Date: Sun, 14 Dec 1997 18:53:29 -0800 (PST) From: "E. Heroux" <heroux-AT-darkwing.uoregon.edu> Subject: UNDERCURRENT #5: Abstracts UNDERCURRENT #5 is finally available online after an extraordinary series of delays. Issue #6 is also in the works and should be out by the end of this winter. Below is the introductory overview of the new issue. The full hypertext of every article is available for free online at this web address: http://darkwing.uoregon.edu/~heroux/uc5/5-content.html UNDERCURRENT #5 Fall '97 Introductory Abstracts The fifth issue continues to braid together several thematic strands taken up in prior articles. Most obvious of these is the second part of "Virtual Battlefields" by Warren Sproule, continued from the last issue. In this conclusion to Sproule's argument for a sociology that can account for the effects of real warfare in an era distracted by postmodernist virtuality, we find a canny critique of the theorists of war. The author concludes with a call for a "greater concentration on 'cracks' within, and shards of 'reality' glimpsed through, the constructed images of globally-dominant states increasingly given over to violent armed intervention, bolstered by forms of social theorising which passively deny, or actively support, such activity." As though to answer this call, yet with at least two surprises of its own, is Floyd Rudmin's study of the history of war-planning against Canada by the American military: "Questions of U.S Hostility Toward Canada: A Cognitive History of Blind-Eye Perception". To be more exact, Rudmin's object is not so much this collection of war plans, exercises, and spying in itself (although those are represented in impressive detail), but rather the cognitive avoidance of such facts by the press, the public, and by prior scholars of this very history. Rudmin's case study of this systematic avoidance of unpleasant implications is also an exemplary instance of an interdisciplinary approach he calls "cognitive history." a method that combines social history and cognitive psychology, in particular the work of Icheiser. Cognitive historiography may well become an adjunct to studies of social memory, ideology, and the sociology of everyday knowledge. But we are blind about much more than international relations, according to "The Spectacle of Information" by William Brown. Everyday life has been colonized by an inward turn of capitalist expansion in its historic invention of consumerism. This intimate invasion of consciousness has been greatly assisted by forms of mass entertainment, most recently of digital networks. Everything has already been packaged, commodified, and distributed: "Wars, riots, law enforcement, criminal justice, elections, political scandals, investigative journalism, expert opinion of all stripes, predictions and forecasts, and news, traffic and weather reports (to name just a few) are produced, distributed and consumed as entertainment products. Even commercial advertisements for products are produced to be consumed as entertainment, as integrated 'info-tainment.'" As it reaches the schools, this has become edu-tainment. Brown updates Guy Debord's critique of the society of the spectacle for the advent of the Information Age by analyzing how information becomes a commodity and how "data" mystifies this process. Speaking of computerization, in a sequence of vignettes about her experiences with computers as a male domain, Sharon Jansen reflects on the old question, "Why do fools fall in love?" Her witty essay on "Men & Microchips" comes up with a couple of new answers to the old question: " Yet it's not simply the illusion of engagement that is so dangerous here. Nor is it that these machines--so dutiful, so obedient, so available, so prompt--are, after all, so absolutely controlled and manipulated by the men who use them. It's something more. It's the flattering picture that these machines offer to the men who love them, for through their computers these men are free to engage themselves, to create themselves, to be who and what they will--effortlessly. At no time since the Renaissance has male self-fashioning been so seductive or so easy: 'O supreme generosity of God the Father, O highest and most marvelous felicity of man! To him it is granted to have whatever he chooses, to be whatever he wills.' Giovanni Pico della Mirandola would have loved to spin on the Web. Finally, in an essay that addresses a hotbutton issue in the culture wars, Alan Sikes analyzes the implications of "Social Protest and the Performance of Gay Identity" in a manner that transcends existing polemics. After reporting about his participation at the big 1993 March on Washington for Lesbian, Gay, and Bisexual Equal Rights and Liberation, Sikes explores how the latest theories of identity and subjectivity speak to a set of dilemmas and paradoxes found in gay discourse. Sikes points out a discursive instability there between notions of "difference" and "sameness". Essentialist assumptions about identity seem to sprout up from within the rhetoric of difference, even within its newer "performative" versions which parody heterosexual subjectivity. The "difference" highlighted by such campy performativity falls back into an "essentialist trap" in which homosexual identity is assumed to be unproblematized. Sikes closes with the recognition "that one must live with a sense of 'doubled' consciousness--aware of the contingency and instability of one's own identity position, yet cognizant of the powerful way in which this position organizes and even enables our existence." Please feel free to browse and/or download each article from our website. -------------------- Erick Heroux Editor UNDERCURRENT http://darkwing.uoregon.edu/~heroux/home.html <heroux-AT-darkwing.uoregon.edu>
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