particular that you might be using the wrong words for your purpose." But this admonition is empty and powerless without some concrete suggestion of an alternative set of beliefs, or of words. Moreover, if you have such a suggestion, you do not need the admonition. The only cash value of this regulative idea is to commend fallibilism, to remind us that lots of people have been as certain of, and as justified in believing, things that turned out to be false as we are certain of, and justified in holding, our present views. It is not, as McCarthy says, a "moment of unconditionality that opens us up to criticism from other points of view" (p. 370). It is the particular attractions of those other points of view.   Richard Rorty is University Professor of Humanities at the University of Virginia. His most recent book is Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity (1989). Thomas McCarthy Ironist Theory as a Vocation: A Response to_Rorty's_Reply I find myself in the odd position of trying to convince someone who had done as much as anyone to bring philosophy into the wider culture that he is wrong to urge now that its practice be consigned to the esoteric pursuits of "private ironists." The problem, I still believe, is Richard Rorty's all-or-nothing approach to philosophy ("Truth and Freedom: A Reply to Thomas McCarthy," pp. 633-43): foundationalism or ironism; and this, I think, is encouraged by his selective reading of philosophy's history. On that reading, modern philosophy "centered around a discussion of truth" (p. 634); it was preoccupied with foundationalist claims of one sort or another. But that preoccupation was permanently discredited by Friedrich Nietzsche and his descendants, especially Martin Heidegger and Jacques Derrida, leaving philosophy with nothing to do but pick the bones of its own carcass. What is missing from this story is precisely the line of thought extending from the left Hegelians to Jürgen Habermas I sought to develop in my paper. That line is defined by, among other things, the primacy of practical reason and the rerouting of philosophical inquiry in sociohistorical directions. One of its high points is American pragmatism, which, pace Rorty, does not lie along the Nietzsche Heidegger Derrida line.   Thomas McCarthy is professor of philosophy at Northwestern University. He is the author of The Critical Theory of Jürgen Habermas(1978) and editor of the series Studies in Contemporary German Social Thought. His work-in-progress concerns the relation of philosophy to social theory. Robert Lecker The Canonization of Canadian Literature: An Inquiry into_Value It is startling to realize that Canadian literature was canonized in fewer than twenty years. Here is how it happened. At the end of World War II, Canadian literature was not taught as an independent subject in Canadian schools. There was no canon. In 1957, the publishing firm McClelland and Stewart introduced its mass-market paperback reprint series entitled the New Canadian Library. It allowed teachers to discuss the work of many Canadian authors who had never been the subject of formal academic study. This New Canadian Library was truly "new": prior to its conception, there was no "library" in use. There were no Canadian classics. Northrop Frye recalls that at that time the notion of finding a classic Canadian writer remained but "a gleam in a paternal critic's eye."1 Frye's comment must be placed in context: he was remembering the efforts that produced the first Literary History of Canadain 1965. In T. D. MacLulich's words, its publication "gave a definitive imprimatur of respectability to the academic study of Canadian writing."2 It made a Canadian canon seem possible; to many, it made the canon seem real. With the advent of this history, the institution called Canadian literature was born.3   1. Northrop Frye, "Conclusion," in Literary History of Canada: Canadian Literature in English,2d ed., ed. Carl F. Klinck et al., 3 vols. (Toronto, 1976), 3:319. 2. T. D. MacLulich, "What Was Canadian Literature? Taking Stock of the Canlit Industry," Essays on Canadian Writing 30 (Winter 1984-85): 19; hereafter abbreviated "WWCL." 3. My use of the term "Canadian literature" applies to English-Canadian literature; the canonization of French-Canadian, or Québecois literature, invokes another story and another set of political imperatives that cannot be adequately treated within the scope of this discussion. 4. John Guillory, "Canonical and Non-Canonical: A Critique of the Current Debate," ELH 54 (Fall 1987): 483.   Robert Lecker is professor of English at McGill University. He is the author of several critical studies, including On the Line (1982), Robert Kroetsch (1986), and An Other I (1988), and coeditor of Essays on Canadian Writing,the multi-volume Canadian Writers and Their Works(1983 ), and the eight-volume Annotated Bibliography of Canada's Major Authors (1979 ). Lecker is currently preparing a collection of essays on the Canadian canon. Frank Davey Canadian Canons Although canon-formation is, as Lecker suggests, a product of rhetoric and textual choices of critics, it is also a product of economic forces, political conflicts, and cultural expectations of coherence, "order," and unitary explanation. Conditioned by some or all of these, an essay ostensibly skeptical of canons, as this one appears to be, can find itself nevertheless contributing to the thing it questions. In attempting to attribute the formation of a single national canon to a specific period ("since 1965" [p. 657]), to a specific and allegedly homogeneous group of actors ("Canadian academic critics" [p. 661]), and to a specific social phenomenon (the teaching of Canadian literature "as an independent subject in Canadian schools" [p. 656]), Lecker's essay becomes another constructor of canonical text and theory. Behind its arguments that a canon suddenly came into being are fairly precise assumptions not only about "Canadian critics" (p. 657) but also about what constitutes canonicity, and about the relative legitimacy of canonicity claims. "At the end of World War II, Canadian literature was not taught as an independent subject in Canadian schools. There was no canon," his essay begins (p. 656). Is a school curriculum the only possible context for the attainment of literary "legitimacy"? Can there be no canon if a literature has no curriculum, education publishers, or "academic critics," or if it has not been institutionalized as an "independent" subject?   Frank Davey,chair of the department of English at York University, is the author of From There to Here: A Guide to English Canadian Literature Since 1960 (1974), Surviving the Paraphrase (1983), Margaret Atwood: A Feminist Poetics (1984), and Reading Canadian Reading(1988). He is also the editor of Open Letter and the on-line magazine Swiftcurrent.He is currently working on a study of nationalist ideologies in Canadian fiction entitled National Arguments. Robert Lecker Response to Frank Davey I know that my view offends those who would prefer a noncentrist, or antifederalist, notion of Canadian literature. Davey has repeatedly expressed such a preference in his own criticism. It similarly offends those who believe that new critical voices are beginning to change our perceptions of the canon. I recognize these voices and grant that they may eventually alter our values. So far, very little has changed. It is this assertion that troubles Davey and prompts his central objection: my concept of the canon is unitary, centralist, conservative, monolithic, distorted, and misleading. It is all of these, insofar as it represents my attempt to describe the concept as it has been transmitted in works of Canadian criticism that promote the idea of coherence by arguing the validity of tradition, influence, pattern, or literary solidarity among authors in different eras. Such criticism imagines a unified view of Canadian literature as the reflection of a unified country. It projects a dream of what Northrop Frye called "the peaceable kingdom."1 In my essay, I emphasize the fictiveness of this dream. Yet this is the fiction that seems to have inspired most Canadian criticism. Although Davey might object to the expression of this dream, the objection doesn't come to terms with my assertion that the dream of national unity remains the driving force behind the literary and critical values we seek out and support. This force is not rational or empirical, as Davey would have us believe. It is a matter of faith. We create the canon in order to embody a vision of something larger we want to sustain.   Robert Lecker is professor of English at McGill University. He is the author of several critical studies, including On the Line (1982), Robert Kroetsch (1986), and An Other I (1988), and coeditor of Essays on Canadian Writing,the multi-volume Canadian Writers and Their Works(1983 ), and the eight-volume Annotated Bibliography of Canada's Major Authors(1979 ). Lecker is currently preparing a collection of essays on the Canadian canon. Peter Galison Aufbau/Bauhaus: Logical Positivism and Architectural Modernism On 15 October 1959, Rudolf Carnap, a leading member of the recently founded Vienna Circle, came to lecture at the Bauhaus in Dessau, southwest of Berlin. Carnap had just finished his magnum opus, The Logical Construction of the World,a book that immediately became the bible of the new antiphilosophy announced by the logical positivists. From a small group in Vienna, the movement soon expanded to include an international following, and in the sixty years since has exerted a powerful sway over the conduct of the philosophy of science as well as over wide branches of philosophy, economics, psychology, and physics. The site of Carnap's lecture that day, the Dessau Bauhaus, was a stunning building designed by Walter Gropius and dedicated just three years earlier. Protected by its flat roof and glass walls, the artists, architects, weavers, and furniture designers had made the school a citadel of high modernism. It was here that Carnap addressed an enthusiastic audience on "Science and Life." "I work in science," he began, "and you in visible forms; the two are only different sides of a single life."1 In this paper I will explore this "single life" of which the new philosophy and the new art were to be different facets; in the process, I hope to cast light on the shared modernist impulses that drove both disciplines in the interwar years.   1. Rudolf Carnap, lecture notes for his Bauhaus lecture, "Wissenschaft und Leben," prepared 1 Oct. 1929 and delivered 15 Oct. 1929, transcription from shorthand by Gerald Heverly, Carnap Papers in the Archives of Scientific Philosophy, University of Pittsburgh Libraries, University of Pittsburgh (hereafter abbreviated CP, PASP), document RC 110-07-49. Quoted by permission of the University of Pittsburgh. All rights reserved. Translations are my own unless otherwise noted.   Peter Galison is associate professor in the departments of philosophy and physics at Stanford University, where he co-chairs the program in the history of science. His primary interest is in the history and philosophy of experimentation, the subject of his How Experiments End (1987) and Big Science: The Growth of Large- Scale Research,edited with Bruce Hevly (forthcoming). His current project is entitled Image and Logic: The Material Culture of Modern Physics. Johannes Fabian Presence and Representation: The Other and Anthropological Writing Taken as a philosophical issue, the idea of representation implies the prior assumption of a differencebetween reality and its "doubles." Things are paired with images, concepts, or symbols, acts with rules and norms, events with structures. Traditionally, the problem with representations has been their "accuracy," the degree of fit between reality and its reproductions in the mind. When philosophers lost the hope of ever determining accuracy (and thus attaining Truth), they found consolation in the test of usefulness: a good representation is one that works. The proof of its working is that it enables us to act on the world together.1 In such a frame, science, including anthropology, is conceived as the pursuit of privileged representations, privileged in that, by their nature of by their combination, they establish knowledge of a special kind. In the case of anthropology, "culture" has served as a sort of umbrella concept for representations. The strcuturalists have been most explicit about the need to think of representation in the plural, but their position is shared, in varying degrees, by all those who conceive of (cultural) knowledge as the selection and combination of signs in systems, patterns, or structures, in short, as some kind of conceptual order ruling perceptual chaos.   1. Remember the connection between the Kantian quest for synthetic forms and Émile Durkheim's idea of collective representations sustained by the moral authority of a society. Durkheim certainly was one to look for the "ethic" in the "ethnic" primitive, and it makes me wonder whether Stephen A. Tyler's characterization of postmodern ethnography as a return to "an earlier and more powerful notion of the ethical character of all discourse, as captured in the ancient significance of the family of terms ‘ethos,' ‘ethnos,' ‘ethics'" might not signal a return to the Durkheimian fold (Tyler, "Post-Modern Ethnography: From Document of the Occult to Occult Document," in Writing Culture: The Poetics and Politics of Ethnography,ed. James Clifford and George E. Marcus [Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1986], p. 126).   Johannes Fabianis professor of cultural anthropology at the University of Amsterdam. His publications include Jamaa: A Charismatic Movement in Katanga (1971), Time and the Other: How Anthropology Makes Its Object (1983), and Language and Colonial Power: The Appropriation of Swahili in the Former Belgian Congo, 1880-1938 (1986). Two books will appear in 1990: History from Below: The Vocabulary of Elisabethville by André Yav,a commented edition-translation of a colonial history written in Swahili by the colonized for the colonized, and Power and Performance,a study of conceptions of power through popular wisdom and theater in Shaba/ Zaire. Annabel Patterson Couples, Canons, and the Uncouth: Spenser-and-Milton in Educational Theory Among the processes of canon-formation is the habit of coupling writers; and among the most powerful of couples in the traditional English literary canon is Spenser-and-Milton. Much of my own professional life has probably been determined by my first teaching assignment of 1963, which included "Spenser-and- Milton," in those days at Toronto a famous cornerstone course carrying the tamp of the stamp of the formidable Renaissance scholar A. S. P. Woodhouse, known affectionately if disrespectfully to his students as Professor Nature-and-Grace. For several years I labored mightily, though neither naturally nor, I suspect, gracefully, on Spenser-and-Milton, sensing all the time that the connections I made, the doctrines I was conveying, lacked persuasion; and no doubt the seed of this essay was sown in those days, although its angle of sight was not then available, obscured on all sides by institutional pillars. When we couple writers we usually imply a criterion of fit or at least explicable mating. While there is nothing to prohibit a merely comparativist curiosity, or coupling in the service of some other agenda, we presumably give greater authority to relationships that imply causality, even, or especially, if causality is defined as the influence of the one writer on the other. Most of such relationships are unidirectional, from the earlier to the later dead, and a plausible coupling requires either the successor's own testimony that the influence-relation existed, or other evidence that the influence-relation was strong enough to be formative; or, preferably, both.   Annabel Patterson,professor of literature and English at Duke University, is the author of Hermogenes and the Renaissance (1970), Marvell and the Civic Crown (1978), Censorship and Interpretation (1984), Pastoral and Ideology: Virgil to Valéry (1987), and Shakespeare and the Popular Voice (1989). Yves Bonnefoy Lifting Our Eyes from the Page For the past thirty years or so we have witnessed the greatest period at least for France in the history of thinking about literature; I want first of all to stress this point, adding, however, that despite this fact problems of fundamental significance still seem to me to have been poorly raised. Among these is the problem of how to read a work. And yet, it is not as though reading has not been the object of continual attention, from the American fascination after the war with "close reading" to the work of the deconstructionists: a revolution has taken place that has made reading the very center of its concern. Indeed, today, we think we can recognize in the structure of a text, in the relation between its words, a reality that is much more reliable and tangible than the meaning that runs along the surface, or than the author's intention, or even than the author's very being, the idea of which has been rendered problematical to the point of dissolution by the ambiguities inherent in his simplest utterances. It is not the writer who is real, it is his language which is neither true nor false, signifying only itself. What is more, it is infinite; its forms and effects are disseminated everywhere in a book without ever being able to be totalized: and because of this, reading has a more clearly creative function than ever before that is, of course, if readers make themselves attentive to all the levels in the depths of the text and bring them as much as they can into the various networks of their analyses. Reading has become a responsibility, a contribution, equal in its way to writing, and moreover it has now become an end in itself, since those who read need not judge themselves more real, more present in their relation to themselves, than the writer. And so, from this point of view, it would seem difficult to say that the problem of reading has been neglected by contemporary criticism.   Yves Bonnefoy is professor of comparative poetics at the Collège de France in Paris. He is the author of five books of poetry, including the recent Ce qui fut sans lumière (1987). Bonnefoy is also a distinguished translator of English poets, such as Donne and Shakespeare, Keats and Yeats. His books of criticism include Rimbaud par lui-même(1961); Rome 1630: l'horizon du premier baroque (1970); Le Nuage rouge (1977); L'Improbable et autres essays (1980); La Verité de parole (1988). He is the editor of the Dictionnaire des Mythologies et des Religions des sociétés traditionelles et du monde antique (1981) and of the forthcoming Dictionnaire des poétiques.He received the French Prix Goncourt for poetry in 1987 and the Bennett Award in 1988. John Naughton is associate professor of romance literatures at Colgate University. He is the author of a critical study of Yves Bonnefoy called The Poetics of Yves Bonnefoy (1984) and the editor of a volume of Bonnefoy's essays in translation entitled The Act and the Place of Poetry (1989). His translation of Bonnefoy's Ce qui fut sons lumière and his book on Louis-René des Forêts will appear in 1991. Calvin Bedient Kristeva and Poetry as Shattered Signification We had thought that poetry was a grace beyond biology, except for the biomovements of dancers, athletes, or those we love most. We had thought it a contradictory "organic" perfection in the relatively staying realm of the symbolical. But, no, according to Kristeva's theory, poetry is essentially antiformal in fact, so profoundly antiaesthetic that the proper words for describing it are not beauty, inspiration, form, instinctive rightness, inevitability,or delicacy (to leave aside unaesthetic terms such as perception and truth,which the theory also renders inappropriate). Instead, it attracts terms drawn from politics and war: corruption, infiltration, disruption, shatterings, negation, supplantation,and murder. Poetry is the chora'sguerrilla war against culture. According to Kristeva, poetry reverses the ritualistic theological sacrifice of the soma, a sacrifice subsequently exacted, like a sales tax, through the "thetic" element of discourse, its determinate articulations. For Kristeva, the "theologization of the thetic" is what culture is (RPL,p. 78) and as such it has no fundamental right to be, since what is fundamental is the chora and not God. I refer here as throughout to the revolutionary Kristeva of the late sixties and early seventies, the Kristeva whose "we," as she says in "My Memory's Hyperbole," was a putatively communist Parisian party for "permanent revolution."4 Revolution in Poetic Language is a monumental, late end product of this phase of Kristeva's thinking; indeed, there are signs that she had already surpassed it by the time the book was published.   4. See Kristeva, "My Memory's Hyperbole," trans. Athena Viscusi, in The Female Autograph: Theory and Practice of Autobiography from the Tenth to the Twentieth Century,ed. Domna C. Stanton (1984; Chicago, 1987), pp. 219-35.   Calvin Bedient is professor of English at the University of California, Los Angeles. His most recent book is He Do the Police in Different Voices (1986), a study of The Waste Land. Charles Bernstein Optimism and Critical Excess (Process) This is not a transcription. More like a reenactment of the possibilities of performative poetics as improvisatory, open-ended. As a way to engage the relation of poetics to poetry and by implication differentiate poetics from literary theory and philosophy, although not necessarily from poetry. As a way to extend the ideas about closure the rejection of closure into the discussion of essays and critical writing. To eject, that is, the idea that there is something containable to say: completed saying. So that poetics becomes an activity that is ongoing, that moves in different directions at the same time, and that tries to disrupt or make problematic any formulation that seems too final or preemptively restrictive. Speaking at the Buffalo conference, Linda Reinfeld pointed to the wedding that was being enacted (which is really always being enacted) between critical theory and poetry as a kind of subtext of that gathering. Hearing Rosmarie Waldrop read, in that context, from Reproduction of Profilessuggested something very much along these lines: Waldrop has created a literary wedding, in the sense of wedding together, or fusing, of philosophy and poetry. In this work, she has taken phrases from Elizabeth Anscombe's translation of Ludwig Wittgenstein's Philosophical Investigations and added weaved in phrases of her own making. The structure of Reproduction of Profiles provokes a number of questions, including the status of Wittgenstein's original text, which may itself be taken as a poetic work, and also the status of the Reproduction of Profiles what kind of a work is that?   Charles Bernstein is the author of a number of books of poetry, including Rough Trades, The Nude Formalism, The Lives of the Toll Takers, The Sophist,and Controlling Interests.Other books include Content's Dream: Essays 1975-1984 and Artifice of Absorption.He coedited L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E and recently edited The Politics of Poetic Form: Poetry and Public Policy. John Hallmark Neff Introduction: Daring to Dream In the absence of shared beliefs and even common interests, it should not be surprising that so much of the well-intentioned art acquired for public spaces has failed failed as art and as art for a civic site. The conventional wisdom of simply choosing "the best artist" and then turning him or her loose to create a work within time and budget guidelines lost much credibility with the drama of Richard Serra's Tilted Arc commission: the process of selection, erection, litigation, rejection, and removal of the sculpture from the Federal Building plaza in New York City. The new conventional wisdom? The jury, not the artist, was ultimately responsible. For Serra did precisely the kind of work for which he is respected worldwide but in a context and for a specific public whose requirements, in their view, were not met but even abrogated by what Serra had done so well: made a Serra. The issues raised by this particular controversy as well as by the very different response now accorded the once-controversial Vietnam Veterans Memorial by Maya Lin, together with firsthand frustration with the selection process for public commissions, were some of the specific reasons for organizing the day-long symposium held 16 September 1989 in First Chicago Center under the auspices of Sculpture Chicago, a biennial exhibition and educational series.   John Hallmark Neff,director of the First National Bank of Chicago's art program, is a former director of the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago. He is the author of Anselm Kiefer: Brüch und Einung(1988), and he is currently working on a book on Max Neuhaus and a catalogue essay for the forthcoming Agnes Denes retrospective exhibition. Michael North The Public as Sculpture: From Heavenly City to_Mass_Ornament The most notable development in public sculpture of the last thirty years has been the disappearance of the sculpture itself. Ever since Jean Tinguely's Homage to New York destroyed itself at the Museum of Modern Art in 1960, sculptors have tried to find new ways to make the sculptural object invisible, immaterial, or remote. Where the sculpture did have some material presence, it often took unexpected forms. As Rosalind Krauss says, "Rather surprising things have come to be called sculpture: narrow corridors with TV monitors at the ends; large photographs documenting country hikes; mirrors placed at strange angles in ordinary rooms; temporary lines cut into the floor of the desert." However various these experiments may seem, they began with a single motive: to escape the constraints of the pedestal, the gallery, and finally of art itself. To prevent this new work from becoming just another commodity in the market, artists either produced works so intangible or remote they could not be bought and sold, or disseminated their ideas in so many reproducible forms they could not be monopolized. The political nature of these motives also meant that much of this "sculpture" could be considered "public." Changing the nature of the art meant changing the role of the audience as well, questioning the purely contemplative role the observer plays in the conventional setting of the museum or gallery. According to Henry Sayre, "As the avant-garde work of art denies its own autonomy, it implicates the audience in its workings."3 As the aesthetic focus shifts from the object to the experience it provokes, the relationship of the two goes beyond mere implication: the public becomes the sculpture. Artists, like Richard Serra, whose goal is to illuminate the material nature of space and the often tenuous materiality of the observer's own body, have made "the viewer, in effect, the subject of the work," to quote Douglas Crimp.   Michael North is associate professor of English at the University of California, Los Angeles. He is the author of The Final Sculpture: Public Monuments and Modern Poets (1985) and is currently completing a study of the politics of Yeats, Eliot, and Pound. W. J. T. Mitchell The Violence of Public Art: Do the Right_Thing The question naturally arises: Is public art inherently violent, or is it a provocation to violence? Is violence built into the monument in its very conception? Or is violence simply an accident that befalls some monuments, a matter of the fortunes of history? The historical record suggests that if violence is simply an accident that happens to public art, it is one that is always waiting to happen. The principal media and materials of public art are stone and metal sculpture not so much by choice as by necessity. "A public sculpture," says Lawrence Alloway, "should be invulnerable or inaccessible. It should have the material strength to resist attack or be easily cleanable, but it also needs a formal structure that is not wrecked by alterations."12 The violence that surrounds public art is more, however, than simply the ever-present possibility of an accident the natural disaster or random act of vandalism. Much of the world's public art memorials, monuments, triumphal arches, obelisks, columns, and statues has a rather direct reference to violence in the form of war or conquest. From Ozymandias to Caesar to Napoleon to Hitler, public art has served as a kind of monumentalizing of violence, and never more powerfully than when it presents the conqueror as a man of peace, imposing a Napoleonic code or a pax Romana on the world. Public sculpture that is too frank or explicit about this monumentalizing of violence, whether the Assyrian palace reliefs of the ninth century b.c., or Morris's bomb sculpture proposal of 1981, is likely to offend the sensibilities of a public committed to the repression of its own complicity in violence.13 The very notion of public art as we receive it is inseparable from what Jürgen Habermas has called "the liberal model of the public sphere," a dimension distinct from the economic, the private, and the political. This ideal realm provides the space in which disinterested citizens may contemplate a transparent emblem of their own inclusiveness and solidarity, and deliberate on the general good, free of coercion, violence, or private interests.14   12. Lawrence Alloway, "The Public Sculpture Problem," Studio International 184 (Oct. 1972): 124. 13. See Leo Bersani and Ulysse Dutoit, "The Forms of Violence," October,no. 8 (Spring 1979): 17-29, for an important critique of the "narrativization" of violence in Western art and an examination of the alternative suggested by the Assyrian palace reliefs. 14. Habermas first introduced this concept in The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere: An Inquiry into a Category of Bourgeois Society,trans. Thomas Burger and Frederick Lawrence (Cambridge, Mass., 1989). First published in 1962, it has since become the focus of an extensive literature. See also Habermas's short encyclopedia article, "The Public Sphere," trans. Sara Lennox and Frank Lennox, New German Critique 1 (Fall 1974): 49-55, and the introduction to it by Peter Hohendahl in the same issue, pp. 45-48. I owe much to the guidance of Miriam Hansen and Lauren Berlant on this complex and crucial topic.   W. J. T. Mitchell,editor of ,is Gaylord Donnelly Distinguished Service Professor of English and art at the University of Chicago. His recent book is Iconology: Image, Text, Ideology (1986). Vito Acconci Public Space in a Private Time 2 Public space is an old habit. The words public space are deceptive; when I hear the words, when I say the words, I'm forced to have an image of a physical place I can point to and be in. I should be thinking only of a condition; but, instead, I imagine an architectural type, and I think of a piazza, or a town square, or a city commons. Public space, I assume, without thinking about it, is a place where the public gathers. The public gathers in two kinds of spaces. The first is a space that ispublic, a place where the public gathers because it has a right to the place; the second is a space that is made public, a place where the public gathers precisely because it doesn't have the right a place made public by force. 3 In the space that is public, the public whose space this is has agreed to be a public; these are people "in the form of the city," they are public when they act "in the name of the city." They "own" the city only in quotes. The establishment of certain space in the city as "public" is a reminder, a warning, that the rest of the city isn't public. New York doesn't belong to us, and neither does Paris, and neither does Des Moines. Setting up a public space means setting asidea public space. Public space is a place in the middle of the city but isolated from the city. Public space is the piazza, an open space separated from the closure of alleys and dead ends; public space is the piazza, a space in the light, away from the plots and conspiracies in dark smokey rooms.   Vit Acconci'slatest show, entitled "Public Places," was held in 1988 at the Museum of Modern Art, New York. He is currently at work on a park in Detroit, a pedestrian mall in Baltimore, and a housing project in Regensburg, Germany. Agnes Denes The Dream The issues touched on in my work range between individual creation and social consciousness. We have entered an age of alienation brought on by specialization, a by-product of the Information Age. This is an age of complexity, when knowledge and ideas are coming in faster than can be assimilated, while disciplines become progressively alienated from each other through specialization. The hard-won knowledge that accumulates undigested, blocking meaningful communication. Clearly defined direction for mankind is lacking. The turn of the century and the next millennium will usher in a troubled environment and a troubled psyche. Making art today is synonymous with assuming responsibility for our fellow man. I am concerned with the fact that we have taken evolution into our own hands. We are the first species that has the ability to consciously alter its evolution, modify itself at will, even put an end to its existence. We have gotten hold of our destiny and our impact on earth is astounding. Because of our tremendous success we are overrunning the planet, squandering its resources. We are young as a species, even younger as a civilization, and like reckless children initiate processes we cannot control. We tend to overproduce, overuse, and quickly tire of things. We also overreact, panic, and self-correct in hindsight. The pluralistic nature of things creates too many variables, confusing the goals to be achieved. Sustained interest and effective action are diminished with the alienation of the individual who feels little potential to interact or identify effectively with society as a whole. Overview for mankind is lacking and as the momentum increases human values tend to decline.   Agnes Denes has had over 250 solo and group exhibitions on four continents since 1965. She has participated in such major international exhibitions as Project '74, Cologne; the 1976 Biennale of Sydney, Australia; Documenta 6 in Kassel, Germany; and the Venice Biennales of 1978 and 1980. In 1989, she received her fourth National Endowment Individual Artist Fellowship. She has published four books, including The Book of Dust The Beginning and the End of Time and Thereafter (1986). Ben Nicholson Urban Poises The urban poise is dependent on a particular notion of urban planning: a myriad of actions that can adjust civic life in many places to provoke it towards greater self-esteem. Urban planning is not consecrated by a drawing in the shape of a plan alone, but it must respect the elevation of the stance of an urban spectacle as seen from the sidewalk. The coercion of civic indicators is reappraised by delighting in the figurative stance of the informant city. Small things are done in the city within its existing urban structure so that an edge is applied to what already exists. City blocks might be fractionally altered, holes in the skyline reamed out smooth, and points located strategically so that they can carry their attendant responsibilities. The method is marginally parasitic, for it exists by requiring something else to exist that it cannot readily harbor. Ten points and places of vulnerability have been chosen in the city that poke at its underbelly. Whilst the poises are given names and specific sites, their viability could be felt equally in a different city using changed names. The Appliance House franchises its intention to various matters of civic consequence, ranging from the weather to shopping to the monumental respect for the dead. Each poise is considered integrally related to the wholeness of the city. If any of the Poises becomes disassociated from the city or from other Poises, the prime tenet of urban existence will have been ignored: the over-exertion of one component of urban life will take place at the expense of somebody else.   Ben Nicholson is studio professor of architecture at the Illinois Institute of Technology. His Appliance House will be published later this year. Cheryl Herr The Erotics of Irishness Like all fields of inquiry, Irish studies has its own traditions, its own ways of organizing information. even the most adventurous of the native practitioners tend carefully to maintain disciplinary boundaries when presenting evidence to sustain a thesis, and American scholars have used Irish practice as their frame of reference. This essay, which engages with the time-honored and increasingly vexed enterprise of defining "Irishness," introduces play into these traditions both in spirit and in methodology. An alternative approach to analyzing Ireland might foreground the underlying assumptions about social relations and historical patterns that link Irish art and writing across diverse fields of inquiry. Exploring the many rhetorics of Ireland might make it impossible, for example, for those involved in the essential task of historical and scientific inquiry to overlook the submessages of popular Irish representations. I begin, obliquely, with a contrast between American and Irish censorship of music videos. My inquiry targets some fundamental differences between American and Irish appropriations of the body, from which the essay suggests symmetries between the psychological development of individuals in Ireland and one stage in what might be termed the psychohistory of Irish culture. As an experimental, semidisruptive piece that challenges disciplinary lines in the field and introduces fresh theoretical categories, this essay reaches toward a new Irish studies.   Cheryl Herr,associate professor of English at the University of Iowa, has published Joyce's Anatomy of Culture (1986) and For the Land They Loved: Irish Political Melodramas, 1890-1925 (1990). Two of her current projects involve spatial organization in Ireland and the syntax of English modernism. Arnold I. Davidson Introduction to Musil and Levinas During the last several years, we have witnessed a reopening of questions concerning National Socialism whose full scope and implications have yet to be determined. The Historikerstreit has provoked new discussions of the problem of the specificity or uniqueness of Auschwitz. While raising general methodological issues about the nature of historical explanation and understanding, the Historikerstreit has also revolved around specific questions concerning the role of moral concepts and memory in assessing National Socialism.1 Disclosures about Paul de Man's wartime writings and further examination of Martin Heidegger's involvement with National Socialism have led to broader consideration of the relations among philosophy, theory, and politics, and have forced us to rethink the problem of intellectual responsibility with renewed urgency.2 These and related topics were at the center of a major international conference, "Nazism and the Final Solution," organized by Saul Friedlånder last April, which took as its organizing theme the limits of ethical, aesthetic, and historical representation of the Final Solution.3 In light of these continuing discussions, we are publishing two remarkable essays written during the early years of National Socialism. To the often-posed challenge, how could one be expected to respond lucidly to Nazism in the early 1930s?, these essays by Robert Musil and Emmanuel Levinas constitute, by the sheer power of their insights, decisive answers. Although significantly different in approach, these essays show not only that one could recognize the reality of National Socialism as it was coming to power, but indicate further that analyses of permanent value could be formulated virtually from the beginning. Musil and Levinas serve to remind us concretely of the capabilities of the human mind and of its responsibilities capabilities and responsibilities that even the most severe political circumstances need not overwhelm.   1. For documents from and discussion of the Historikstreit,see the special issue of New German Critique44 (Spring/Summer 1988). 2. On Paul de Man, see 14 (Spring 1988): 590-652, and 15 (Summer 1989): 704-44, 764-873. On Martin Heidegger, see 15 (Winter 1989): 407-88. 3. The proceedings of this conference are forthcoming.   Arnold I. Davidson,executive editor of and associate professor of philosophy at the University of Chicago, is currently Marta Sutton Weeks Fellow at the Stanford Humanities Center. Robert Musil Ruminations of a Slow-Witted Mind The orientation and leadership of the revolutionary "renewal of the German mind," whose witnesses and participants we are, point in two directions. On, after seizing power, would like to talk the mind into helping out with internal development and promises it a golden age if it joins up; indeed it even offers it the prospect of a certain voice in decision making. The other direction, on the contrary, attests its mistrust of the intellect by declaring that the revolutionary process will continue indefinitely, and (especially in the short run) has room for the mind in its task; or it might also assure the intellect that it is not needed at all because a new mind has already turned up, and that the old one might as well jump into the fire and either burn to ashes or purify itself into its elements. What has happened up to the moment these words are being written leaves no doubt that the second direction is on the march, the first its musical accompaniment. Nor can it be otherwise than that a Movement [National Socialism] that has manifested itself so powerfully demands above all that the intellect complete assimilate and subordinate itself to the Movement. But then again, it is possible that the intellect cannot do this without renouncing itself. Surely there must be some sort of boundary here, since nothing happens that is not contingent; so it is a good test for the intellect that today it has everywhere been saddled with a kind of kangaroo-court mentality that judges it not according to its own laws, but according to the law of the Movement.   Robert Musil (1880-1942) made a decisive contribution to twentieth- century European literature. Among his works available in English are Young Törless, Posthumous Papers of a Living Author,and The Man Without Qualities.Burton Pike is professor of comparative literature at the Graduate School of the City University of New York. With Sophie Wilkins, he has edited and translated a new edition of Musil's novel The Man without Qualities,available in 199. He is the author of Robert Musil: An Introduction to His Work (1972) and The Image of the City in Modern Literature(1981). David S. Luftteaches modern European intellectual history at the University of California, San Diego. He is the author of Robert Musil and the Crisis of European Culture, 1880-1912 (1980). Emmanuel Levinas Reflections on the Philosophy of Hitlerism The philosophy of Hitler is simplistic [primaire]. But the primitive powers that burn within it burst open its wretched phraseology under the pressure of an elementary force. They awaken the secret nostalgia within the German soul. Hitlerism is more than a contagion or a madness; it is an awakening of elementary feelings. But from this point on, this frighteningly dangerous phenomenon becomes philosophically interesting. For these elementary feelings harbor a philosophy. They express a soul's principal attitude towards the whole of reality and its own destiny. They predetermine or prefigure the meaning of the adventure that the soul will face in the world. The philosophy of Hitlerism therefore goes beyond the philosophy of Hitlerians. It questions the very principles of a civilization. The conflict is played out not only between liberalism and Hitlerism. Christianity itself is threatened in spite of the careful attentions or Concordats that the Christian churches took advantage of when Hitler's regime came to power. But it is not enough to follow certain journalists in distinguishing between Christian universalism and racist particularism: a logical contradiction cannot judge a concrete event. The meaning of a logical contradiction that opposes two forms of ideas only shows up fully if we go back to their source, to intuition, to the original decision that makes them possible. It is in this spirit that we are going to set forth the following reflections.   Emmanuel Levinashas been professor of philosophy at the Ecole Normale Superieure Israelite de Paris and at the University of Paris I (Sorbonne). Among his books that have been translated into English are Totality and Infinity, Ethics and Infinity, Otherwise Than Being or Beyond Essence, and The Levinas Reader. His essay "As If Consenting to Horror" appeared in the Winter 1989 issue of . Sean Hand is lecturer in French at the University College of Wales, Aberystwyth. He is the editor of The Levinas Reader (1989) and the translator of Levinas's Difficult Freedom (forthcoming). He is currently completing a book on Michel Leiris. Michael Camille The Très Riches Heures:An Illuminated Manscript in the_Age_of Mechanical Reproduction This new nonexistence of the Très Riches Heures is, I would argue, crucial to the existence of its replications. It is essential for each numbered copy of the limited facsimile edition that the original manuscript not be available for all to see. Most art historians, no matter how "contextual" or theoretical, would still emphasize the necessity of looking at the objects they study with that oddly singular, egocentrically well-trained "eye"/I. Left, however, with only the piles of reproductions I am forced to ask myself and my students not what is the Très Riches Heures (a nonentity hidden somewhere in a museum vault) but what are the books, pamphlets, postcards, facsimiles, and the laser discs that scholars working on the manuscript at Chantilly are now shown instead of the original? The manuscript now has the status of one of those hypothetical "lost prototypes," beloved of scholars of manuscript illumination, that can only be seen refracted in its subsequent copies. Just as hypothesizing on the influence of early medieval "lost models" on existing works has always seemed to me a futile approach to medieval book painting, and preferring to view every manuscript as an object in its own right, I am not concerned with the lost and now forever invisible Très Riches Heures itself but rather with the power of its many reproductions.   Michael Camilleis associate professor of art history at the University of Chicago and the author of The Gothic Idol: Ideology and Image- Making in Medieval Art (1989). He is working on a study of medieval marginal images entitled Image on the Edge (forthcoming). Jack Amariglio, Stephen Resnick, and Richard Wolff Division and Difference in the "Discipline" of Economics The existence and unity of a discipline called economics reside in the eye and mind of the beholder. The perception of economics's unity and disciplinarity itself arises in some, but not all, of the different schools of thought that we would loosely categorize as economic. Indeed, as we hope to show, the presumption of unity and disciplinarity the idea that there is a center or "core" of propositions, procedures, and conclusions or a shared historical "object" of theory and practice is suggested in the concepts and methods of some schools of economic thought, but is opposed by others. Further, we argue that the portrayal of economics as a discipline with distinct boundaries is often a discursive strategy by one school or another to hegemonize the field of economic discourse. In this way, the issue of the existence of an economics discipline and its principles of unity or dispersion is in part a political question. Its effects are felt in the hiring and firing of economics professors and practitioners, the determination of what comprises an economics curriculum, the determination of what is a legitimate economic argument and what is not, the dispensation of public and private grant monies, and the differential entry into or exclusion from ideological, political, and economic centers of power and decision making. Our view is that no discipline of economics exists. Or, rather, no unified discipline exists. The "discipline" of economics is actually an agonistic and shifting field of fundamentally different and often conflicting discourses. The dispersion and divisions that exist between the schools of thought we discuss here as "economic" may have some regularities. But we do not see closer contiguity of these economic schools when placed on a horizontal scale than, to take just one example, among all of the many different "disciplinary" forms of Marxian thought. That is, in our view, Marxian economic thought shares more concepts, approaches, and methods may have more discursive regularity with Marxian literary theory than do Marxian economic thought and neoclassical economic theory.   Jack Amarigliois associate professor of economics at Merrimack College and the editor of Rethinking Marxism: A Journal of Economics, Culture, and Society. He is working on a book entitled Modernism and Postmodernism in Economics with Arjo Klamer.Stephen ResnickandRichard Wolffare professors of economics at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. Their recent coauthored books are Knowledge and Class: A Marxian Critique of Political Economy (1987) and Economics: Marxian versus Neoclassical (1987). Walter Frisch Music and Jugendstil The most common approach in writings on music and Jugendstil has been to isolate several aspects of the visual art, either of technique or of subject matter, and to seek parallels in music of the fin de siècle. Historians of art and design seem to agree on at least three basic elements of Jugendstil: the primacy of the dynamic, flowing line; flatness or two dimensionality (Jugendstil has been called a Flåchenkunst); and the profuseness of ornament. All these features are neatly embodied in a 1900 drawing by Theodor Heine (fig. 1), in which the ostensible subject matter, the dancing lady, is dissolved in the undulating linearity of her dress and the swirling smoke or incense. In this example, as in the celebrated "Cyclamen" tapestry by the Munich artist Hermann Obrist (fig. 2), line and ornament are largely liberated from their representational obligations and are manipulated in an almost abstract fashion. As Robert Schmutzler has remarked, the tapestry is "on the borderline dividing the symbol and the ornament, between abstract dynamism and the representation of a distinctive organism."4 This aspect of Obrist's tapestry was realized as early as 1895 by the critic Georg Fuchs, who wrote in the journal Pan, "'These embroideries do not intend to "mean" anything, to say anything.'" Fuchs went on to describe the dynamic motion of the image in terms that have nothing to do with cyclamens per se: "'This racing movement seems like the abrupt, powerful convolution of the lash of a whip. One moment it appears as the image of a forceful outburst of natural elements; it is a lightning bolt. Another moment it resembles the defiant signature of a great man, a conqueror, an intellect who decrees new laws through new documents.''"5 Fuchs's metaphor of the whiplash or Peitschenhieb, has stuck; Obrist's tapestry is today known principally by that name.   4. Robert Schmutzler, Art Nouveau (New York, 1962), p. 193. 5. Georg Fuchs, quoted in Peg Weiss, Kandinsky in Munich: The Formative Jugendstil Years (Princeton, N.J., 1979), p. 33; hereafter abbreviated KM; translation modified.   Walter Frisch is associate professor of music at Columbia University and author of Brahms and the Principle of Developing Variation (1984). He is presently completing a book on the early tonal works of Arnold Schoenberg. Bruce F. Murphy The Exile of Literature: Poetry and the Politics_of_the_Other(s) The marginality of poetry in American culture has been taken for granted at least since the dawn of the modernist period, when Walt Whitman printed his first volume of poetry at his own expense. More recently, it has become an article of faith that there is a real popular audience for poetry, but somewhere else-in the East. Literary journals, the popular press, and publishers have made household names of a handful of Eastern European writers: Czeslaw Milosz, Joseph Brodsky, Zbigniew Herbert. One is regaled with chestnuts about ordinary people in the Eastern bloc who care about "the Word," manuscripts passed from hand to hand, even poems preserved orally. Inevitably, the questions are revived: Where are the great American poets? Has American poetry been reduced to private confessions and personal trivia? Why is it that our poetry lacks that public, political relevance? The answer to such questions is often that we do not have the weight of History on our backs, the state oppression under which, as Milosz says, "poetry is no longer alienated," no longer "a foreigner in society," and can become more important than bread.1 But what has not surfaced in the vaunted "poetry and politics" debate is the extent to which our homage to victims of censorship everywhere has become a fetishization of totalitarianism, and a self-serving one at that. The mythology of our freedom, unbounded and unmediated, depends precisely on this other world, on what happens over there.   1. Czeslaw Milosz, The Witness of Poetry (Cambridge, Mass., 1983), p. 95; hereafter abbreviated WP.   Bruce F. Murphy's work has appeared in the Paris Review, Pequod, and An Gael. He has completed a manuscript of poems and with Friedrich Ulfers is writing a study of Friedrich Nietzsche. Lee Clark Mitchell Face, Race, and Disfiguration in Stephen Crane's "The_Monster" What does it mean to be black in America, to exist as a dark physical body, a "colored" voice, a stigmatized being in a society that sees, hears, and acts according to a set of bleaching assumptions? Versions of that question have echoed across our historical landscape ever since James-town, but rarely have they figured so forcibly as in the 1890s, when the Supreme Court upheld Ferguson over Plessy, Jim Crow laws spread through the South, degenerationists elaborated the "problem of the Negro," imperialists hoisted the "white man's burden" of "little brown brothers" abroad, and racial lynching peaked at an all-time high that incited a national scandal. Any radical hopes for Reconstruction after the Civil War had long since vanished by the years of the fin de siècle. And a century later, the gains of a "Second Reconstruction" movement for civil rights have likewise eroded, with unparalleled "hypersegregation" accentuating new patterns of black poverty, unemployment, family disintegration, homelessness, and addiction.1 Being black, in other words, has meant and, to a considerable degree, continues to mean being excluded from white society, white prerogatives, even white discourse itself, in a process whose effects insidiously appear to legitimate the very causes that produce them.   1. C. Vann Woodward first warned of this unsettling repetition of nineteenth-century patterns in his 1965 suggestion that the civil rights movement might constitute a "Second Reconstruction" (Woodward, "From the First Reconstruction to the Second," Harper's Magazine, Apr. 1965, pp. 127-33). In his recent reassessment of the troubling implications of that prediction, he notes how ghetto speech is growing more distinct from standard English: "The result is a vicious circle in which the longer blacks are made victims of the white stereotypes that foster hypersegregation, the more they appear to conform to the stereotypes that were used to justify segregation in the first place, and the deeper victims sink in isolation" (Woodward, "The Crisis of Caste," The New Republic, 6 Nov. 1989, p. 44).   Lee Clark Mitchell,professor of English at Princeton University, is the author of Witnesses to a Vanishing America: The Nineteenth- Century Response (1981) and Determined Fictions: American Literary Naturalism (1989). He is currently working on the formula western in a book tentatively titled "Writing Westward: Imagining America beyond the Frontier." Michael Fried Almayer's Face: On "Impressionism" in Conrad, Crane, and_Norris My basic supposition is that the destruction of the little Jew's face and hands in Vandover and the Brute images the irruption of mere (or brute) materiality within the scene of writing-that instead of Crane's double process of eliciting and repressing that materiality, what is figured in the shipwreck scene is a single, unstoppable process of materialization, involving both the act of representation (the beating of the helpless Jew) and the marking tool and actual page (the stump of the oar, the Jew's "white and writhing" face), the result of which can only be the defeat of the very possibility of writing (as embodied in the chilling phrase, "When his hands were gone"). Here it might be objected that such a reading derives whatever plausibility it has from the comparison with Crane, and in a sense this is true: my claim is precisely that it's only against the background of Crane's seemingly bizarre but, in this regard, normative or centric enterprise that the wider problematic of late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century literary "impressionism" can be made out. In another sense, however, the comparison with Crane involves an appeal to issues notably that of materialism which have long been basic to Norris criticism and which the recent work of Walter Benn Michaels has brought to a new level of conceptual sophistication and historical refinement. Specifically, the title essay in Michaels's book, The Gold Standard and the Logic of Naturalism, interprets both McTeague and Vandover and the Brute in terms of a conflict between materiality and representation that found contemporary expression both in the debates over the gold and silver standards versus paper money and in the vogue for trompe l'oeil painting (in which the objects that a given picture represents are as it were directly contrasted with the paint and canvas the picture is made of)." In this regard a crucial moment in Vandover's regression from man to beast is his discovery that, as a painter, he has lost the ability to represent nature three-dimensionally; Michaels treats this development as equivalent to "replac[ing] the painting with nature itself" (that is, with the shallowly three-dimensional canvas), and goes on to remark: "But this ... is ultimately a distinction without a difference. Vandover the artist can so easily devolve into Vandover the brute precisely because both artist and brute are already committed to a naturalist ontology in money, to precious metals; in art, to three-dimensionality. The moral of Vandover's regression, from this standpoint, is that it can only take place because . . . it has already taken place. Discovering that man is a brute, Norris repeats the discovery that paper money is just paper and that a painting of paper money is just paint" (GS, pp. 166-67). My reading of the shipwreck passage would thus be consistent with what Michaels calls Norris's "trompe l'oeil materialism" (GS, p. 167), though the nearly sadomasochistic violence of that passage may be taken to imply that materialism's consequences for writing threaten to be even more disastrous than they are for painting. But rather than analyze the role of writing as such in Vandover, which would involve an intricate discussion not just of that novel and McTeague but also of Michaels's essay, I want to turn to another, lesser-known book by Norris, in which a thematic of writing plays a conspicuous and more nearly univocal role: A Man's Woman (1899).   Michael Fried is J. R. Herbert Boone Professor of Humanities and director of the Humanities Center at the Johns Hopkins University. His most recent book is Courbet's Realism (1990). He is currently at work on a book to be titled Manet's Modernism. Ian Hacking The Making and Molding of Child Abuse Some evil actions are public. Maybe genocide is the most awful. Other evil actions are private, a matter of one person harming another or of self-inflicted injury. Child abuse, in our current reckoning, is the worst of private evils. We want to put a stop to it. We know we can't do that, not entirely. Human wickedness (or disease, if that's your picture of abuse) won't go away. But we must protect as many children as we can. We want also to discover and help those who have already been hurt. Anyone who feels differently is already something of a monster. We are so sure of these moral truths that we seldom pause to wonder what child abuse is. We know we don't understand it. We have little idea of what prompts people to harm children. But we do have the sense that what we mean by child abuse is something perfectly definite. So it comes as a surprise that the very idea of child abuse has been in constant flux the past thirty years. Previously our present conception of abusing a child did not even exist. People do many of the same vile things to children, for sure, that they did a century ago. But we've been almost unwittingly changing the very definitions of abuse and revising our values and our moral codes accordingly.   Ian Hacking, a philosopher, teaches at the Institute for the History and Philosophy of Science and Technology in the University of Toronto. His latest book is entitled The Taming of Chance (1990). Maynard Solomon Beethoven's Ninth Symphony: The Sense of an Ending The question of what constitutes a finished work is thrown open, reminding us that in certain of his completed autographs Beethoven continued the process that he normally reserved for the earlier stages of composition, setting out further choices, possibilities, and interchangeabilities, including radical alterations in goal as well as detail. In particular, the revision of movement endings was one of his long-standing preoccupations. In works of his middle period, Emil Platen observed, Beethoven continued to make essential alterations in the closing sections of movements after the works had already taken concrete notational form; for example, in the scores of the String Quartets, op. 59, "out of a total of seven movement endings, six were altered after the fact, four in essential ways."6 Indeed the relationship between sketches and compositional goals was always more problematical than traditional scholars were willing to allow. As Lewish Lockwood has shown, the closer one looks at the sketches the less one can continue to accept as an article of faith that "as a work progresses from first inklings to final realization it should pass through successive phases of growth and clarification of structure, and of complication of detail in relation to that structure, becoming progressively more definite en route to its goal."7 To further thicken the issue, Janet Levy has pointed out that one "cannot assume that the goals of a completed work are necessarily the same as the goals of the sketches for it," inasmuch as the composer's intentions may well have changed during the course of composition and we may be left with sketches made in connection with goals no longer reflected in the final work.8 Composition is only partly a teleological process whereby the composer eventually finds a lapidary form for a predetermined idea. With Beethoven, not only is there no prospective inevitability, there may even be no inevitability after the fact. His sketches and autographs may well be series of rough maps to the multiplicity of universes he glimpsed, to a plurality of possibilities, a jammed crossroads of paths taken and not taken.   6. Emil Platen, "Beethovens Autographen als Ausgangspunkt morphologischer Untersuchungen," in Bericht über den internationalen musikwissenschaftlichen Kongress: Bonn 1970,ed. Carl Dahlhaus et al. (Kassel, 1971), p. 535. See also Lewis Lockwood, "Beethoven and the Problem of Closure: Some Examples from the Middle-Period Chamber Music," in Beitråge zu Beethovens Kammermusik,p. 270. 7. Lockwood, "On Beethoven's Sketches and Autographs: Some Problems of Definition and Interpretation," Acta Musicologica42 (Jan.-June 1970): 34. 8. Levy, Beethoven's Compositional Choices,p. 3.   Maynard Solomon'sbooks include Beethoven(1977), Beethoven Essays (1988), and, most recently, Beethoven's Tagebuch (1990). He has also written on Schubert, Ives, and Freud, and has edited a standard work on Marxist aesthetics. He is currently writing a life of Mozart and a study of the origins of music. In 1990 he was visiting professor of music at Columbia University. Marc Shell Marranos (Pigs), or from Coexistence to Toleration For hundreds of years, Muslim Spain was the most tolerant place in Europe. Christians, Muslims, and Jews were able to live together there more or less peacefully. The three religious groups maintained a tolerant convivencia,or coexistence, thanks partly to a twofold distinction among kinds of people that was essential to the particularist doctrine of Islam influential in Spain. Islamic doctrine distinguishes first between Muslim and non-Muslim peoples and second between those non-Muslims who are, like Muslims themselves, "Peoples of the Book" (that is, Christians and Jews) and those non-Muslims who are "pagan." These two distinctions, taken together, could amount to the difference between life and death. For example, Muslim courts ruled on the basis of the Koran that those "others" who were Peoples of the Book could not legally be put to the sword for refusing to convert to Islam while those "others" who were pagan could be. Christians and Jews had to be put up with, and usually were.2   1. Henry Kamen, Inquisition and Society in Spain in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries (Bloomington, Ind., 1985), p. 264; my emphasis; hereafter abbreviated I. 2. The Korangrounds the series of divisions outlined and is consistent with the well-known Pact of Umar I, which established special regulations for Christians and Jews living in Muslim lands: "'There is to be no compulsion in religion. Rectitude has been clearly distinguished from error. So whoever disbelieves in idols and believes in Allah has taken hold of the firmest handle. It cannot split. Allah is All-hearing and All- knowing'" (Sura 2:256; quoted in Norman A. Stillman, The Jews of Arab Lands: A History and Source Book[Philadelphia, 1979], p. 149). See also Sura 109:6: "To you your religion, to me my religion."   Marc Shell,a John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Fellow for 1990-95, is head of the department of comparative literature at the University of Massachusetts in Amherst. His books include The Economy of Literature(1978), Money, Language, and Thought: Literary and Philosophical Economies from the Medieval to the Modern Era (1982), and The End of Kinship: "Measure for Measure," Incest, and the Ideal of Universal Siblinghood (1988). Children of the Earth is forthcoming. Kwame Anthony Appiah Is the Post- in Postmodernism the Post- in_Postcolonial? Sara Suleri has written recently, in Meatless Days, of being treated as an "otherness machine"-and of being heartily sick of it.20 Perhaps the predicament of the postcolonial intellectual is simply that as intellectuals-a category instituted in black Africa by colonialism-we are, indeed, always at the risk of becoming otherness machines, with the manufacture of alterity as our principal role. Our only distinction in the world of texts to which we are latecomers is that we can mediate it to our fellows. This is especially true when postcolonial meets postmodern; for what the postmodern reader seems to demand of Africa is all too close to what modernism-in the form of the postimpressionists-demanded of it. The role that Africa, like the rest of the Third World, plays for Euro-American postmodernism-like its better-documented significance for modernist art-must be distinguished from the role postmodernism might play in the Third World; what that might be it is, I think, too early to tell. What happens will happen not because we pronounce on the matter in theory, but will happen out of the changing everyday practices of African cultural life. For all the while, in Africa's cultures, there are those who will not see themselves as Other. Despite the overwhelming reality of economic decline; despite unimaginable poverty; despite wars, malnutrition, disease, and political instability, African cultural productivity grows apace: popular literatures, oral narrative and poetry, dance, drama, music, and visual art all thrive. The contemporary cultural production of many African societies, and the many traditions whose evidences so vigorously remain, is an antidote to the dark vision of the postcolonial novelist.   20. Sara Suleri, Meatless Days (Chicago, 1989), p. 105.   Kwame Anthony Appiah, professor of philosophy and literature at Duke University, is the author of a number of books, including For Truth in Semantics (1986), Necessary Questions (1989), and In My Father's House (forthcoming), a collection of essays on African cultural politics. His first novel, Avenging Angel, was published in 1990. Michael André Bernstein "These Children That Come at You with Knives":_"Ressentiment,"_Mass Culture, and the Saturnalia In what is probably the most arresting of all the textual developments of the Saturnalian dialogues, the reader's emotional identification with the voice of rage and thwarted rebellion is ever more thoroughly compelled by the structure and tone of succeeding works, at the same time that the dangers of that role, both for its bearer and for others, are ever more explicitly argued. Readers of Le Neveau de Rameau are not forced by the inner logic of the text to choose between Moi and Lui,and they can find in each a welcome counterbalance to and relief from the demands of the other. But in Notes from Underground the "gentlemen- readers" have nothing left to offer us, and the novel makes it impossible to feel anything less than the same contempt for their platitudes that the Underground Man himself flaunts. The clearest index of the development I am tracing is the formal shift from Diderot's dialogue proper to Dostoyevski's first- person novel, but this mutation is itself already a consequence of a more indirect and disturbing cause. Dostoyevski, in the famous cry of The Possessed,was certain that "‘the fire is in the minds of men and not in the roofs of houses'";9 he believed that only the prior corruption of Russia's intelligentsia, their eager surrender to the lure of conspiracy and violence, could have led so many of them to the acts of senseless catastrophe, fueled by ressentiment,false pride, and incoherent utopian fantasies, marks all of his most important post-Siberia political and cultural writings.10   9. Dostoyevski, The Possessed,trans. Garnett (New York, 1961), p. 533. 10. In The Brothers Karamazov,Dostoyevski explicitly states that the future revolution will be made by the Smerdyakovs. In the chapter "Over the Brandy," for example, Ivan tells his father that Smerdyakov is "a prime candidate" to initiate a revolutionary uprising (BK,p. 120).   Michael André Bernsteinis professor of English and comparative literature at the University of California, Berkeley. He is the author of The Tale of the Tribe: Ezra Pound and the Modern Verse Epic (1980) and a book of poetry. His most recent contribution to is "‘O Totiens Servus': Saturnalia and Servitude in Augustan Rome" (Spring 1987). John Barrell Subject and Sentence: The Poetry of Tom Raworth Towards the end of Percy Bysshe Shelley's fragment ‘The Triumph of Life' there are some famous lines which raise most of the questions that will concern me in this essay. Never mind, for the moment, the context: the lines I have in mind are these:             "I rose; and, bending at her sweet command,                         Touched with faint lips the cup she raised,             And suddenly my brain became as sand                         "Where the first wave had more than half erased             The track of deer on desert Labrador,                         Whilst the fierce wolf from which they fled amazed               "Leaves his stamp visibly upon the shore                         Until the second bursts so on my sight             Burst a new Vision never seen before. 1 […] Two kinds of things are happening here which I want to point out. The first is that even as the poem is attempting to represent the mind as passive and the experience of the mind as an empty succession of events, it is also making a quite contrary attempt to represent the mind as active and the succession as a structure. The lines dramatise how a play of mental events, as they are represented in language, may be reprocessed in such a way that some of them come to be classified as interruptions or breaks in the otherwise meaningful sequence composed by the others. As my first paraphrase suggested, it seems to make sense to recast Shelley's narrative into the story of deer chased by a wolf, a story which is then interrupted by the wave which bursts on the shore and which threatens the coherence of the story by threatening to efface all sin that the deer have passed across the beach, have crossed the mind.   1. Percy Bysshe Shelley, ‘The Triumph of Life,' in Shelley's Poetry and Prose,ed. Donald H. Reiman and Sharon B. Powers (new York, 1977), II. 403-11. The most illuminating reading of these lines is Paul de Man's in The Rhetoric of Romanticism (New York, 1984), pp. 99-100.   John Barrell is professor of English at the University of Sussex and author of a number of books on literature and the visual arts, most recently Poetry, Language and Politics (1988). The Infection of Thomas De Quincey and The Birth of Pandora will be published next year. Andrew Ross Getting out of the Gernsback Continuum Pop and camp nostalgia for the lofty ziggurats, teardrop automobiles, sleek ships of the airstream, and even the alien BEMs (bug-eyed monsters) with imperiled women in their clutches, are one thing; the cyberpunk critique of "wrongheadedness," whether in Gibson's elegant fiction or Sterling's flip criticism, is another. Each provides us with a stylized way of approaching SF's early formative years, years usually described as "uncritical" in their outlook on technological progress. But neither perspective can give us much sense of the sociohistorical landscape of the thirties on which these gleaming technofantasies were raised. To have some idea of the historical power of what Gibson calls the "Gernsback Continuum," we need to know more, for example, about the entrepreneurial activities and scientific convictions of Hugo Gernsback himself, a man often termed the "father" of science fiction because he presided over its market specialization as a cultural genre. In Gernsback's view, SF was more of a social than a literary movement. We need to know more about the hallowed place of engineers and scientists in public consciousness in the years of boom and crisis between the wars, the consolidation of industrial research science at the heart of corporate capitalism, and the redemptive role cast for technology in the drama of national recovery and growth. We also need to know about the traditions of progressive thought that stood behind the often radical technocratic philosophy of progressive futurism in the thirties. My description of North American SF's period of genre formation will show the crucial influence of the national cults of science, engineering, and invention as well as discuss the role of technocracy in the social thought of the day. I will also consider the ways in which pulp SF escaped or resisted the recruitist role allotted to it not only by shaping figures like Gernsback, who devoted himself directly to enlisting his readers in the cause of "science," but also by subsequent critics of early SF, including those writers, like Gibson and Sterling, who have lamented its naïve celebration of technological innovation.   Andrew Ross teaches English at Princeton University and is the author of The Failure of Modernism: Symptoms of American Poetry (1986) and No Respect: Intellectuals and Popular Culture (1989). He is also the editor of Universal Abandon?: The Politics of Postmodernism (1988) and the coeditor, with Constance Penley, of Technoculture (forthcoming). W. J. T. Mitchell and Barbara Kruger An Interview with Barbara Kruger Mitchell: Could we begin by discussing the problem of public art? When we spoke a few weeks ago, you expressed some uneasiness with the notion of public art, and I wonder if you could expand on that a bit. Kruger: Well, you yourself lodged it as the "problem" of public art and I don't really find it problematic inasmuch as I really don't give it very much thought. I think on a broader level I could say that my "problem" is with categorization and naming: how does one constitute art and how does one constitute a public? Sometimes I think that if architecture is a slab of meat, then so-called public art is a piece of garnish laying next to it. It has a kind of decorative function. Now I'm not saying that it always has to be that way at all and I think perhaps that many of my colleagues are working to change that now. But all too often, it seems the case. Mitchell: Do you think of your own art, insofar as it's engaged with the commercial public sphere that is, with advertising, publicity, mass media, and other technologies for influencing a consumer public that it is automatically a form of public art? Or does it stand in opposition to public art? Kruger: I have a question for you: what is a public sphere which is an uncommercial public sphere?   Barbara Krugeris an artist who works with words and pictures. W. J. T. Mitchell,editor of ,is Gaylord Donnelly Distinguished Professor of English and art at the University of Chicago. Henry Louis Gates, Jr. Critical Fanonism One of the signal developments in contemporary criticism over the past several years has been the ascendancy of the colonial paradigm. In conjunction with this new turn, Frantz Fanon has now been reinstated as a global theorist, and not simply by those engaged in Third World or subaltern studies. In a recent collection centered on British romanticism, Jerome McGann opens a discussion of William Blake and Ezra Pound with an extended invocation of Fanon. Donald Pease has used Fanon to open an attack on Stephen Greenblatt's reading of the Henriad and the interdisciplinary practices of the new historicism. And Fanon, and published interpretations of Fanon, have become regularly cited in the rereading of the Renaissance that have emerged from places like Sussex, Essex, and Birmingham.1 My intent is not to offer a reading of Fanon to supplant these others, but to read, even if summarily, some of these readings of Fanon. By focusing on successive appropriations of this figure, as both totem and text, I think we can chart out an itinerary through contemporary colonial discourse theory. I want to stress, then, that my ambitions here are extremely limited: what follows may be a prelude to a reading of Fanon, but does not even begin that task itself.2   1. See Jerome McGann, "The Third World of Criticism," in Rethinking Historicism: Critical Readings in Romantic History,ed. Marjorie Levinson et al. (New York, 1989), pp. 85-107, and Donald Pease, "Toward a Sociology of Literary Knowledge: Greenblatt, Colonialism, and the New Historicism," in Consequences of Theory,ed. Barbara Johnson and Jonathan Arac (Baltimore, 1991). 2. A properly contextualized reading of Fanon's Black Skin, White Masks,the text to which I most frequently recur, should situate it in respect to such germinal works as Jean-Paul Sartre's Réflexions sur la question Juive(Paris, 1946), Dominique O. Mannoni's Psychologie de la colonisation(Paris, 1950), Germaine Guex's La Névrose d'abandon (Paris, 1950), as well as many lesser known works. But this is only to begin to sketch out the challenge of rehistoricizing Fanon.   Henry Louis Gates, Jr.is coeditor of Transition,a quarterly review, and the author of Figures in Black (1987) and The Signifying Monkey (1988), which received an American Book Award. Gilles Deleuze The Conditions of the Question: What Is Philosophy? Perhaps the question "What is philosophy?" can only be posed late in life, when old age has come, and with it the time to speak in concrete terms. It is a question one poses when one no longer has anything to ask for, but its consequences can be considerable. One was asking the question before, one never ceased asking it, but it was too artificial, too abstract; one expounded and dominated the question, more than being grabbed by it. There are cases in which old age bestows not an eternal youth, but on the contrary a sovereign freedom, a pure necessity where one enjoys a moment of grace between life and death, and where all the parts of the machine combine to dispatch into the future a trait that traverses the ages: Turner, Monet, Matisse. The elderly Turner acquired or conquered the right to lead painting down a deserted path from which there was no return, and that was no longer distinguishable from a final question. In the same way, in philosophy, Kant's Critique of Judgment is a work of old age, a wild work from which descendants will never cease to flow. We cannot lay claim to such a status. The time has simply come for us to ask what philosophy is. And we have never ceased to do this in the past, and we already had the response, which has not varied: philosophy is the art of forming, inventing, and fabricating concepts. But it was not only necessary for the response to take note of the question; it also had to determine a time, an occasion, the circumstances, the landscapes and personae, the conditions and unknowns of the question. One had to be able to pose the question "between friends" as a confidence or a trust, or else, faced with an enemy, as a challenge, and at the same time one had to reach that moment, between dog and wolf, when one mistrusts even the friend.   Gilles Deleuzewas professor of philosophy at the University of Paris VIII, Vincennes-St.-Denis, until his retirement in 1987. Among his books translated into English are the two-volume Capitalism and Schizophrenia (Anti-Oedipus [1983] and A Thousand Plateaus [1987]), the two-volume Cinema (The Movement-Image [1986] and The Time-Image [1989]), The Logic of Sense (1990), and Expressionism in Philosophy: Spinoza (1990). Daniel W. Smith is a doctoral candidate in philosophy at the University of Chicago. He is at work on a study of the philosophy of Deleuze, and is translating Deleuze's Francis Bacon: Logique de la sensation.Arnold I. Davidson, executive editor of Critical Inquiry,teaches philosophy at the University of Chicago and is currently Marta Sutton Weeks Fellow at the Stanford Humanities Center. David Saunders and Ian Hunter Lessons from the 'Literatory': How to Historicise Authorship Authorship has proven a magnetic topic for literary studies and is now identified as an index of the current state of literary history and theory. The significance of this topic stems from a characteristic that literary criticism shared with the other human sciences: its drive to adopt a reflexive and self-critical posture towards its own central objects and concepts. By reflecting on authorship, criticism aspires not just to describe a literary phenomenon; it also wishes to bring to light the conditions that make this phenomenon possible and thinkable. At the heart of recent studies of authorship, no matter how historical their aspiration, we find a certain quasi-philosophical dialectic or play between authorship and its material conditions, between the author as an exemplary consciousness and the unconscious determinations that bring this consciousness into being and speak through it. The thematic name for this play is the ‘formation of the subject.'. Our purpose is to provide a historical and theoretical argument against this conception of authorship and to outline an alternative approach.   David Saundersand Ian Hunter teach in the Division of the Humanities, Griffith University, in Brisbane, Australia. Saunders is the author of Law and Authorship (forthcoming), and is coauthor with Hunter and Dugald Williamson of Book Sex: Obscenity Law and the Policing of Pornography (also forthcoming). Hunter is the author of Culture and Government: The Emergence of Literary Education (1988). His current project is a study of aesthetics as an ethos or way of life. Brook Thomas Reflections on the Law and Literature Revival At a key moment in the 1988 presidential debates, Michael Dukakis claimed that the issue in the campaign was not ideology but competency. A major reason for Bush's victory was that Dukakis was most competent at creating the illusion that even George Bush was competent. Even so, a useful way to begin some reflections on the law and literature revival is to note that even a hardened political pragmatist like Bush felt that it was in his political interest to declare that the issue was indeed ideology. Bush's insistence on the importance of ideology is noteworthy for those interested in the humanities because it seems to much at odds with the conservative position in current cultural politics. Ideology might be the issue in political campaigns, but for the conservatives it has no role in the humanities, which properly understood are the repository of essential human values. As contradictory as this position might seem, it is actually quite consistent. The ideological function of government is to impart to its citizens the proper values, values that find expression in great humanistic documents. To turn the role of the humanities from that of guarding and defending these sacred documents to that of demystifying them as ideological products is to undermine the possibility of government performing its proper ideological function. Radicals in the current wars over culture thus stand accused of subverting the fundamental values that the country represents.   Brook Thomas is professor of English at the University of California, Irvine. He is the author of Cross-Examinations of Law and Literature; Cooper, Hawthorne, Stowe, and Melville (1987) and The New Historicism and Other Old-Fashioned Topics (forthcoming). Barbara Hoffman Law for Art's Sake in the Public Realm Contemporary public art is still in the process of defining its artistic and legal identity. Indeed to juxtapose the terms public and art is a paradox. Art is often said to be the individual inquiry of the sculptor or painter, the epitome of self-expression and vision that may challenge conventional wisdom and values. The term public encompasses a reference to the community, the social order, self-negation: hence the paradox of linking the private and the public in a single concept. A goal of any general or jurisprudential theory concerning government sponsorship or ownership of art in the public context must reconcile, through state institutions and law, this tension between art's subjectivity with hits potential for controversy and government's need to promote the public good. This essay critically examines and discusses existing contemporary legal doctrine and its failure to accommodate or even adequately define the issues and competing values at stake in the public art context. Such failure may be attributed in part to the fact that neither legal theory nor art policy have been inspired by the vision of or located in the broader context of a sociopolitical public realm.   Barbara Hoffman practices arts and entertainment law in New York and is counsel to the College Art Association. She is a former professor of constitutional law at the University of Puget Sound, and she has served as chair of the Public Art Committee of the Art Law Committee of the Association of the Bar of the City of New York, and president of the Washington Volunteer Lawyers for the Arts. Richard Serra Art and Censorship In the United States, property rights are afforded protection, but moral rights are not. Up until 1989, the United States adamantly refused to join the Berne Copyright Convention, the first multilateral copyright treaty, now ratified by seventy-eight countries. The American government refused to comply because the Berne Convention grants moral rights to authors. This international policy was and is incompatible with United States copyright law, which recognizes only economic rights. Although ten states have enacted some form of moral rights legislation, federal copyright laws tend to prevail, and those are still wholly economic in their motivation. Indeed, the recent pressure for the United States to agree, at least in part, to the terms of the Berne Convention came only as a result of a dramatic increase in the international piracy of American records and films. In September 1986, Senator Edward M. Kennedy of Massachusetts first introduced a bill called the Visual Artists Rights Act. This bill attempts to amend federal copyright laws to incorporate some aspects of international moral rights protection. The Kennedy bill would prohibit the intentional distortion, mutilation, or destruction of works of art after they have been sold. Moreover, the act would empower artists to claim authorship, to receive royalties on subsequent sales, and to disclaim their authorship if the work were distorted.4 This legislation would have prevented Clement Greenburg and the other executors of David Smith's estate from authorizing the stripping of paint from Several of Smith's later sculptures so that they would resemble his earlier and more marketable unpainted sculptures. Such moral rights legislations would have prevented a Japanese bank in New York from removing and destroying a sculpture by Isamu Noguchi simply because the bank president did not like it. And such legislation would have prevented the United States government from destroying Tilted Arc.   4. Although this section appeared in the original version of Kennedy's bill, the current version provides for a study of resale royalties.   Richard Serra is known for his large-scale site-specific works in landscapes, urban environments, and museums. Jerome Christensen Spike Lee, Corporate Populist [W. J. T.] Mitchell focuses on the exemplary status of the Wall of Fame in Sal's Pizzeria, "an array of signed publicity photos of Italian-American stars in sports, movies, and popular music" (p. 892). He argues that the Wall "exemplifies the central contradictions of public art" (p. 893). "The Wall," he writes, "is important to Sal not just because it displays famous Italians but because they are famous Americans … who have made it possible for Italians to think of themselves as Americans, full-fledged members of the general public sphere" (p. 894). For Buggin' Out, the young black customer who angrily objects to the absence of photos of black people, the Wall "signifies exclusion from the public sphere" (p. 894). Although the streets are saturated with images of "African-American heroes," those "tokens of self-respect" are not enough for Buggin' Out, who wants "the respect of whites, the acknowledgment that African-Americans are hyphenated Americans, too, just like Italians" (p. 894). Mitchell astutely interprets the desired integration of the Wall as merely a symptom of a larger struggle for "full economic participation. As long as blacks do not own private property in this society," he states, "they remain in something like the status of public art, mere ornaments to the public place, entertaining statues and abstract caricatures rather than full human beings" (p. 895). By foregrounding the economic implications of the film, Mitchell has surely engaged one of the dominant goals of the man who formed Forty Acres and a Mule Productions and who recently opened the store called Spike's Joint in New York City. Yet Mitchell's sympathetic account belies the countercurrents that trouble the ostensible progressiveness of Spike Lee's ambitious art.   Jerome Christensen teaches in the English department at Johns Hopkins University. He is the author of books on Coleridge and Hume and one forthcoming on Byron. Currently, he is completing a study of the continued pertinence of the romantic turn of mind called Romantic Theory, Romantic Practice. W. J. T. Mitchell Seeing Do the Right Thing I might as well say at the outset that, although I can return Christensen's compliment, and call his response "thoughtful," I am most interested in those places where the fullness of his thought, and particularly of his own language, has paralyzed his thought in compulsively repetitious patterns, and led him into interpretive maneuvers (the reduction of the film to a single "message"; the equation of this message with the views of particular characters in the film) that he would surely be skeptical about in the reading of a literary text. Even more interesting is the way Christensen's antipathy to the film, and the violence of the language in which eh expresses the antipathy, has prevented him from registering the plainest sensory and perceptual elements of the film text. In a rather straightforward and literal sense, Christensen has neither seen nor heard Do the Right Thing,but has screened a fantasy film of his own projection. To say Christensen has projected a fantasy, however, is not to say that his response is eccentric or merely private. On the contrary, it is a shared and shareable response, a reflex in the public imaginary of American culture at the present time. As such, it deserves patient and detailed examination.   W. J. T. Mithcell,editor of ,is Gaylord Donnelly Distinguished Service Professor of English and art at the University of Chicago. His most recent book is Iconology: Image, Text, Ideology (1986). Jonathan Crewe Gerald Bruns's Cavell Years ago, before Arnoldian poetic touchstones had become quite as unpopular as they are now, I and my fellow college undergraduates found a touchstone of sorts in a poem by Edna St. Vincent Millay. The cherished line read: Plato alone looked upon beauty bare. For us, this line became the touchstone, not of poetic sublimity but of being poetic, which is to say of attaining a consummate inane pretentiousness in poetic diction and intellectual attitude alike. Millay, we thought, had done it once and for all. Today, of course, nobody has any use for touchstones, and if we erstwhile undergraduates were to reread Millay we might well come away feeling ashamed of our former arrogance, juvenile conceit, and no doubt sexism. Still, Millay's line has a memorably vacuous, oracular ring to it. That is the ring I keep hearing in Gerald Bruns's "Stanley Cavell's Shakespeare" ( 16 [Spring 1990]: 612-32). "Cavell … alone perhaps with Martin Heidegger, has a sense of what is at stake in this quarrel [between philosophy and poetry]" (p. 612). "Exposure to reality is what happens in Hamlet,although it occurs nowhere (anywhere, in any literature) so powerfully as in Lear" (p. 615). "This was the later Heidegger's idea: poetry … puts everything out of the question" (p. 615). "The face, like the world (as the world), requires me to forego knowing" (p. 620). "Proving the existence of the human proved to be a separate problem that did not get clearly formulated until Mary Shelley's Frankenstein and E. T. A. Hoffmann's ‘The Sandman'" (p. 614). Philosophers and cultural historians may make what they will of these vatic disclosures, but it may strike those who study Shakespeare that Bruns is recycling lugubrious clichés (of the type currently favored by the National Endowment for the Humanities) about Hamlet and Lear while simultaneously upping the philosophical ante for them. This, however, is roughly the procedure that Bruns wants to pass off as Cavell's.   Jonathan Crewe,professor of English at Dartmouth College, is the author of Trials of Authorship: Anterior Forms and Poetic Reconstruction from Wyatt to Shakespeare (1990). James Conant On Bruns, on Cavell Gerald Bruns's "Stanley Cavell's Shakespeare" ( 16 [Spring 1990]:612-32) is a consistently sympathetic and thoughtful response to Cavell's difficult essays on Shakespeare.1 Nevertheless, while Bruns's exposition of Cavell's thought places it in a pertinently complex region of philosophical and literary concerns, it is hampered by its relative isolation from much of Cavell's other work and from certain abiding conflicts within contemporary philosophy which inform that work. The resultant misunderstandings of Cavell's thought are perhaps as inevitable as they are widespread a function of the way in which the modern American university carves up and compartmentalizes the world of humanistic learning and are on the verge of becoming entrenched among commentators on his work. Much of Cavell's work has been concerned (as has Bruns's, I gather) to resist some of the costs of this process of compartmentalization or professionalization. The problems this resistance poses for the reception of the work are perhaps nowhere more pervasive than in the case of Cavell's collection of essays on Shakespeare, Disowning Knowledge in Six Plays of Shakespeare,in part because of Cavell's sense of the figure of Shakespeare, of what this corpus of writing represents. In light of, and in appreciation of, Bruns's serious and resourceful effort to get Cavell's thought on these matters straight, it is worth trying to get it clearer.   James Conant,assistant professor of philosophy at the University of Pittsburgh, is currently a fellow at the Michigan Society of Fellows. His "Kierkegaard, Wittgenstein and Nonsense" is included in Pursuits of Reason: Essays in Honor of Stanley Cavell (1991). Gerald L. Bruns Reply to Crewe and Conant I am impressed by how angry Jonathan Crewe is, but I found his remarks confused and unclear and so I'm uncertain how to reply. Whatever the matter it, he wants "to forestall a sense of academic obligation on anyone's part (for example, on the part of students) to work back to Cavell through Bruns" (p. 612). God knows this might be a good idea, judging from what James Conant says. Conant's criticisms are directed at the section of my paper called "The Moral of Skepticism," which he cannot help wanting to rewrite, since he has a much more intimate grasp of Cavell's thinking than I have. I imagined myself on the outside of Cavell's texts, trying to characterize them in a certain way, not on the inside, giving an account of their genesis. Obviously my paper is neither philosophy nor literary criticism but a crossdressing of the two that is bound to make someone like Crewe bite his teeth. I appreciate Conant's forbearance.   Gerald L. Bruns is William and Hazel White Professor of English and Comparative Literature at the University of Notre Dame. His most recent book is Heidegger's Estrangements: Language, Truth, and Poetry in the Later Writings(1989). Toril Moi Reading Kristeva: A Response to Calvin Bedient I must confess that I found [Calvin] Bedient's account of Kristeva's theories quite shocking. Since, on the whole, critical essays rarely upset me, my own reaction was quite puzzling to me. What is there in Bedient's prose to unsettle me so? It certainly can't be his style or tone: he has produced a perfectly even-tempered essay. Refraining from imputing selfish or dishonest motives to the theorist he wants to disagree with, Bedient never argues ad feminam,and takes much trouble lucidly to explain why he disagrees with Kristeva. There is every reason to commend him for his honest style of argumentation. There can be no doubt that his essay is produced purely by his concern to take issue with a theory he truly believes to be incapable of accounting for the way in which poetry and particularly modern poetry actually works. What causes my unease must therefore be something else. It may of course be the fact that Bedient's account of Kristeva's theory of language in Revolution of Poetic Language is wrong. His is not a somewhat skewed, or slanted, or one-sided presentation of her views, but as far as I can see a total misreading. Briefly put, Bedient's mistake consists in taking Kristeva's account of the sentence process in language for a complete theory of poetic language.He does not seem to have noticed Kristeva's account of the symbolic, her repeated insistence that language the signifying process is the product of a dialectical interaction between the symbolic and the semiotic, or even her definition of the "thetic."   Toril Moi,professor of comparative literature at the University of Bergen and professor (adjunct) at Duke University, is the editor of The Kristeva Reader (1986) and the author of Sexual/Textual Politics: Feminist Literary Theory (1985). Her most recent book is Feminist Theory and Simone de Beauvoir (1990). Calvin Bedient How I Slugged It out with Toril Moi_and_Stayed_Awake [Toril] Moi says that my misunderstanding of Kristeva lies in taking the "semiotic process" (more specifically, what Kristeva calls "the drives borne by vocalic or kinetic differences")1 for the whole of "poetic language": "He does not seem to have noticed Kristeva's account of the symbolic, her repeated insistence that language the signifying process is the product of a dialectical interaction between the symbolic and the semiotic" (p. 639). But how could I not notice what Kristeva herself reiterates over and over? Not notice that "textual practice is that most intense struggle toward death, which runs alongside and is inseparable from the differentiated binding of its charge in a symbolictexture" words I quoted on page 814 (emphasis added)? The reader will find in my essay many other statements (both mine and Kristeva's) to the same effect. I noticed, I noticed, but Moi did not notice I noticed. She's so certain Kristeva's book is difficult that she may underestimate the ability of others to grasp its essential points. But despite the pine-knot paroxysms of grotesqueness in the Englished version (samples of which so repulsed the editor who commissioned the essay that he rejected it), Kristeva makes herself understood well enough through her sharp logicality and by dint of repetition.   Calvin Bedient is professor of English at the University of California, Los Angeles. His most recent book is He Do the Police in Different Voices (1986), a study of The Waste Land. Heinz Ickstadt A Letter from Berlin The last kilometers of the Berlin Wall were finally torn down during this last week before Christmas, but mentally, socially, economically it continues to exist, and for some in what used to be East Berlin (and I am not even thinking of hard-liners and former party members) it isn't so clear anymore whether the actual wall made of concrete wasn't easier to bear. To be sure, the wall that once separated the largest cities in each of the two Germanys is still present as a scar of empty space; but distances have shrunk, and old views of the city have been reestablished at least geographically, Berlin, no doubt, is slowly becoming one again. However, the social and economic differences as well as the mental walls erected in forty years of separate existence still divide the eastern from the western part. Now that the euphoria of unification has finally subsided, gains and losses are being counted, and many East Germans are beginning to ask themselves whether the price they paid for political freedom was not too high after all. The moral and economic bankruptcy of the old regime daily becomes more apparent: its structures of corruption and repression, its system of total surveillance that had become a part of everyday life and made use of even those whom the state had marginalized. And yet that system, corrupt as it was, had also provided a measure of stability, a predictable life that, although it had restricted individual choice, can now evoke nostalgic memories of warmth and security.   Heinz Ickstadt is professor of American literature at the John F. Kennedy Institute for North American Studies at the Free University in Berlin. He has written and edited books on Hart Crane, Thomas Pynchon, and the 1930s, and has published widely on American literature and culture in the late nineteenth century, American modernism, postmodern fiction, and on the relation of literature and painting. A book on the changing functions of the American novel, coauthored with Winfried Fluck, is forthcoming. Vicki Mahafffey The Case against Art: Wunderlich on Joyce Much has been written over the last decade on the urgency of expanding the canon, although the imperialist overtones of such a movement (which itself rallied under an anti-imperialist banner resisting the hegemony of white, male, Western writers) have not always been registered. A great deal of attention has pooled at the borders of the canon, as we aim to erode or extend those borders, but crucial assumptions about the privileged status of the subject matter that we as critics choose, whatever that subject matter may be, canonical or extracanonical,have not been questioned with comparable intensity. Although the hegemony of the subject and the concomitant transformation of the "other" into an object have been attacked theoretically from several different directions (deconstructive, feminist, Marxist), we nevertheless lack a widespread practical, professional awareness of the extent to which the status of what we "criticize" and teach silently reproduces a subject/object economy of privilege. In the pages that follow, my contribution to the case against the sacralized status of art (a case that several avant-garde modernist writers committed themselves to building) emerges out of the implicit dialogue that Paul Wunderlich initiates with James Joyce on the "subjects" of sexism, anti-Semitism, art, and politics, set against the background of the Holocaust. My target is neither Wunderlich nor Joyce nor is it any of the groups that they might be said to represent but the political implications of artistic privilege, a priveilege that criticism, even "resistant" criticism, may seek to redistribute but not to challenge. My aim is not to desecrate Joyce's authority nor to objectify him (from a subjective elevation of my own) as a stereotypical sexist or anti-Semite, but to deauthorize and rehumanize his monumental status by recontextualizing the grounds of his achievement, climbing down to (where all the ladders start," the "foul rag-and-bone shop" of vulnerability.   Vicki Mahaffey,associate professor of English at the University of Pennsylvania, is the author of Reauthorizing Joyce (1988). She is currently working on a book about the politics of representation. Sandra M. Gilbert and Susan Gubar Masterpiece Theatre: An Academic Melodrama We'd like to do a little hypnosis on you. Imagine that you're ensconced in your own family room, your study, or your queen-sized bed. Settling back, you pick up the remote, flick on the TV, and naturally you turn to PBS. This is what you hear: Host 1:Good evening. Welcome to Masterpiece Theatre. Because Alistair Cooke is away on assignment in Alaska, we've agreed to host the show tonight, and that's both a pleasure and a privilege because our program this evening marks the beginning of a fascinating new series, a first on television: Masterpiece Theatre will present you with a docudrama entitled "Masterpiece Theatre." Host 2:Like "The First Churchills," this show analyzes the situation of real-life people tonight, people in the academy. Names have not been changed to protect either the innocent or the guilty, but all the situations are fictive and at times words that may never have been spoken are put into the mouths of people who did not speak them. Other lines, however, are direct quotations from various written sources, although none of the characters, as we depict them, should be confused with any "actual" persons, whether or not those persons would scribe to the idea of their own reality. Like "Upstairs/ Downstairs," this program will introduce you to a spectrum of characters from many walks of life. What's different about tonight's episode, though, is that all these characters have passionate opinions about the show itself. Why, the very idea of Masterpiece Theatre drives some of them to Guerrilla Theatre, others to Theatre of the Absurd. Yes, you've always already guessed it: we focus tonight on a drama involving what we used to call humanists now for some a dirty word and most of our characters are in deep trouble.   Sandra M. Gilbert,professor of English at the University of California, Davis, and Susan Gubar,professor of English at Indiana University, are coauthors of No Man's Land: The Place of the Woman Writer in the Twentieth Century, Volume 1: The War of the Words (1987) and Volume II: Sexchanges (1988), the first installments of a three-part sequel to their Madwoman in the Attic: The Woman Writer and the Nineteenth-Century Literary Imagination (1979). They have also coedited The Norton Anthology of Literature by Women: The Tradition in English (1985). Marie-Hélène Huet Monstrous Imagination: Progeny as Art in French Classicism The monster and the woman thus find themselves on the same side, the side of dissimilarity."The female is as it were a deformed male," added Aristotle (GA,p. 175). As she belongs to the category of the different, the female can only contribute more figures of dissimilarities, if not creatures even more monstrous. But the female is a necessary departure from the norm, a useful monstrosity. The monster is gratuitous and useless for future generations. Aristotle's seminal work on the generation of monsters posited a rigorously physical definition that was not necessarily linked to deformities: "Monstrosities," he wrote, "come under the class of offspring which is unlike its parents" (GA,p. 425). Further, while a "monstrosity, of course, belongs to the class of ‘things contrary to Nature,' … it is contrary not to Nature in her entirety but only to Nature in the generality of cases" (GA,p. 425). The monster, defined repeatedly by its lack of resemblance to its legitimate parents, is also monstrous in another important way, one that Aristotle described as a false resemblance to different species: "People say that the offspring which is formed has the head of a ram or an ox; and similarly with other creatures, that one has the head of another.… at the same time, in no case are they what they are alleged to be, but resemblances only" (GA,pp. 417-19; emphasis added). The monster is thus a double imposture. Its strange appearance a misleading likeness to another species, for example belies the otherwise rigorous law that children should resemble their parents. Further, monsters offer striking similarities to categories to which they are not related, blurring the differences between genres, and disrupting the rigorous order of nature. Thus, if the monster were defined in the first place as that which did not resemble him who engendered it, it nevertheless displayed some sort of resemblance, albeit a false resemblance to an object external to its conception.   Marie-Hélène Huet is William R. Kenan Professor of Romance Languages at Amherst College. She is the author of Rehearsing the Revolution: The Staging of Marat's Death, 1793-1797 (1982) and is currently completing a book on literature and tetratology. James Chandler, Arnold I. Davidson, and Harry Harootunian Editor's Introduction: Questions of Evidence We think the present moment is a timely one for debating the relation between evidentiary protocols and academic disciplines. Since academic practices for constituting and deploying evidence tend to be discipline-specific, the much-discussed crisis of the disciplines in recent years (the so-called blurring of the disciplinary genres) has given rise to a series of controversies about the status of evidence in current modes of investigation and argument: deconstruction, gender studies, new historicism, cultural studies, new approaches to the history and philosophy of science, the critical legal studies movement, and so on. Unfortunately, these controversies too often devolve into oversimplified debates about who has the evidence and who does not, who did their homework and who did not, or about the dangers of an ill-defined academic relativism. Attention needs to be better and otherwise directed: at the configuration of the fact-evidence distinction in different disciplines and historical moments, for example; or at the relative function of such notions as "self-evidence," "experience," "test," "testimony," and "textuality" in various academic discourses; or at the ways in which the invoked "rules of evidence" are themselves the products of historical developments, and themselves undergo redifferentiation and reformulation.   James Chandler,professor of English at the University of Chicago, is the author of Wordsworth's Second Nature (1984). He is currently completing England in 1819,studies in and of romantic case history. Arnold I. Davidson,executive editor of Critical Inquiry,teaches philosophy and the history of science at the University of Chicago. He is currently working on the history of horror as it relates to the epistemology of norms and deviations and is editing a collection of essays on Heidegger, philosophy, and National Socialism. Harry Harootunian,a coeditor of Critical Inquiry and professor of history and East Asian languages and civilizations at the University of Chicago, is the author of Things Seen and Unseen: Discourse and Ideology in Tokigawa (1988) and editor, with Masao Miyoshi, of Postmodernism and Japan (1989). Terry Castle Contagious Folly: "An Adventure" and Its Skeptics The question of the so-called collective hallucination (as it has come to be known to psychical researchers) is neither as arcane nor as irrelevant to everyday life as it might first appear. On the contrary, it illuminates a much larger philosophical issue. In Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego,his 1921 book devoted to the relationship between individual and group psychology, Sigmund Freud lamented that there was still "no explanation of the nature of suggestion, that is, of the conditions under which influence without adequate logical foundation takes place."2 What the science of psychology lacked, in other words, was an understanding of ideological transference the process by which one individual imposed his or her beliefs and convictions on another. How did an idea spread, so to speak, from one person to the next, resulting in the formation of a group consciousness? The phenomenon of the collective hallucination puts the issue starkly if ambiguously in relief. If a ghost or apparition can be said to represent, in Freud's terms, an idea "without adequate logical foundation," a delusion,then the process by which two people convince each other that they have seen one and in turn attempt to convince others might be taken to epitomize the formation of ideology itself. In what follows I shall examine a case of collective hallucination certainly the most notorious and well documented in the annals of modern psychical research precisely as a way of spotlighting this larger problem. My goal in so doing is not so much to expose the folly of people who claim to see ghosts (though the notion of folly will play a crucial part in what I have to say) but the difficulty that inevitably besets anyone who attempts to debunk such claims on supposedly rationalist grounds. For in the absence of any satisfying explanation of how such "folly" spreads how a private delusion becomes a folie à deux (or troisor quatre) the labors of the skeptic are doomed to result only in a peculiar rhetorical and epistemological impasse.   2. Sigmund Freud, Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego,trans. and ed. James Strachey (New York, 1959), p. 22.   Terry Castle is professor of English at Stanford University and the author of Masquerade and Civilization: The Carnivalesque in Eighteenth-Century English Culture and Fiction (1986). She is currently working on a new study entitled Lesbians and Other Ghosts: Essays on Literature and Sexuality. Joan W. Scott The Evidence of Experience There is a section in Samuel Delany's magnificent autobiographical meditation, The Motion of Light in Water,that dramatically raises the problem of writing the history of difference, the history, that is, of the designation of "other," of the attribution of characteristics that distinguish categories of people from some presumed (and usually unstated) norm.1 Delany (a gay man, a black man, a writer of science fiction) recounts his reaction to his first visit to the St. Marks bathhouse in 1963. He remembers standing on the threshold of a "gym-sized room" dimly lit by blue bulbs. The room was full of people, some standing, the rest             an undulating mass of naked, male bodies, spread wall to wall.                         My first response was a kind of heart- thudding astonishment very close to fear.             I have written of a space at certain libidinal saturation before. That was not what frightened me. It was rather that the saturation was not only kinesthetic but visible.2 Watching the scene establishes for Delany a "fact that flew in the face" of the prevailing representation of homosexuals in the 1950s as "isolated perverts," as subjects "gone awry." The "apprehension of massed bodies" gave him (as it does, he argues, anyone, "male, female, working or middle class") a "sense of political power": what this experience said was that there was a population not of individual homosexuals … not of hundreds, not of thousands, but rather of millions of gay men, and that history had, actively and already, created for us whole galleries of institutions, good and bad, to accommodate our sex. [M,p. 174]   2. Samuel R. Delany, The Motion of Light in Water: Sex and Science Fiction Writing in the East Village, 1957-1965 (New York, 1988), p. 173; hereafter abbreviated M.   Joan W. Scott is professor of social science at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey. She is the author, most recently, of Gender and the Politics of History (1988) and is currently at work on a history of feminist claims for political rights in France during the period 1789-1945 as a way of exploring arguments about equality and difference. Mark Kelman Reasonable Evidence of Reasonableness Questions of how we claim to know the things that we know and whose claims to knowledge are treated as authoritative are inescapable in reaching legal judgments. I want to illustrate this generalization by referring to a pair of hypothetical self-defense cases that, I argue, require fact finders to judge both how "accurately" each defendant understood the situation in which he found himself and how accurately policymakers can assess the consequences of alternative legal rules. The first case I will deal with is one in which the defendant shoots and kills her sleeping husband. The husband had physically abused her over a long period. While the defendant will of course acknowledge that she was in no immediate danger at the moment she killed the man, her preliminary claim (we will explore variations as well) is that she needed to act self-defensively at that moment for fear that she subsequently would be incapable of defending herself against life-threatening attacks that she was convinced would inevitably be made. The second case is one in which a white defendant shoots and kills a black teenager who has confronted him on the subway, in a situation in which the teenager's "threats" were ambiguous. The shooting victim had brandished no weapon and made no physical contact with the defendant, but he had "asked" the defendant for money and, in the defendant's mind, displayed a generally threatening demeanor. I will presuppose that this defendant unlike Bernhard Goetz, the defendant in the notorious New York subway vigilante case on which I partly base this hypothetical model overtly acknowledges that the race of the victim played a substantial role in his assessment of the danger of the situation. (It is important to note as well that the defendant in my model shoots the victim only once and does not shoot while his victim is retreating from the scene, as Goetz almost surely did.)   Mark Kelman,professor of law at Stanford University, is the author of A Guide to Critical Legal Studies (1987) as well as a number of articles on law and economics, taxation, criminal law, and legal theory. Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick Jane Austen and the Masturbating Girl There seems to be something self-evident irresistibly so, to judge from its gleeful propagation about the use of the phrase, "Jane Austen and the Masturbating Girl," as the Q.E.D. of phobic narratives about the degeneracy of academic discourse in the humanities. But what? The narrative link between masturbation itself and degeneracy, though a staple of pre-1920s medical and racial science, no longer has any respectable currency. To the contrary: modern views of masturbation tend to place it firmly in the framework of optimistic, hygienic narratives of all- too-normative individual development. When Jane E. Brody, in a recent "Personal Health" column in the NewYork Times,reassures her readers that, according to experts, it is actually entirely possible for people to be healthy without masturbating; "that the practice is not essential to normal development and that no one who thinks it is wrong or sinful should feel he or she must try it"; and that even "'those who have not masturbated … can have perfectly normal sex lives as adults,'" the all but perfectly normal Victorianist may be forgiven for feeling just a little out of breath.3 In this altered context, the self- evidence of a polemical link between autoeroticism and narratives of wholesale degeneracy (or, in one journalist's historically redolent term, "idiocy")4 draws on a very widely discredited body of psychiatric and eugenic expertise whose only direct historical continuity with late twentieth-century thought has been routed straight through the rhetoric and practice of fascism. But it now draws on this body of expertise under the more acceptable gloss of the modern, trivializing, hygienic- developmental discourse, according to which autoeroticism not only is funny any sexuality of any power is likely to hover near the threshold of hilarity but also must be relegated to the inarticulable space of (a barely superceded) infantility.   3. Jane E. Brody, "Personal Health," New York Times,4 Nov. 1987. 4. Rosenblatt, "The Universities," p. 3.   Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick is professor of English at Duke University and the author of Between Men: English Literature and Male Homosocial Desire (1985) and Epistemology of the Closet (1990). Ian Hacking Two Souls in One Body Bernice R. broke down so badly, when she turned nineteen, and behaved so much like a retarded child that she was committed to the Ohio State Bureau of Juvenile Research. Its director, Henry Herbert Goddard, a psychologist of some distinction, recognized that she suffered from multiple personality disorder. She underwent a course of treatment lasting nearly five years, after which "the dissociation seems to be overcome and replaced by a complete synthesis. [She] is working regularly a half day and seems reasonably happy in her reactions to her environment."1 Therapy enabled her core personality and her main alter to make contact with each other, and for her to understand her past and, to some extent, why she had split. Her story prompts questions about evidence, objectivity, historical truth, psychological reality, self-knowledge, and the soul. It involves that powerful intersection of morality and metaphysics: why is it of value to have a self-understanding founded on true beliefs about ourselves and our past, or at any rate on memories that are not strictly false? To what extent is such self=knowledge based on evidence? To what extent is it knowledge at all?   Ian Hacking,a philosopher, teaches at the Institute for the History and Philosophy of Science and Technology in the University of Toronto, and he is the author of Taming Chance (1990). His most recent contribution to is "The Making and Molding of Child Abuse" (Winter 1991). Charles Bernheimer Response to Peter Brooks In his article "Storied Bodies, or Nana at Last Unveil'd" ( 16 [Autumn 1989]: 1-32), Peter Brooks makes the claim that, for a certain dominant mode of nineteenth-century narrative, the female sexual organ is the occult source of the narrative dynamic. On a superficial reading, Brooks's piece might appear to empower women by putting their sexuality at the generative origin of the story. But the opposite is the case: his argument reflects rather than critiques the misogynist strategies of the texts he discusses. I will begin my analysis of his article with a brief return to the story by Barbey d'Aurevilly whose climactic scene Brooks offers as "a kind of allegory of the cultural story [he has] been delineating" (p. 29).   Charles Bernheimeris professor of romance languages and chair of the program in comparative literature and literary theory at the University of Pennsylvania. The author of Flaubert and Kafka(1982) and Figures of Ill Repute (1989), he is currently working on a study of fin-de-siècle literature and art, The Decadent Subject. Peter Brooks Response to Charles Bernheimer I suppose I should be grateful to Charles Bernheimer for setting me back on the path of righteousness from which I appear to have so grievously strayed. But I think Bernheimer and I are in deep disagreement about the purposes of literary criticism, and this may make me, in his perspective, a hopeless case. Bernheimer reads my article, "Storied Bodies, or Nana at Last Unveil'd," as intending "to empower women by putting their sexuality at the generative origin of story" (p. 868). He ascribes to me the motive of "offering feminists a gift" (p. 873). He even suggests, in a particularly offensive move: "This offer, I would guess, provides the generative energy for Brooks's critical story" (p. 873). I can do without such attributions of motive. My intent, far less ambitious, was to describe some attitudes toward the nude female body that I found in novels and paintings of the later nineteenth century. I don't believe that criticism need be harnessed to the "empowerment" of anyone in particular, nor that it need denounce what Bernheimer identifies as "patriarchal oppression" (p. 874), "misogynist strategies" (p. 868), and the "hegemonic privileges" (p. 873) of the male gaze everywhere they are to be found (and they are to be found pretty much everywhere in the Western tradition). Does criticism really need to burden itself with this litany of clichés? Do they tell us anything new?   Peter Brooksis Tripp Professor of Humanities and director of the Whitney Humanities Center, Yale University. He is nearing completion of a book tentatively entitled Storied Bodies. Jerome Bruner The Narrative Construction of Reality Surely since the Enlightenment, if not before, the study of mind has centered principally on how man achieves a "true" knowledge of the world. Emphasis in this pursuit has varied, of course: empiricists have concentrated on the mind's interplay with an external world of nature, hoping to find the key in the association of sensations and ideas, while rationalists have looked inward to the powers of mind itself for the principles of right reason. The objective, in either case, has been to discover how we achieve "reality," that is to say, how we get a reliable fix on the world, a world that is, as it were, assumed to be immutable and, as it were, "there to be observed." This quest has, of course, had a profound effect on the development of psychology, and the empiricist and rationalist traditions have dominated our conceptions of how the mind grows and how it gets its grasp on the "real world." Indeed, at midcentury Gestalt theory represented the rationalist wing of this enterprise and American learning theory the empiricist. Both gave accounts of mental development as proceeding in some more or less linear and uniform fashion from an initial incompetence in grasping reality to a final competence, in one case attributing it to the work out of internal processes or mental organization, and in the other to some unspecified principle of reflection by which whether through reinforcement, association, or conditioning we came to respond to the world "as it is." There have always been dissidents who challenged these views, but conjectures about human mental development have been influenced far more by majoritarian rationalism and empiricism than by these dissident voices.   Jerome Bruner is research professor of psychology at New York University, where he is also serving as Meyer Visiting Professor of Law. His most recent book, Acts of Meaning,appeared in 1990. In 1987 he received the Balzan Prize for "a lifetime contribution to the study of human psychology." Nina Baym Between Enlightenment and Victorian: Toward a Narrative of_American Women Writers Writing History All the early advocates of women's education, male and female, had proposed history as a central subject in women's education perhaps as the central subject. They envisaged it as a substitute for novel reading, which they viewed as strengthening women's mental weakness (if the oxymoron may be permitted) and encouraging them in unrepublican habits of idleness, extravagance, and daydreaming.6 Many prominent women educators wrote history, among them Pierce, Rowson, and Willard. But besides such history writing and history advocacy by materialist educational reformers, American women wrote history in other modes and contexts, and it is on these that I want to focus now. Speculating on history as a woman's writing practice from the earliest years of the republic, my approach is purely literary in taking for granted, but considering it unimportant, that by present-day standards none of these women could have been "good" historians. More generally, I supposed that insofar as our present-day definition of literature or, more generally, of writing, invokes such forms as poem, play, story, and novel and insofar as the feminist enterprise of recovering women's writing further emphasizes such private, putatively unpublished forms as journal, diary, and letters we have been instructed to perceive women writers as largely sealed off from public discourse, writing (if they wrote at all) from somewhere outside the public sphere. This currently dominant view of women's writing may be an inadvertent artifact of an unself- conscious, individualistic, curiously romantic definition of writing even among postmodernist critics; or, it may be a strategic view designed to focus attention on and valorize previously silenced or presently new forms of utterance. In contrast, to encompass diverse, already published, programmatically public instances of women's writing in our definition is to begin to see how often and how openly (albeit from certain ideological positions but manifestly not the one taken here how unsatisfactorily) American women have written in such forms. We then begin to recover a different sort of writing woman from the madwoman in the attic and acquire materials with which to begin constructing a different narrative of American women's literary history.   Nina Baym is Jubilee Professor of Liberal Arts and Sciences at the University of Illinois, Urbana. She is the author of many books and articles on American and feminist literary topics. William Flesch Quoting Poetry A tension between content and form can even be said to be essential to the effect of a great deal of rhymed poetry in English. William Wimsatt's wonderful essay on "One Relation of Rhyme to Reason" argues precisely that rhymes in English poetry work when differences of meaning and of part of speech tend to counterpoint similarities of sound.3 Rhyming nouns together, for example, ought to be avoided, since the salutory tension will arise from the fact that a difference in grammatical function will coexist with sameness of sound. This means that prosodical structure does not mirror content, and that even in rhymed poetry the sense may be variously drawn out. Empson makes the complementary remark that English is blessed with the fact that subjects and verbs cannot in general rhyme: The crucial thing about English, as a language for poetry, is that you cannot rhyme the subject with the verb, because either ‘the cat distracts' and ‘the nerves swerve' or ‘the cats distract' and ‘the nerve swerves'; this bit of grammar has been enormously helpful to English poetry by forcing it away from platitude.4 This means that the grammar of rhymed poems will not simply be determined by the rhyme scheme but will tend to be a kind of counterpoint to that scheme, since the predicate is kept from rhyming with the subject.   3. William Wimsatt, "On Relation of Rhyme to Reason," The Verbal Icon: Studies in the Meaning of Poetry (Lexington, Ky., 1954), pp. 152-66. In this essay, anticipating some of the deconstructive claims he came to find too extreme at the end of his life, Wimsatt writes that "verse in general, and more particularly rhyme, make their special contribution to poetic structure … [by imposing] upon the logical pattern of expressed argument a kind of fixative counterpattern of alogical implication" (p. 153). See also Wimsatt, "Verbal Style: Logical and Counterlogical," The Verbal Icon,pp. 200-217. 4. Empson, "Rhyme," Argufying,p. 136.   William Flesch teaches English at Brandeis University and is the author of The Heart of Generosity: Largess and Loss in Herbert, Shakespeare, and Milton (forthcoming). John Koethe Contrary Impulses: The Tension between Poetry and Theory A striking fact of our current literary culture is the estrangement between poets and critics and reviewers of contemporary poetry on the one hand, and proponents of that loosely defined set of doctrines, methodologies, and interests that goes by the name of "theory" on the other. There are individual exceptions to this on both sides, and one can find counterexamples to every generalization I shall suggest here. Nevertheless, anyone familiar with the climates of opinion to be found in English and philosophy departments, poetry workshops and critical symposia, creative writing and cultural studies programs, and the (dwindling)­ nonacademic counterparts of these especially among people in their twenties and thirties has to acknowledge the lack of acquaintance and interest and often even the disdain and contempt that characterizes the relations between poets and those engaged in the kind of high-level, quasi-philosophical reflective activity that literature, and poetry in particular, used to occasion. Illustrations are easy to come by. References to modern poetry by younger theorists are typically confined to the high modernists and to poets canonized twenty or thirty years ago in books like Donald Allen's New American Poetry or Richard Howard's Alone with American;and their rare allusions to the poetry of their contemporaries often betray a striking lack of familiarity and taste. Conversely, the fact that eighty years after Ezra Pound called for the breaking of everything breakable, a poet as intelligent and conceptually ambitious as Jorie Graham should title a book The End of Beauty,and have the theoretical outlook evoked by the title hailed as radical by as informed a critic as Helen Vendler, surely suggests that the level of reflective awareness in the poetry community is not what it might be.2   1. Quoted in Peter Brazeau, Parts of a World: Wallace Stevens Remembered An Oral Biography (New York, 1983), p. 43. 2. See Helen Vendler, "Married to Hurry and Grim Song," The New Yorker,27 July 1987, pp. 74-77.   John Koethe is professor of philosophy at the University of Wisconsin, Milwaukee. His most recent book of poetry is The Late Wisconsin Spring (1984). Carlo Ginzburg Checking the Evidence: The Judge and the Historian In the last 2500 years, since the beginnings in ancient Greece of the literary genre we call "history," the relationship between history and law has been very close. True, the Greek word historia is derived from medical language, but the argumentative ability it implied was related to the judicial sphere. History, as Arnaldo Momigliano emphasized some years ago, emerged as an independent intellectual activity at the intersection of medicine and rhetoric. Following the example of the former, the historian analyzed specific cases and situations looking for their natural causes; following the prescriptions of the latter a technique, or an art, born in tribunals he communicated the results of his inquiry.2 Within the classical tradition, historical writing (and poetry as well) had to display a feature the Greeks called enargeia,and the Romans, evidential in narrtatione:the ability to convey a vivid representation of characters and situations. The historian, like the lawyer, was expected to make a convincing argument by communicating the illusion of reality, not by exhibiting proofs collected either by himself or by others.3 Collecting proofs was, until the mid-eighteenth century, an activity practiced by antiquarians and erudite, not by historians.4 When, in his Traité des differentes sortes de preuves qui servent à établir la vérité he l'histoire  (1769), the erudite Jesuit Henri Griffet compared the historian to a judge who carefully evaluates proofs and witnesses, he was expressing a still-unaddressed intellectual need. Only a few years later Edward Gibbon published his Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire,the first work that effectively combined historical narrative with an antiquarian approach.5   2. See Arnaldo Momigliano, "History between Medicine and Rhetoric," Ottavo contributo alla storia degli studi classici e del mondo antico, trans. Riccardo Di Donato (Rome, 1987), pp. 14- 25. 3. See Ginzburg, "Montrer et citer." 4. See Momigliano, "Ancient History and the Antiquarian," Contributo alla storia degli studi classici (Rome, 1955), pp. 67-106. 5. See Henri Griffet, Traité des differentes sortes de preuves qui servent à établir la vérité de l'histoire,2d ed. (Liège, 1770). Allen Johnson, in his Historian and Historical Evidence(New York, 1926), speaks of the Traité as "the most significant book on method after Mabillon's De re diplomatic" (p. 114). See also Momigliano, "Ancient History and the Antiquarian," p. 81, and Ginzburg, "Just One Witness." On Gibbon, see Momilgiano, Sesto contributo alla storia degli studi classici e del mondo antico (Rome, 1980), pp. 231-84.   Carlo Ginzburgis Franklin D. Murphy Professor of Italian Renaissance Studies at the University of California, Los Angeles. His two most recent books are Ecstasies: Deciphering the Witches' Sabbath and Il giudice e lo storico. Lorraine Daston Marvelous Facts and Miraculous Evidence in Early Modern_Europe I have sketched the well-known distinction between facts and evidence not to defend or attack it (as does a vast literature in the history and philosophy of science), but rather as a preface to a key episode in the history of the conceptual categories of fact and evidence. My question is neither, "Do neutral facts exist?" nor "How does evidence prove or disprove?" but rather, "How did our current conceptions of neutral facts and enlisted evidence, and the distinction between them, come to be?" How did evidence come to be incompatible with intention, and is it possible to imagine a kind of evidence that is intention-laden? It is my claim that partial answers to these questions lie buried in the sixteenth- and seventeenth-century literature on prodigies and miracles. I shall argue that during this period prodigies briefly became the prototype for a new kind of scientific fact, and that miracles briefly exemplified a form of evidence patent to the senses and crucially dependent on intention. Both conceptions diverge sharply not only from current notions of facts and evidence, but also from medieval views on the nature of prodigies and miracles. Prodigies were originally closely akin to portent, divine signs revealing God's will and things to come; miracles were more intimately associated with the private experience of grace than with the public evidence of the senses. Prodigies were transformed from signs into nonsignifying facts, and miracles into compelling evidence, as part of more sweeping changes in natural philosophy and theology in the mid-seventeenth century.   Lorraine Daston is professor of history of science at the University of Göttingen, Federal Republic of Germany. She is the author of Classical Probability in the Enlightenment (1988) and is currently at work on a history of scientific objectivity. Barbara Herrnstein Smith Belief and Resistance: A Symmetrical Account Questions of evidence including the idea, still central to what could be called informal epistemology, that our beliefs and claims are duly corrected by our encounters with autonomously resistant objects (for example, fact, rocks, bricks, and texts- themselves) are inevitably caught up in views of how beliefs, generally, are produced, maintained, and transformed. In recent years, substantially new accounts of these cognitive dynamics and, with them, more or less novel conceptions of what we might mean by "beliefs" have been emerging from various nonphilosophical fields (for example, theoretical biology, cognitive science, and the sociology of knowledge) as well as from within disciplinary epistemology. Because of the distinctly reflexive nature of these developments that is, new conceptions of concepts, revised beliefs about belief, invocations of evidence said to challenge the operation of evidence, quasi-logical refutations of the authority of logic, and so on the deployment of positions and arguments becomes extremely difficult here, as does even the description of the relevant events in intellectual history. Indeed, since we are dealing here not merely with shifts of, as it is sometimes put, "vocabulary," but, often enough, with clashes of profoundly divergent conceptual idiom and syntax,every major term and discursive move is potentially implicated in the problematic itself, and, thereby, open to radical questioning and liable to charges of question-begging. The aim of the present essay is twofold: first, to suggest the more general interest and significance, beyond the fields in which they are being developed, of these emerging reconceptions of belief; and, second, to frame that suggestion in an account which, since it cannot escape the rhetorical difficulties just mentioned, foregrounds them. A number of related themes notably, symmetry, circularity, reciprocality, and ambivalence recur throughout and, at various points, are drawn together in accord with the account itself.   Barbara Herrnstein Smith is Braxton Craven Professor of Comparative Literature and English at Duke University, and director of its Center for Interdisciplinary Studies and Cultural Theory. Her current work examines contemporary models of cognition and communication. R. C. Lewontin Facts and the Factitious in Natural Sciences The problem that confronts us when we try to compare the structure of discourse and explanation in different domains of knowledge is that no one is an insider in more than one field, and insider information is essential. An observer who is not immersed in the practice of a particular scholarship and who wants to understand it is at the mercy of the practitioners. Yet those practitioners are themselves mystified by a largely unexamined communal myth of how scholarship is carried on. R. G. Collingwood, although primarily a philosopher, was immersed in the community of historians and understood how history is done, so that he has had an immense influence on our ideas about historiography. Every historian knows The Idea of History.1 He was also a metaphysician, yet his influence on scientists' understanding of nature, and of science, has been nil, and it is a rare scientist indeed who has ever heard of Collingwood or read The Idea of Nature.2 Collingwood's views of the structure of science had to be constructed in large part from the elaborate fictions created by scientists and by an earlier generation of philosophers and historians of science who participated in the Baconian myth of the hypothetical-deductive scheme.   1. See R. G. Collingwood, The Idea of History (Oxford, 1946). 2. See Collingwood, The Idea of Nature (Oxford, 1945).   R. C. Lewontinis Alexander Agassiz Professor at Harvard University. He is an experimental and theoretical evolutionary geneticist who has also worked extensively on epistemological issues in biology. He is the author of The Genetic Basis of Evolutionary Change (1974) and, with Richard Levins, of The Dialectical Biologist (1985). His current research concerns the nature of genetic variation among individuals within species. Jacques Derrida Given Time: The Time of the King One could accuse me here of making a big deal and a whole history out of words and gestures that remain very clear. When Madame de Mainternon says that the King takes her time, it is because she is glad to give it to him and takes pleasure from it: the King takes nothing from her and gives her as much as he takes. And when she says, "I give the rest to Saint-Cyr, to whom I would like to give all," she is confiding in her correspondent about a daily economy concerning the leisures and charities, the works and days of a "grande dame" somewhat overwhelmed by her obligations. None of the words she writes has the sense of the unthinkable and the impossible toward which my reading would have pulled them, in the direction of giving-taking, of time and the rest. She did not mean to say that, you will say. What if … yes she did [Et si]. And if what she wrote meant to say that, then what would that suppose? How, where, on the basis of what and when can we read this letter fragment as I have done? How could we even hijack it as I have done, while still respecting its literality and its language? End of the epigraph.     Jacques Derrida is Directeur d'Études at the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales in Paris, and professor of French, University of California, Irvine. In the past year, he has published Le Problème de la genèse chez Husserl (1990), Mémoires d'aveugle, l'autoportrait et autres ruines(1990), L'Autre Cap (1991), and Circonfessionin Jacques Derrida,with Geoffrey Bennington (1991). Peggy Kamufis professor of French at the University of Southern California and Directeur de Programme, Collège International de Philosophie in Paris. She is the author of Signature Pieces: On the Institution of Authorship (1988) and most recently has edited A Derrida Reader: Between the Blinds (1991). Naomi Schor "Cartes Postales": Representing Paris 1900 Two widely shared but diametrically opposed views inform what theories we have on the everyday: one, which we might call the feminine or feminist, though it is not necessarily held by women or self-described feminists, links the everyday with the daily rituals of private life carried out within the domestic sphere traditionally presided over by women; the other, the masculine or masculinist, sites the everyday in the public spaces and spheres dominated especially, but not exclusively, in modern Western bourgeois societies by men. According to the one, the everyday is made up of the countless repetitive gestures and small practices that fall under the heading of what the existentialists called the contingent. According to the other, the everyday is made up of the chance encounters of the streets; its hero is not the housewife but the flâneur.In the word of Maurice Blanchot: The everyday is human. The earth, the sea, forest, light, night, do not represent everydayness, which belongs first of all to the dense presence of great urban centers. We need these admirable deserts that are the world's cities for the experience of the everyday to begin to overtake us. The everyday is not at home in our dwelling-places, it is not in offices or churches, any more than in libraries or museums. It is in the street if it is anywhere.1   1. Maurice Blanchot, "Everyday Speech," trans. Susan Hanson, in "Everyday Life," ed. Alice Kaplan and Kristin Ross, special issue of Yale French Studies,no. 73 (1987): 17.   Naomi Schor is the William Hanes Wannamaker Professor Romance Studies at Duke University and coeditor of differences: A Journal of Feminist Cultural Studies. Her most recent book is Reading in Detail: Aesthetics and the Feminine (1987). She is currently completing a book entitled George Sand and Idealism. Kofi Agawn Representing African Music Among the fields of music study, ethnomusicology has wrestled most self-consciously with matters of representation. Since its inception in the late nineteenth century as vergleischende Musikwissenschaft [comparative musicology] and throughout its turbulent history, ethnomusicology has been centrally and vitally concerned with at least three basic issues and their numerous ramifications. First is the problem of locating disciplinary boundaries: is ethnomusicology a subfield of musicology, does it belong under anthropology or ethnology, or is it an autonomous discipline?1 Second is the problem of translation: what factors influence the attempt to translate the reality of other musical cultures into audio and visual recordings, verbal accounts, and transcriptions in musical notation? Is there a viable "theory of translatability"?2 Third is a network of political and ideological matters: what sorts of ethical issues constrain the practical effort to understand another culture? What is the relation between empire and ethnomusicological representation? Can we that is, is it a good thing to study any music without taking note of the social, economic, political, and technological circumstances of its producers?   1. A concise introduction to the field of ethnomusicology, its history, personalities, and method may be found in Barbara Krader, "Ethnomusicology," in The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians,ed. Stanley Sadie, 20 vols. (London, 1980), 6:275-82. The most comprehensive recent discussion of key issues in ethnomusicological research is Bruno Nettl, The Study of Ethnomusicology: Twenty-nine Issues and Concepts (Urbana, Ill., 1983). 2. See Johannes Fabian, Time and the Other: How Anthropology Makes Its Object (New York, 1983), p. 43.   Kofi Agawu teaches at Cornell University and is the author of Playing with Signs: A Semiotic Interpretation of Classic Music (1991). James E. Young The Counter-Monument: Memory against Itself in Germany Today One of the contemporary results of Germany's memorial conundrum is the rise of its "counter-monuments": brazen, painfully self-conscious memorial spaces conceived to challenge the very premises of their being. On the former site of Hamburg's greatest synagogue, at Bornplatz, Margrit Kahl has assembled an intricate mosaic tracing the complex lines of the synagogue's roof construction: a palimpsest for a building and community that no longer exist. Norbert Radermacher bathes a guilty landscape in Berlin's Neukölln neighborhood with the inscribed light of its past. Alfred Hrdlicka began (but never finished) a monument in Hamburg to counter and thereby neutralize an indestructible Nazi monument nearby. In a suburb of Hamburg, Jochen Gerz and Esther Shalev-Gerz have erected a black pillar against fascism and for peace designed to disappear altogether over time. The very heart of Berlin, former site of the gestapo headquarters, remains a great, gaping wound as politicians, artists, and various committees forever debate the most appropriate memorial for this site.4   4. The long-burning debate surrounding projected memorials, to the Gestapo-Gelånde in particular, continues to exemplify both the German memorial conundrum and the state's painstaking attempts to articulate it. For an excellent documentation of the process, see Topographie des Terrors: Gestapo, SS und Reichssicherheitshauptamt auf dem "Prinz-Albrecht- Gelånde," ed. Reinhard Rürup (Berlin, 1987). For a shorter account, see James E. Young, "The Topography of German Memory," The Journal of Art 1 (Mar. 1991): 30.   James E. Young is assistant professor of English and Judaic studies at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. He is the author of Writing and Rewriting the Holocaust: Narrative and the Consequences of Interpretation(1988) and The Texture of Memory: Holocaust Memorials and Meaning in Europe, Israel, and America(forthcoming), from which this essay is drawn. He is also the curator of "The Art of Memory," an exhibition at the Jewish Museum of New York (forthcoming). Pierre Vidal-Naquet Atlantis and the Nations I will not dwell overlong on the "meaning" of this story. But let me make two essential points. Plato tells us this story as though it were true: it is "a tale which, though passing strange, is yet wholly true." Those words were to be translated into every language in the world and used to justify the most realistic fantasies. That is quite understandable, for Plato's story started something new. With a perversity that was to ensure him great success, Plato had laid the foundations for the historical novel, that is to say, the novel set in a particular place and a particular time. We are now quite accustomed to historical novels, and we also know that in every detective story there comes a moment when the detective declares that real life is not much like what happens in detective stories; it is far more complicated. But that was not the case in the fourth century B.C. Plat's words were taken seriously, not by everyone, but by many, down through the centuries. And it is not too hard to see that some people continue to take them seriously today. As for the "meaning," following others and together with others, I have tried elsewhere to show that essentially it is quite clear: the Athens and Atlantis of ancient lore represent the two faces of Plato's own Athens. The former, the old primordial Athens, is what Plato would have liked the city of which he was a citizen to be; the latter is what Athens was in the age of Pericles and Cleon, an imperialistic power whose very existence constituted a threat to other Greek cities.   Pierre Vidal-Naquet is director of the Centre Louis Gernet de Recherches Comparées sure les Sociétés Anciennes at the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales in Paris. His most recent publications are the second volume of Les Juifs, la mémoire et le present (1991), La Grèce ancienne 1: Du mythe à la raison,with Jean-Pierre Vernant (1990), and La Démocratie grecque vue d'ailleurs (1990). Among his works to have appeared in English are Myth and Tragedy in Ancient Greece,with Jean-Pierre Vernant (1988), and The Black Hunter: Forms of Thought and Forms of Society in the Greek World (1986). Janet Lloyd is a supervisor for a number of colleges in Cambridge University, where she gives classes in French language and literature. Among her more recent translations are Yves Mény's Government and Politics in Western Europe: Britain, France, Italy, West Germany (1990) and Marie-Claire Bergère's Golden Age of the Chinese Bourgeoisie, 1911-1937 (1989). In progress are translations of works on Shakespeare, Pericles' Athens, and a historical geography of France. Simon Schaffer Self Evidence There seems to be an important historical connexion between changes in the concept of evidence and that of the person capable of giving evidence. Michel Foucault urged that during the classical age the relationship between evidence and the person was reversed: scholasticism derived statements' authority from that of their authors, while scientists now hold that matters of fact are the most impersonal of statements.1 In a similar vein, Ian Hacking defines a kind of evidence which ‘consists in one thing pointing beyond itself', and claims that until the early modern period ‘testimony and authority were primary, and things could count as evidence only insofar as they resembled the witness of observers and the authority of books'.2 This captures a rather familiar theme of the ideology of early modern natural philosophy. Nullius in verba was the Royal Society of London's motto. Robert Boyle, doyen of the Society's experimental philosophers, tried to build up the credit of laboratory objects at the expense of untrustworthy humans. He reckoned that ‘inanimate bodies … are not capable of prepossessions, or giving us partial informations', while vulgar men may be influenced by predispositions, and so many other circumstances, that they may easily give occasion to mistakes'. So an inanimate body's deeds could function as signs of some other state of affairs in a way that the stories of vulgar humans could not.3   1. See Michel Foucault, L'Ordre du discours: Leçon inaugurale au Collêge de France prononcée le 2 décembre 1970 (Paris, 1971). 2. Ian Hacking, The Emergence of Probability: A Philosophical Study of Early Ideas about Probability, Induction and Statistical Inference(Cambridge, 1975), pp. 34, 33. 3. Quoted in Steven Shapin and Simon Schaffer, Leviathan and the Air Pump (Princeton, N.J., 1985), p. 218. See also Peter Dear, ‘Totius in verba:' Rhetoric and Authority in the Early Royal Society', Isis 76 (June 1985): 145-61.   Simon Schaffer lectures in history and philosophy at the University of Cambridge. He is the coauthor (with Steven Shapin) of Leviathan and the Air Pump: Hobbes, Boyle, and the Experimental Life(1985) and coauthors (with David Gooding and Trevor Pinch) of The Uses of Experiment: Studies in the Natural Sciences (1989). Donald Preziosi The Question of Art History Until fairly recently, most of the attention of art historians and others in these debates has been paid to differences among the partisans of various disciplinary methodologies, or to the differential benefits of one or another school of thought or theoretical perspective in other areas of the humanities and social sciences as these might arguably apply to questions of art historical practice.1 Yet there has also come about among art historians a renewed interest in the historical origins of the academic discipline itself, and in the relationships of its institutionalization in various countries to the professionalizing of other historical and critical disciplines in the latter part of the nineteenth century. These interests have led increasingly to wider discussion by art historians of the particular nature of disciplinary knowledge, the circumstances and protocols of academic practice, and the relations between the various branches of modern discourse on the visual arts: academic art history, art criticism, aesthetic philosophy, the art market, exhibitions, and musicology.2 What follows does not aim to summarize or characterize these developments but is more simply an attempt to delineate some of the principal characteristics of the discipline as an evidentiary institution in the light of the material conditions of academic practice that arose in the latter half of the nineteenth century in relation to the history of mueological display. In brief, this essay is concerned with the circumstances of art history's foundations as a systematic and "scientific" practice, and its focus is limited to a single, albeit paradigmatic, American example.   1. An extended discussion of these issues may be found in Donald Preziosi, Rethinking Art History: Meditations on a Coy Science (New Haven, Conn., 1989), pp. 80-121. See also The New Art History,ed. A. L. Rees and Frances Borzello (Atlantic Highlands, N.J., 1988). 2. One important sign off these discussions has been a series of "Views and Overviews" of the discipline appearing in The Art Bulletin in recent years, of which the most recent has been perhaps the most extensive and comprehensive: Mieke Bal and Norman Byrson, "Semiotics and Art History," The Art Bulletin 73 (June 1991): 174-208.   Donald Preziosiis professor of art history at the University of California, Los Angeles, and, beginning in 1992, at the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales in Paris. He is the author of Rethinking Art History: Meditations on a Coy Science (1989) and is currently completing a book on the history of museums entitled Framing Modernity. Bill Brown Writing, Race, and Erasure: Michael Fried and the_Scene_of_Reading … [T]o trace the problematic of writing (however various) in the Norris canon is foremost to confirm Fried's claims about its pervasiveness. Indeed, he now intimates that the problematic pervades the fiction of "other important writers of the 1890s and early 1900s," work by Jack London, Harold Frederic, and Henry James (predictably, the "unresolved borderline case" [p. 199]). On the one hand, this pervasiveness muddies an already ambivalent use of the term impressionism (emptied of its traditional content, yet clung to as a heuristic means of grouping writers);10 on the other hand, it augments Fried's sense that the thematization of writing attained particular moment in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. To my eye, nonetheless, the moment dissolves once its historical isolationism confronts "literary history."   10. Fried explicitly addresses this ambivalence, explaining that "I am unpersuaded by the many attempts that have been made to define that concept either in relation to French impressionist painting or in terms of a fidelity to or evocation of the ‘impressions' of one or more characters (including the implied narrator), but I see no comparably useful designation for the global tendency that Crane, Norris, and Conrad all instantiate" (p. 197 n. 6). The term, as I see it however, serves precisely to exclude the global tendency as it is instantiated elsewhere. And yet, to the degree that "impressionism" can now designate a confrontation between the sight of writing and the impressionist emphasis on sight as traditionally understood, Fried, despite all disclaimers, revivifies that tradition (which has had scant attention in the last two decades).   Bill Brown,assistant professor of English at the University of Chicago, is presently completing a book on the "economy of play" in the work of Stephen Crane. Michael Fried Response to Bill Brown So there will be no mistake, I don't deny, why would I wish to, that a thematic of racial difference is crucial to the overall plot of Almayer's Folly.What I claim is that that thematic falls short of significantly determining or even, to use Brown's word, appreciably "complicating" the problematic of erasure that surfaces in the closing chapters. It's as though the rest of the novel is there chiefly to stage those chapters and their dramatization of erasure; something similar takes place in Powell's narrative of spying into Captain Anthony's cabin toward the end of Chance and even, to a lesser degree, in the climactic encounter between Winnie Verloc and her husband in chapter 11 of The Secret Agent. It's worth noting, too, that the opening paragraphs of A Personal Record,Conrad's autobiographical account of the beginnings and origins of his "writing life," describe the circumstances under which "the tenth chapterof ‘Almayer's Folly' was begun."8 This in itself suggests that Conrad has a special stake in the last three chapters of his first novel, and one of my aims in "Almayer's Face" was to discover (think of the neutrino) what that stake may have been.9   8. Joseph Conrad, A Personal Record (1912; Marlboro, Vt., 1988), pp. 72: my emphasis. 9. Again, so there will be no mistake, I would distinguish Almayer's Follysharply in this respect from, for example, The Nigger of the "Narcissus," in which effects of erasure are disseminated throughout the text and in which the title character's blackness is crucial to their production.   Michael Fried,J. R. Herbert Boone Professor of Humanities at the Johns Hopkins University, is currently at work on books on Manet and on literary "impressionism." His most recent book is Courbet's Realism (1990). Michael Rogin Blackface, White Noise: The Jewish Jazz Singer Finds_His_Voice Birth and The Jazz Singer ostensibly exploit blacks in opposite ways. Birth makes war on blacks in the name of the fathers; The Jazz Singer's protagonist adopts a black mask and kills his father. The Birth of a Nation,climaxing the worst period of violence against blacks in southern history, lynches the black; the jazz singer, ventriloquizing the black, sings through his mouth. Birth,a product of the progressive movement, has national political purpose. The Jazz Singer, marking the retreat from public to private life in the jazz age, and the perceived pacification of the fantasized southern black threat, celebrates not political regeneration but urban entertainment. [ … ] Celebrating the blackface identification that Birth of a Nation denies, The Jazz Singer does no favor to blacks. The blackface jazz singer is neither a jazz singer nor black. Blackface marries ancient rivals in both movies; black and white marry in neither. Just as Birth offers a regeneration through violence, so the grinning, Jazz Singer, minstrelsy mask kills blacks with kindness.   Michael Rogin teaches political science at the University of California, Berkeley. His books include Fathers and Children: Andrew Jackson and the Subjugation of the American Indian (1975), Subversive Genealogy: The Politics and Art of Herman Melville (1983), "Ronald Reagan," the Movie and Other Episodes in Political Demonology (1987). Jerome J. McGann Laura (Riding) Jackson and the Literal Truth Can poetry tell the truth? This question has embarrassed and challenged writers for a long time. While the question may be addressed at both an ethical and an epistemological level, its resonance is strongest when the ethico-political issues become paramount as they were for both Socrates and Plato. Today the question appears most pressing not among poets but among their custodians, the critics and academicians.1 Whether or not poetry can tell the truth whether or not it can establish an identity between thought and its object has become an acute problem for those who are asked to bring critical judgment to the matter. To the extent that a consensus has been reached, the judgment has been negative. That poetry develops only a metaphorical and nonidentical relation between thought and its object is the current general view.   1. This crisis has been widely debated; my own contribution to the discussion may be found in Social Values and Poetics Acts: The Historical Judgment of Literary Work (Cambridge, Mass., 1988). The critique of Plato in the early sections of this work is particularly relevant to the question of poetry's truth- functions. The same subject is pursued further in the sequel, Toward a Literature of Knowledge (Chicago, 1989).   Jerome J. McGann is Commonwealth Professor of English at the University of Virginia. The Textual Condition (1991) is his most recent critical work, and he is the editor of the New Oxford Book of Romantic Period Verse (forthcoming). Daniel Boyarin "This We Know to Be the Carnal Israel":_Circumcision_and_the_Erotic Life of God and Israel When Augustine condemns the Jews to eternal carnality, he draws a direct connection between anthropology and hermeneutics. Because the Jews reject reading "in the spirit," they are therefore condemned to remain "Israel in the flesh." Allegory is thus, in his theory, a mode of relating to the body. In another part of the Christian world, Origen also described the failure of the Jews as owing to a literalist hermeneutic, one that is unwilling to go beyond or behind the material language and discover its immaterial spirit.1 This way of thinking about language has been initially stimulated in the Fathers by Paul's usage of "in the flesh" and "in the spirit" respectively to mean literal and figurative. Romans 7:5-6 is a powerful example of this hermeneutic structure: "For when we were still in the flesh, our sinful passions, stirred up by the law, were at work on our members to bear fruit for death. But now we are fully freed from the law, dead to that in which we lay captive. We can thus serve in the new being of the Spirit and not the old one of the letter." In fact, the exact same metaphor is used independently of Paul by Philo, who writes that his interest is in "the hidden and inward meaning which appeals to the few who study soul characteristics rather than bodily forms."2 For both, hermeneutics becomes anthropology.   1. See Henri Crouzel, Origen,trans. A. S. Worrall (San Francisco, 1989), pp. 107-12. 2. Philo, On Abraham,sec. 147, in vol. 6 of Philo,trans. and ed. F. H. Colson (Cambridge, Mass., 1935), p. 75. It is very important to note that Philo himself is just the most visible representative of an entire school of people who understood the Bible, and indeed the philosophy of language, as he did. On this see David Winston, "Philo and the Contemplative Life," in Jewish Spirituality: From the Bible through the Middle Ages,ed. Arthur Green (New York, 1986-87), pp. 198-231, esp. p. 211.   Daniel Boyarin is Taubman Professor of Talmudic Culture in the department of Near-Eastern studies at the University of California, Berkeley. He is the author of Intertextuality and the Reading of Midrash (1990), as well as the forthcoming Carnal Israel: Reading Sex in Talmudic Culture,from which the present essay is drawn. He is currently engaged in a project entitled The Politics of the Spirit: Paul as a Jewish Cultural Critic. Warwick Anderson "Where Every Prospect Pleases and Only Man Is_Vile":_Laboratory Medicine as Colonial Discourse My concern here is with the way a new American medical discourse in the Philippines fabricated and rationalized images of the bodies of the colonized and the subordinate colonizers. I am interested in reading the reports of biological (and in particular, physiological) experiments as discursive constructions of the American colonial project, as attempts to naturalize the power of foreign bodies to appropriate and command the Islands. The origin of the American colonial enterprise at a time when science lent novel force and legitimacy to public policy gave scientists and doctors an opportunity to construct a new physiology and pathology of colonialism. The medical laboratory thus became an important site for the construction of the social space of interaction between American and Filipino bodies.5 The Filipino emerged in this period as a potentially dangerous part of the zoological realm, while the American colonizer became a resilient racial type, no longer inevitably susceptible to the tropical climate but vulnerable to the crowd of invisible, alien parasites newly associated with native bodies. This new medical discourse in the tropics accorded with a broad shift in the language and practices of medical science that occurred at the end of the nineteenth century. Generally, the medical concern with constitutions and climate gave way to a greater interest in the specific microbial causation of individual disease. At the same time, the colonial doctor's anecdotes and clinical impressions seemed less convincing, and increasingly the laboratory was called on to authenticate knowledge.   Warwick Andersonis a medical doctor who is completing his doctorate in the history and sociology of science at the University of Pennsylvania. His current project is the politics of disease theory in southeastern Asia. Chicago Cultural Studies Group Critical Multiculturalism We would like to open some questions here about the institutional and cultural conditions of anything that might be called cultural studies or multiculturalism. By introducing cultural studies and multiculturalism many intellectuals aim at a more democratic culture. We share this aim. In this essay, however, we would like to argue that the projects of cultural studies and multiculturalism require: (a) a more international model of cultural studies than the dominant Anglo-American versions; (b) renewed attention to the institutional environments of cultural studies; and (c) a questioning of the relations between multiculturalism and identity politics. We seek less to "fix" these problems than to provide a critical analysis of the languages, the methods of criticism, and the assumptions about identity, culture, and politics that present the problems to us. Because the thickets entangling what our group calls cultural studies are so deeply rooted in Western academia, which to a large degree constitutes our own group, the counterexample of cultural criticism in other contexts can be more than usually instructive. We begin by considering the position of cultural studies in China, since our group includes a number of Chinese intellectuals, on whose experience the following section is largely based.   The Chicago Cultural Studies Group began meeting in June 1990. It includes Lauren Berlant, David Bunn, Vinay Dharwadker, Norma Field, Dilip Gaonkar, Marilyn Ivy, Benjamin Lee, Leo Ou-fan Lee, Xinmin Liu, Mathew Roberts, Sharon Stephens, Katie Trumpener, Greg Urban, Michael Warner, Jianyang Zha, and Jueliang Zhou. Mieke Bal Telling, Showing, Showing off The American Museum of Natural History is monumental not only in its architecture and design but also in its size, scope, and content. This monumental quality suggests in and of itself the primary meaning of the museum inherited from itshistory: comprehensive collecting as a form of domination.8 In this respect museums belong to an era of scientific and colonial ambition, from the Renaissance through the early twentieth century, with its climactic moment in the second half of the nineteenth century. It belongs in the category of nineteenth-century endeavors such as experimental medicine (I'm thinking here of Claude Bernard), evolutionary biology (Charles Darwin), and the naturalistic novel (Émile Zola), all of which claimed to present a comprehensive social study. Such projects have been definitively compromised by postromantic critique, postcolonial protest, and postmodern disillusionment.9 But in spite of its appearance, that prefix post- doesn't make things any easier. Any museum of this size and ambition is today saddled with a double status; it is necessarily also a museum of the museum, a preserve not for endangered species but for an endangered self, a "metamuseum": the museal preservation of a project ruthlessly dated and belonging to an age long gone whose ideological goals have been subjected to extensive critique.10 Willy-nilly, such a museum solicits reflections on and of its own ideological positions and history. It speaks to its own complicity with practices of domination while it continues to pursue an educational project that, having emerged out of those practices, has been adjusted to new conceptions and pedagogical needs. Indeed, the use of the museum in research and education is insisted on in its self-representations, including the Guide.   9. For an example of the postmodern critique, see Michael M. J. Fischer, "Ethnicity and the Postmodern Arts of Memory," in Writing Culture: The Poetics and Politics of Ethnography,ed. Clifford and George E. Marcus (Berkeley, 1986), pp. 194-233. 10. The metamuseal function of a museum like the American Museum is analyzed in Ames, Museums, the Public, and Anthropology.   Mieke Balis professor of the theory of literature at the University of Amsterdam and retains a visiting professorship in the comparative arts program at the University of Rochester. Her most recent book is Reading "Rembrandt": Beyond the Word- Image Opposition (1991). Nancy Fraser Sex, Lies, and the Public Sphere: Some Reflections_on_the Confirmation of Clarence Thomas The recent struggle over the confirmation of Clarence Thomas and the credibility of Anita Hill raises in a dramatic and pointed way many of the issues at stake in theorizing the public sphere in contemporary society. At one level, the Senate Judiciary Committee hearings on Hill's claim that Thomas sexually harassed her constituted an exercise in democratic publicity as it has been understood in the classical liberal theory of the public sphere. The hearings opened to public scrutiny a function of government, namely, the nomination and confirmation of a Supreme Court justice. They thus subjected a decision of state officials to the force of public opinion. Through the hearings, in fact, public opinion was constituted and brought to bear directly on the decision itself, affecting the process by which the decision was made as well as its substantive outcome. As a result, state officials were held accountable to the public by means of a discursive process of opinion and will formation. Yet that classical liberal view of the public sphere does not tell the whole story of these events.1 If were examine the Thomas confirmation struggle more closely, we see that the very meaning and boundaries of the concept of publicity was at stake. The way the struggle unfolded, moreover, depended at every point on who had the power to successfully and authoritatively define where the line between the public and the private would be drawn. It depended as well on who had the power to police and defend that boundary.   1. See Jürgen Habermas, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere: An Inquiry into a Category of Bourgeois Society,trans. Thomas Burger (Cambridge, Mass., 1989).   Nancy Fraser is associate professor of philosophy and faculty fellow of the Center for Urban Affairs and Policy Research at Northwestern University, where she also teaches in the women's studies program. She is the author of Unruly Practices: Power, Discourse, and Gender in Contemporary Social Theory (1989). She is currently working on Keywords of the Welfare State,a jointly authored book with Linda Gordon. Kwame Anthony Appiah and Henry Louis Gates, Jr. Editors' Introduction: Multiplying Identities A literary historian might very well characterize the eighties as the period when race, class, and gender became the holy trinity of literary criticism. 's contribution to this shift in critical paradigms took the form of two special issues, "Writing and Sexual Difference," and "‘Race,' Writing and Difference." In the 1990s, however, "race," "class," and "gender" threaten to become the regnant clichés of our critical discourse. Our object in this special issue is to help disrupt the cliché-ridden discourse of identity by exploring the formation of identities and the problem of subjectivity. Scholars in a variety of disciplines have begun to address what we might call the politics of identity. Their work expands on the evolving, anti-essentialist critiques of ethnic, sexual, national, and racial identities, particularly the work of those post- structuralist theorists who have articulated concepts of difference. The calls for a "post-essentialist" reconception of notions of identity have become increasingly common. The powerful resurgence of nationalisms in Eastern Europe provides just one example of the catalysts for such theorizing.   Kwame Anthony Appiah,author of Assertion and Conditionals(1985), Truth in Semantics(1986), and Necessary Questions (1989), has also published a novel, Avenging Angel (1990), and a collection of essays, In My Father's House (1992). His most recent contribution to was "Is the Post- in Postmodernism the Post- in Postcolonial?" (Winter 1991). Henry Louis Gates, Jr.,is coeditor of Transition,a quarterly review, and the author of Figures in Black (1987), The Signifying Monkey (1988), and Loose Canons (1992). His latest contribution to was "Critical Fanonism" (Spring 1991). Gananath Obeyesekere "British Cannibals": Contemplation of an Event in the_Death_and Resurrection of James Cook, Explorer I have recently completed a work entitled The Apotheosis of Captain Cook: European Mythmaking in the Pacific.1 In it I present an alternative view of the events leading to the apotheosis of James Cook by the Hawaiians in 1779 when he first landed there, in effect making the case that the supposed deification of the white civilizer is a Western myth model foisted on the Hawaiians and having a long run in European culture and consciousness. As a result of reading the extensive logs and journals of Cook's voyages, I have become interested in the manner in which "cannibalism" got defined in these voyages. My reading of these texts suggests that statements about cannibalism reveal more about the relations between Europeans and Savages during early and late contact than, as ethnographic statements, about the nature of Savage anthropophagy.   1. See Gananath Obeyesekere, The Apotheosis of Captain Cook: European Mythmaking in the Pacific (Princeton, N.J., forthcoming).   Gananath Obeyesekere teaches anthropology at Princeton University. He is the author of The Apotheosis of Captain Cook: European Mythmaking in the Pacific (forthcoming). Walter Benn Michaels Race into Culture: A Critical Genealogy of Cultural_Identity Our sense of culture is characteristically meant to displace race, but part of the argument of this essay has been that culture has turned out to be a way of continuing rather than repudiating racial thought. It is only the appeal to race that makes culture an object of affect and that gives notions like losing our culture, preserving it, stealing someone else's culture, restoring people's culture to them, and so on, their pathos. Our race identifies the culture to which we have a right, a right that may be violated or defended, repudiated or recovered. Race transforms people who learn to do what we do into the thieves of our culture and people who teach us to do what they do into the destroyers of our culture; it makes assimilation into a kind of betrayal and the refusal to assimilate into a form of heroism. Without race, losing our culture can mean no more than doing things differently from the way we now do them and preserving our culture can mean no more than doing things the same the melodrama of assimilation disappears.41 If, of course, doing things differently turns out to mean doing them worse, then the change will seem regrettable. But it's not the loss of our culture that will make it regrettable; it's the fact that the culture that will then be ours will be worse than the culture that used to be ours. It is, of course, always possible and often likely that things will get worse; abandoning our idea of culture, however, will not make them worse.   Walter Benn Michaelsis professor of English and the humanities at The Johns Hopkins University. He is the author of The Gold Standard and the Logic of Naturalism (1987) and of a monograph on American literature in the Progressive period, forthcoming in the Cambridge History of American Literature. His previous contributions to include "Against Theory" and "Against Theory 2," both written in collaboration with Steven Knapp. Xiaomei Chen Occidentalism as Counterdiscourse: "He Shang" in Post-Mao China In the years since its introduction, Edward Said's celebrated study Orientalism has acquired a near-paradigmatic status as a model of the relationships between Western and non-Western cultures. Said seeks to show how Western imperialist images of its colonial others images that, of course, are inevitably and sharply at odds with the self-understanding of the indigenous non- Western cultures they purport to represent not only govern the West's hegemonic policies, but were imported into the West's political and cultural colonies where they affected native points of view and thus served as instruments of domination themselves. Said's focus is on the Near East, but his critics and supporters alike have extended his model far beyond the confines of that part of the world. Despite the popularity of Said's model, however, comparatists and sinologists have yet to make extensive use of it in their attempts to define China's self-image or the nature of the Sino-Western social, cultural, and political relationships.   Xiaomei Chen is assistant professor of Chinese and comparative literature at Ohio State University. She has recently completed a book on the politics of cross-cultural "misunderstanding" in modern China and the West, and is now working on a cultural study of post-Mao Chinese theater. Diana Fuss Fashion and the Homospectatorial Look Hazel V. Carby Policing the Black Woman's Body in an Urban_Context Sara Suleri Woman Skin Deep: Feminism and the Postcolonial Condition Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak Acting Bits/Identity Talk Saree S. Makdisi The Empire Renarrated: "Season of Migration to the_North"_and_the Reinvention of the Present Akeel Bilgrami What Is a Muslim? Fundamental Commitment and Cultural_Identity Katie Trumpener The Time of the Gypsies: A "People without_History"_in_the Narratives of the West