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 "&lsquo;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 "&lsquo;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 &lsquo;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, &lsquo;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.
