Critical and Cultural Studies Commons^™

The Infinite Plasticity Of The Digital: Posthuman Possibilities, Embodiment And Technology In William Gibson's Interstitial Trilogy, Tama Leaver

Reconstruction: Studies in Contemporary Culture

[Editors' Introduction]

Ever since William Gibson coined the term cyberspace in his debut novel Neuromancer, his work has been seen by many as a yardstick for postmodern and, more recently, posthuman possibilities. This article critically examines Gibson's second trilogy (Virtual Light, Idoru and All Tomorrow's Parties), focusing on the way digital technologies and identity intersect and interact, with particular emphasis on the role of embodiment. Using the work of Donna Haraway, Judith Butler and N. Katherine Hayles, it is argued that while William Gibson's second trilogy is infused with posthuman possibilities, the role of embodiment is …

The Photocopied Self: Perzines, Self-Construction, And The Postmodern Identity Crisis, Steve Bailey, Anita Michel

Reconstruction: Studies in Contemporary Culture

[First paragraph]

Mike Gunderloy, creator of Factsheet 5, and co-author of The World of Zines, offers the following definition of perzines:

A personal zine, or perzine, is the most intimate kind of zine. It allows the editor/writer many freedoms, not the least of which is spouting off about anything or nothing-in-particular without worrying about editorial policies and other rules of regimented periodicals. It's also a way of corresponding with any number of people simultaneously while maintaining an aura of intimacy and friendship. And something else to remember when you're reading (or writing) a perzine -- because this intimacy …

Plato Means Business In The Republic: A Human Resource Management Critique Of The Philosopher-King, Anton Karl Kozlovic

Reconstruction: Studies in Contemporary Culture

[First paragraph]

Exploring the interface between 20th century management principles and the classical world is innovative and relatively new, but not unheard of in the recent past. For example, Greg Latemore and Victor Callan (1998) used Homer's The Odyssey to illustrate leadership lessons. Charles Handy (1995) used four Greek gods (i.e., Zeus, Apollo, Athena, Dionysius) as role models to show managers how to run their own businesses more effectively. While conventional histories of management thought routinely examined the ancient world for its insights, contributions and other ideational antecedence that underpinned their discipline (George Jr., 1972). However, the value of this …

On Power And Equity: Toward A Working-Class Rhetoric, Omar Schwartz

Reconstruction: Studies in Contemporary Culture

[First paragraph]

The working-class in the United States has been, and continues to be, systematically excluded from normative political representation and is allowed little opportunity to contribute to the terms and conditions of its social existence (Henwood, 1987; Moberg, 1992). While few workers today resist such marginalization, this has not been always the case. During the formative period of U.S. labor consciousness (from the end of the Civil War until the First World War), the political alienation of labor was routinely challenged by workers who relied extensively (and illegally) on collective self-help in their pursuit of economic justice. With this …

Review Of Art And Fear, By Paul Virilio, Davin Heckman

Reconstruction: Studies in Contemporary Culture

No abstract provided.

Review Of Religion And Rationality, By Jurgen Habermas, Nicholas Ruiz Iii

Reconstruction: Studies in Contemporary Culture

No abstract provided.

From Butler To Buffy: Notes Towards A Strategy For Identity Analysis In Contemporary Television Narrative, Rob Cover

Reconstruction: Studies in Contemporary Culture

[First paragraph]

Given the increasing significance of questions of identity, subjectivity and selfhood in contemporary postmodern western cultures, it is important to begin acknowledging how these questions are reflected in contemporary media and television and to develop new strategies by which to analyse television characters in terms of identity and subjectivity. The scope for analysing television series' characterizations through recent postmodern and poststructuralist theories of non-essentialist, non-foundationalist subject/identity performativity has not yet been considerably explored. It is my contention here, however, that such a method both reflects the representation of self and identity transformation in new television series as well …

On Misa, Brey, And Feenberg's Modernity And Technology, Davin Heckman

Reconstruction: Studies in Contemporary Culture

[First paragraph]

In the course of my own research on culture and technology, I have marveled at the vast pool of valuable resources available in both Cultural Studies and Science and Technology Studies. And I have been equally amazed by the disciplinarity that seems to keep each of these approaches from interacting with each other, in spite of the fact that they share common ancestors like Marx, Heidegger, and Mumford. And so I found myself intrigued by the arrival of Misa, Brey, and Feenberg's edited volume, Modernity and Technology -- a deliberate effort to reconcile the theoretical question of Modernity …

Cultural Literacy And The Field Of The Media, Tony Schirato, Jen Webb

Reconstruction: Studies in Contemporary Culture

[First paragraph]

This paper is concerned with the notion of cultural literacy, specifically with regard to the media, and focuses on two interrelated questions. First, what do we mean by the term cultural literacy, and how can this term be extended and applied to the field, texts and practices of the media? Second, what is it about the place and function of the media in the contemporary world that requires us (as citizens, educators or audiences) to be culturally and media literate?

On Aaron Baker's Contesting Identities: Sports In American Film And Stephen C. Wood And J. David Pincus's Reel Baseball: Essays And Interviews On The National Pastime, Hollywood And American Culture, Marc Ouellette

Reconstruction: Studies in Contemporary Culture

[First paragraph]

Aaron Baker's Contesting Identities: Sports in American Film is an indictment of the key American myth that anyone can succeed through self-reliance. Baker finds that sports films, in general, comprise a site in which the myth is represented and reproduced. Baker's focus, though presented from multiple analytical perspectives, is singular in its purpose. That said, Baker does concentrate on what he considers the four core American sports: football, baseball, basketball and boxing. Approximately ninety movies, from the silent era to the present day, provide the content of the analysis, but several are exemplary and are cited repeatedly in …

Of Technology And Apocalypse, Or Whose Independence Day?, Christopher Keep

Reconstruction: Studies in Contemporary Culture

[First paragraph]

The scene is now familiar. The cities of the world are in ruins. The Empire State Building obliterated. The White House reduced to rubble. The remnants of humankind gather in the desert, scrounging together what remains of their air defence systems for one last effort to repulse the alien invaders. Haggard but determined, the last American President prepares to lead his motley crew of resistance fighters into the fray. He takes the hand mic, tests it once or twice, and his voice crackles over the speakers. In less than one hour, he announces, aircraft from here will join …

On Bret Easton Ellis's American Psycho, Andrew Miles Jacobsen

Reconstruction: Studies in Contemporary Culture

[First paragraph]

No book since American Psycho has created as much of a scandal. And few books have been as misunderstood. In 1990, months before it was set to be released, certain violent passages were leaked to the press that, taken out of context, made the book seem like a depth-less celebration of sexual violence. Right after Simon & Schuster canceled the book, an employee of the publishing house said, The most unfortunate thing about this whole controversy is that the book is a piece of shit. It's hard when something like this becomes an issue of censorship, because you …

Endless Enlightenment: Eye-Operated Technology And The Political Economy Of Vision, Michael Gardiner

Reconstruction: Studies in Contemporary Culture

[First paragraph]

Despite a residual popular temptation to see the posts of cultural analysis as signs of temporal closure, the logic of global visual media is strengthening, not weakening, metaphors of visibility which remain intact from the Enlightenment. Here I describe a stand-off between post-Enlightenment critiques (as in some sectors of Cultural Studies) and a narrow power base which is defined by producing light and managing the very conditions of visibility. For the world's most powerful state, still strongly bound to its original Enlightenment foundations, intervention into other states' sovereignty is increasingly justified by evidence from spy planes (rather than …

New And Now: A Plea For Historiography And Technology, Haidee Wasson

Reconstruction: Studies in Contemporary Culture

[First paragraph]

Throughout the late 1980s and 1990s, the word new was persistently attached to the term technology, a coupling intended to reference a vast range of phenomena -- computers, the internet, wireless telecommunications, satellite cinema and so on. Throughout this period, these technologies were widely heralded as global panaceas. In the pages of glossy hi-tech magazines and academic annals alike, the obliteration of racism, homophobia, sexism, and the great class divide became subjunctive to the problem of connecting everybody everywhere to emergent digital networks. Decentering old-world imperial powers and creating alternative cultural formations became battle cries for the new …

Reading Over The Shoulder Of The Future At The Library Of Congress, Samuel Gerald Collins

Reconstruction: Studies in Contemporary Culture

[First paragraph]

It is 2003 and I am doing some research at the Library of Congress, the de facto national library for the United States and the largest library in the world. Next to me sit some articles I've printed off of online journals on the Defense Advanced Research Project Agency's Total Information Awareness Project, a plan, still in its formative stage, to throw a panopticon net of surveillance across the United States through a combination of language translation technologies, data search and pattern recognition technologies, and advanced collaborative and decision support tools (DARPA). But I am also doing research …

Aircraft Picture Postcards As A Tool For Influence Through Images, Daniel Martel

Reconstruction: Studies in Contemporary Culture

[First paragraph]

The era in which we live at the turn of the millennium is defined by most scholars -- depending on their specialisation -- as the era of worldwide economic integration, adoption of technologies of western origins, internal harmonization of institutions and working procedures, and cultural standardization. The roots of this can be traced back to the Renaissance, as well as the industrial revolutions and economic liberalism. Their driving forces are successful economic transactions and permanent innovation. According to this worldview, the ultimate goal of any such activity is the optimised individual situation of any human being or economic …

A Body Of Her Own: Cultural Constructions Of The Female Body In A.S. Byatt's Strange Stories, Sabine Coelsch-Foisner

Reconstruction: Studies in Contemporary Culture

[First paragraph]

Byatt's short fiction, from her first collection Sugar and Other Stories (1987) to Elementals (1998) is marked by a continuous preoccupation with the body: the body as the product of social signifying practices, the body as the site of desires, fears, and anxieties, the body as the source of experience, the body as creator and created. In brief, the body is treated as the centre of existence, consciousness and identity. Yet, these are constantly called into doubt in Byatt's stories, which depict heroines trapped between asserting their identity and submitting to cultural dictates of beauty and behavior. In …

Ravers At The Bush: Generation Ecstasy Goes To The Theatre, William C. Boles

Reconstruction: Studies in Contemporary Culture

[First paragraph]

Determining that seminal moment when a new theatrical movement comes to life has been one of the points of debate surrounding the challenging new plays and their talented, twenty something authors that have appeared on the British stage since the mid-1990s. Plays and authors like: Mojo (1995) by Jez Butterworth; Blasted (1995) by Sarah Kane; Closer (1997) by Patrick Marber; The Beauty Queen of Leenane (1996) by Martin McDonagh; Butterfly Kiss (1994) by Phyllis Nagy; Love and Understanding (1997) by Joe Penhall; Essex Girls (1994) by Rebecca Prichard; Shopping and Fucking (1996) by Mark Ravenhill; and Ashes and …

Teaching In The Middle: An Ordinary Revolution, Davin Heckman, Patrick Vrooman

Reconstruction: Studies in Contemporary Culture

[First paragraph]

We teach in the humanities. We teach encounters with the Other. And yet, what do we want from an encounter with the Other?

On Katherine Frank's G-Strings And Sympathy: Strip Club Regulars And Male Desire, Kristen Schilt

Reconstruction: Studies in Contemporary Culture

[First paragraph]

Katherine Frank's book, G-Strings and Sympathy, provides an anthropological look into the fantasies of male strip club regulars in a Southern City she calls Laurelton. Turning the gaze onto the gazers, a group left unstudied in the majority of literature on sex work, Frank unpacks how trips to the strip club are closely linked with discourses about sexuality, consumption and masculinity. Through six years of participant observation at a variety of clubs in Laurelton and in-depth interviews with thirty self-professed strip club regulars, Frank delves into not only why these men attend strip clubs but how these visits …

Solutions/Fixations: A Transformation, Davin Heckman

Reconstruction: Studies in Contemporary Culture

[First two paragraphs]

As I write from the heartland, in a small rural town in Northwest Ohio, the world, with the help of my government, is undergoing a process of reorganization.

This has been going on for some time. Media and its various material incarnations have stumbled around the world and back, layering it with new meanings, creating new sites of production. Rays of feedback, echoes, have coated the world with a many-layered web of meaning.

The Electronic Polis: Media Democracy And The Invasion Of Iraq, Jeff Lewis, Kirsty Best

Reconstruction: Studies in Contemporary Culture

[First paragraph]

The American-led victory in Baghdad was announced to the world with scenes of Iraqi citizens dragging down the statues of the deposed tyrant. Like the spectacle of World Cup Soccer or the Olympic Games, the image was transmitted live through the global media network to the billions of people who had been closely watching the three week invasion. President Bush shared in the celebration, announcing the dawn of a new age for freedom and democracy in the Middle East. This new democracy, the president proclaimed, would bring stability and prosperity to the region through the obliteration of terrorism …

Stuffed Animals And The Predicament Of Culture: Lost In The Bedroom Jungle, Walter Putnam

Reconstruction: Studies in Contemporary Culture

[First paragraph]

These preachings are from the gospel according to Reverend Billy, spiritual leader of the Church of Stop Shopping (qtd. in Kalb). For several years, Reverend Billy has been waging a guerilla war in Lower Manhattan against the likes of Starbucks and Disney, including agit-prop performances where he brandishes stuffed animals atop tall poles like skulls adorning savage palisades. His inversion and subversion of these multivalent emblems of consumer culture reinforce the anti-consumer message he delivers in our era of late capitalism and globalization. His conspicuous utilization of stuffed animals highlights the manner in which these ubiquitous and inconspicuous …

The Cia World Factbook: Marriage Of Archive And Empire?, Jack Shuler

Reconstruction: Studies in Contemporary Culture

[First paragraph]

A recent exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of Art cites the production of textiles as integral in establishing the power of the Mongol empire. In the accompanying notes to the exhibit, the museum curators write that, In the creation of luxury textiles and objects for the Mongol elite, Chinese artists developed a visual language that was an effective means of establishing their rule and continuous presence throughout the vast empire. These artists used certain motifs such as the dragon and phoenix, to create tangible representations of power. The mythical beasts integrated the ideas of cosmic force, earthly strength, …

Review Of Writing Back: Sylvia Plath And Cold War Politics, By Alan Clinton, Alan Clinton

Reconstruction: Studies in Contemporary Culture

No abstract provided.

Review Of Mapping Tourism, By Stephen P. Hanna And Vincent J. Del Casino, Jr., Alexandra Ganser

Reconstruction: Studies in Contemporary Culture

No abstract provided.

Homeland (In)Security : Roots And Displacement, From New York, To Toronto, To Salt Lake City, Marusya Bociurkiw

Reconstruction: Studies in Contemporary Culture

[First paragraph]

On September 11, 2001, broadcast and print media around the world narrated the destruction of New York City's World Trade Center and the deaths of thousands of its occupants. This paper will examine the ways in which television and its appendages (the telephone, the internet, the newspaper) operated to organize the discursive meanings of this traumatic event. I will propose that between September 11 and February 2002's Winter Olympics in Salt Lake City, Utah, ideas about home, roots and rootedness (and their Others: foreignness, homelessness, nomadicism) operated as a discursive mapping of that which could otherwise not be …

Review Of Heredity, By Jenny Davidson, David C. Froemke

Reconstruction: Studies in Contemporary Culture

No abstract provided.

Fixations/Solutions, Matthew Wolf-Meyer

Reconstruction: Studies in Contemporary Culture

[First paragraph]

When the idea of this issue’s theme came to me, I was standing in a crowd of my peers, members of my generation, listening to Godspeed You! Black Emperor. As with all concerts, the performers left the stage to signal their eventual encore, and when they returned, they returned with the announcement that the U.S. military had begun its bombing, and formal invasion, of Iraq. Whether the idea for the issue had come to me prior to this moment, or as a result of it, I am unsure; I had, however, earlier decided that the summer issue we …

War If Necessary, But Not Necessarily War': The Canadian Paradox And 'Iraqi Freedom', Marc Ouellette

Reconstruction: Studies in Contemporary Culture

[First paragraph]

The Canadian refusal to join the U.S. led “coalition of the willing” does not mark the first time the nation has chosen not to follow its “traditional allies” into a foolish, ego-driven, imperialistic and vengeful conflict. Indeed, Canada’s record in these matters is flawless. Peter C. Newman points out that “we went along with most presidential global adventures, except the Vietnam War. The other significant time we parted company with the Yanks was over our drive to impose economic sanctions on apartheid South Africa, a policy we initiated and successfully defended despite American objections.” In fact, the objections …