Articles
Mr. Schrödinger Inside Himself
Richard Doyle
In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:
"Life" just isn't what it used to be. That is, the conceptual rhetorical matrix which we used to feel comfortable ascribing to something
called "organisms" has been displaced and retooled. From "Artificial
Life" to the cyborg universe of Donna Haraway, the tropes we have traditionally associated with "vitality" seem to be mutating. These mutations have most notably taken place around a molecule, the double helix, a twin strand of nucleic acids with immense discursive as well as
physico-chemical powers. In this essay I will attempt to analyse the
rhetorical economy of this new regime of the molecule, rhetorics which
functioned as software for the new science of molecular biology. I call
these rhetorics "software" in order to foreground the ways in which
molecular biology has relied on particular linguistic media––the trope
of the "code," for example––as much, or more than the more obvious
gadgets of ultracentrifuges, electrophoresis gels and electron microscopes. Indeed, In one particular case which I will outline here, I would
argue that the new rhetorical framework which made possible the identification of life with a molecule preceded the technologies which would
make the practices of a molecular biology possible. My concern is not
to establish the priority of this rhetorical intervention, but to mark out
how the assemblage or network which produces molecular biology runs
on rhetoricity as well as technicity.
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La vérité du bonheur: The Legitimation of Literature in Georges Bataille’s L’Abbé C.
Tommaso Giartosio
In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:
What is at stake in literature? Maybe the possibility of posing the
question itself? But certainly the question is urgent: then perhaps what
is at stake, that which determines the spécifique littéraire and justifies
the literary enterprise, is the protection of this urgency against any final
answer? To legitimate literature one should therefore prevent it from
fixing its own laws... Or could literature itself be the code wherein lies
a law that outlaws all laws, a project that obliterates all projects? Could
this be the dynamic raison d'être of literature, its moving paradox: the
fact that it strives towards an object which it cannot but deny?
Such, I would suggest, is the crucial set of problems any writer
should face and cannot help facing. It is a philosophical and a philological set of problems; for this reason, perhaps, it imposes itself with particular immediacy on all those who do not locate their work exclusively
within one of the two cognate domains, philosophy and literature, but
rather move from one to the other, occasionally (and willingly) forgetting where exactly they are. In the case of a writer like Georges
Bataille, this transpositional technique––involving characters, concepts,
situations, key words––is particularly evident; all his works are, in a way, concomitant, modifying and devouring one another out of a lively
impulse to kill.
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Distractions: A Dossier on Weimar Culture
Introduction
The Editors
In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:
Granted: Claiming a focus, a center of gravity for a dossier entitled
"Distractions" may seem to try even the good offices of an Editor's
Note. Indeed, the following pieces cover a lot of different ground: there
are film theoretical reflections on Walter Benjamin, an essay that challenges a conventional feminist take on DADA art, a reading of an
American silent film in conjunction with thoughts about Siegfried Kracauer's Mass Ornament, a quirky consideration of the metaphorics of
hot and cold in German culture, and a few of Kracauer's deft Feuilletons that appear here for the first time in English. Yet for all their
thematic divergence, not to use the term diversity, these essays find
their coherence in a mode of argumentation that, in a looping manner,
brings the questions of its original material to bear upon itself.
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Loitering: Four Encounters in Berlin
Siegfried Kracauer
In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:
A couple of days ago at the Scala I saw the Alfred Jackson-Girls
who, as the program announces, have just returned from their international tour. This troop is not made up of about 16 girls––I could be
wrong about the number––rather each leg makes up one thirty-second
of a remarkably precise apparatus. Anyone who has ever traveled on a
pleasure boat has certainly, with his back turned toward some lake,
leaned over the rampart inside the ship and looked down at the glistening engines. The poses that the girls strike recall the regular play of the
engines' pistons. They are not militarily exact, rather they correspond to
the ideal of the machine. If one presses a button then the girl-machine is
cranked up and performs its intense work at 32 horsepower. All the
limbs roll, all the spindles begin to rotate. And as the mechanism
pounds, trembles and rumbles like a saw-mill or a locomotive, the oil of
smiling continually drips into the joints so that none of the gears breaks
down. Finally, the machine's activity is brought to a halt by an
inaudible siren blast and the dead whole automatically breaks down into
its living parts. a process of destruction which leaves one with the sad
feeling that these parts are by no means able to continue to exist
independently.
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Cosmos in Film: On the Concept of Space in Walter-Benjamin's “Work of Art” Essay
Gertrud Koch
In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:
No essay by Walter Benjamin has led his readers and interpreters in
as many different directions as "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction." Not only is this the sole long and coherent text
which the author wrote, and rather late at that (1935/36), on the subject
of the new medium of the masses––film––but it develops a precarious
and contradictory historical thesis. This thesis can be inserted in a stimulating way into the palimpsest of Benjamin's remarks on history and
philosophy. That this essay, first written in Paris in 1935, bore an intrinsic connection with the Arcades Project beyond that of mere simultaneity, is evidenced by several passages in his letters. Even if they
were only to be interpreted as tactical evasive maneuvers against the critique of the design of the Arcades Project, these passages still offer several interesting arguments for such a connection.
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Refrigerators of Intelligence
Helmut Lethen
In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:
Karl Holtz' drawing "A Palace Tour in the Year 1979" [Eine
Schloßführung im Jahre 1979] appeared in October, 1929, in the Ullstein magazine UHU. A look back at the present, which then
lay a half century back. A flock of visitors stands before a deserted architectural monument, in which the elements of Rietveld and Bauhaus
are combined with designs of the Soviet constructivists (something like
Lenin's speech rostrum or the Pravda editorial building) and with characteristics of the newly-opened Wannsee beach resort. While the
building itself appears to belong to the class of dwellings in which, as
Ernst Bloch once noted, one learns to freeze, the flock of visitors appears to have taken on a summery and relaxed disposition. These people, dressed a bit anachronistically for the fashion standards of 1929,
occupy the future. And from there they regard what was built for the
sensibilities and mentalities of the future as anachronistically obsolete.
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Ambivalence of the “Mass Ornament”: King Vidor's The Crowd
Miriam Hansen
In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:
When, after much delay, MGM finally released The Crowd in
February of 1928, exhibitors had the choice between two different endings; seven different endings had been scripted, two were actually shot
and distributed in separate reels. In one version, the hero's journey of
downward mobility is reversed by an overnight success in advertising
which restores the family to harmony and respectability in a sentimental Christmas tableau. In the other, now familiar ending, John Sims
(James Murray) makes a more modest return from unemployment by
finding a job as a sandwich man dressed up as a juggling clown: he dissuades his wife (Eleanor Boardman) from leaving him and takes her and
their son to a vaudeville show where the family is reconstituted as part
of the great community of popular entertainment. The second ending
clearly dampens the bland optimism of the first, but is nonetheless intended as a happy one. However, in their particular cinematic choreography, the final shots of The Crowd give the lie to any simple closure,
ending the film on a note of ambivalence if not unwitting cynicism.
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Kuchenmesser DADA: Hannah Höch’s Cut through the Field of Vision
Courtney Federle
In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:
At the First International DADA Fair in 1920 Hannah Höch exhibited her photomontage Schnitt mit dem Kuchenmesser DADA durch die
letzte Weimarer Bierbauchkulturepoche Deutschlands (Slice with the
cake knife DADA through Germany's last Weimar beer-belly cultural
epoch). With the broad blunt blade of her Kuchenmesser DADA Höch
cuts the cake of the last Weimar beer-belly cultural epoch, graphically
slicing through the culture of the first years of the Weimar Republic.
She crowds this piece with photos and text clipped from contemporary
newspapers and magazines, evoking the major themes that fascinated
and preoccupied Berliners in the late-teens and early twenties: the city,
technology, velocity, fragmentation, alienation, exoticism, eroticism,
revolution, and the masses. The montage's graphic references to the culture and politics of those years invites the viewer to identify people,
places and things and to make sense of them and their relations within
the context of the work and the world. The process of locating and explaining the images in Höch's Kuchenmesser DADA led critics to focus
on their graphic referentiality. One study has even attempted exhaustively to identify the content and source of each image. The effort to
determine positively the referent and origin of each image, however, has
neglected the material condition of the images now sundered from their
sources and inserted in a strange photoscape. As a result of the insistent, contextual reading of this work, Höch's tactics of montage, as
well as the morphology and syntax of her graphic language, have been
neglected.
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Modernity and its Discontents: Notes on Alterity in Weimar Cinema
Anton Kaes
In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:
Let us begin with the following three premises: (1) narrative fictions in film do not exist in a vacuum; instead, they partake of dynamic
social and economic processes and general discursive formations; (2)
these fictions do not merely reflect the social and intellectual conditions
of their origins, but respond to them; and (3) these fictions invariably
also function as compensatory expressions of the times. If we accept
these premises, we arrive at the following thesis: films express and
work through secret fears, hopes and wishes; in the imaginary world of
film, we encounter what in everyday life has been repressed, what
seems strange and unheimlich. Filmic fictions point to that which
society has left unarticulated; in modernity, film has become the
privileged forum for encountering what is foreign.
The very first films from the final years of the last century had the
effect of rendering the familiar unfamiliar. In the flickering of early
films, the world appeared in the mute visual language of dreams. The
technical apparatus of the camera could suspend temporal-spatial order
through close-up or slow-motion shots, it could create new worlds artificially, and even combine things that were otherwise separated by the
greatest geographical or temporal removes...
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Book Reviews
On John Rajchman‘s Truth and Eros: Foucault, Lacan, and the Question of Ethics
Lisa Freinkel
A review of Rajchman, John. Truth and Eros: Foucault, Lacan, and the Question of Ethics. (New York and London: Routledge, 1991).
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On Homi K. Bhabha, ed., Nation and Narration
George Handley
A review of Bhabha, Homi K. Nation and Narration. (New York: Routledge, 1990).
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On Page duBois‘s Torture and Truth: The New Ancient World
Ann Gelder
A review of duBois, Page. Torture and Truth: The New Ancient World. (New York: Routledge, 1991).
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Volume 5.2 is available at JSTOR. Qui Parle is edited by an independent group of graduate students at the University of California, Berkeley and published by Duke University Press.