Critical Inquiry Critical Inquiry

To be sure, the two introductory volumes, Hauptprobleme der Philosophie and Grundfragen der Soziologie, are at last available again.2 Two of Simmel's most important books, Philosophie des Geldes (1900) and Soziologie (1908), have also been reprinted.3 In addition, Michael Landmann has energetically sought to renew an interest in Simmel with a commemorative volume on the occasion of Simmel's hundredth birthday and with the republication of two collections of essays.4 Only a few years ago, Simmel was included in an illustrious circle of classic social theorists.5 And in the United States in the 1950s, Kurt Wolff actually launched a discussion with a compilation of Simmel's sociological writings.6

· 2. See Simmel, Hauptprobleme der Philosophie (Leipzig, 1910) and Grundfragen der Soziologie (Indivuduum und Gesellschaft) (Berlin, 1917); trans. Kurt H. Wolff, under the title “Fundamental Problems of Sociology,” pt. 1 of The Sociology of Georg Simmel, ed. Wolff (Glencoe, Ill. 1950), pp. 1-84.

· 3. See Simmel, Philosophie des Geldes, ed. David P. Frisby and Klaus Christian Köhnke, vol. 6 of Georg Simmel: Gesamtausgabe, ed. Otthein Rammstedt (Frankfurt am Main, 1989), hereafter abbreviated PG, trans. Tom Bottomore and Frisby, under the title The Philosophy of Money (London, 1990), hereafter abbreviated PM; and Soziologie: Untersuchungen über die Formen der Vergesellschaftung (Leipzig, 1908). English translations of most of the essays in Soziologie appear in pts. 2-5 of The Sociology of Georg Simmel, pp. 85-424.

· 4. See Buch des Dankes an Georg Simmel: Briefe, Erinnerungen, Bibliographie, ed. Kurt Gassen and Michael Landmann (1958; Berlin, 1993), and Simmel, Brücke und Tür: Essays des Philosophen zur Geschichte, Religion, Kunst, und Gesellschaft, ed. Landmann (Stuttgart, 1957) and Das individuelle Gesetz: Philosophische Exkurse, ed. Landmann (Frankfurt am Main, 1968).

· 5. See P. E. Schnabel, “Georg Simmel,” in Von Comte bis Durkheim, vol. 1 of Klassiker des soziologischen Denkens, ed. Dirk Käsler (Munich, 1976), p. 267.

· 6. See The Sociology of Georg Simmel. For the reception in the United States, see Schnabel, “Georg Simmel,” p. 276.

See also: Jürgen Habermas, Work and Weltanschauung: The Heidegger Controversy from a German Perspective

Jürgen Habermas teaches at the Johann Wolfgang Goethe-Universität in Frankfurt, Germany. Among his influential publications are The Theory of Communicative Action (1984), The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity (1987), The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere (1989), and Justification and Application (1993). An English translation of his most recent work, Faktizität und Geltung (1992), is forthcoming under the title Between Facts and Norms. Mathieu Deflem is a doctoral candidate in the Department of Sociology at the University of Colorado, Boulder. He is preparing a dissertation on the history of international policing; his research focuses on social theory and sociology of law.

I will suggest, in what follows, that we step into the gap between truth and legend and read King Kong as a confessional text, an entry of sorts in the spiritual diary of the corporation. If this seems odd at first glance it is only, it will turn out, a way to take hold of the particular strand I would like to follow through a much larger and more familiar tapestry, that of corporate self-representation. In the twenties and thirties the task of “business expression”2—in the terse phrase of a Westinghouse executive—was experienced by corporate authorities not merely as an opportunity but as an ontological necessity. Self-representation was a way for the corporation to lay visible claim to a privileged, indeed dominating, place on the landscape of American market culture, to be sure, but it was also, I will argue, a way to quell the corporation's anxieties about its odd identic status as a legal fiction. The “fictionality” of corporate identity has been a theme since the late nineteenth century for critics of the corporation, suspicious of this entity vested with the privileges of personhood but not its responsibilities. But what has been less widely noted is that a declared corporate identity is a potential source of anxiety for the corporation itself. From this perspective self-representation may be, among other things, a way for the abstract body of business, corporeal but invisible, to convince itself of the “reality” and sturdiness of its own existence. On the other hand, perhaps predictably, the self-representation of the corporation produces its own anxiety, complementary to that attaching to invisibility: the anxiety of embodiment. In other words, to the extent that critics of the corporation were right to understand the invisibility of the corporation as a pervasive and disturbing form of power, the ontological certainty vouchsafed by self-representation may seem, for the corporation itself, to carry its own heavy price. To be visible is, after all, to be, for example, a glaring target: of public criticism, or federal antitrust legislation, or the actions of organized labor. Embodiment may carry with it a risk of admission; the bases of the corporation's existence may be merely material in nature, comprised less by abstract, spiritual entities than by, for instance, the bodies of the laborers it absorbs. Hence the mode of self envisioning deployed in some of the corporate artifacts I will discuss is what we might call an elliptical one, a visibility that expresses the aspiration to disappear all over again.

· 2. Harry P. Davis, foreword to Frank A. Arnold, Broadcast Advertising: The Fourth Dimension (New York, 1931), p. xv.

See also: Mark McGurl, The Program Era: Pluralisms of Postwar American Fiction  ·  Mark McGurl, The Posthuman Comedy

Mark McGurl, a doctoral candidate in the Humanities Center at The Johns Hopkins University, is working on a dissertation titled “Social Geometries in the Emergence of Modernist Narrative, 1860-1930.” The present essay is part of a separate study, also in progress, of Hollywood film and the politics of special effects.

The present essay goes in another direction: it assumes that in comparative anthropological studies, the spatiotemporal dimensions of a theoretical problem not only are intrinsic to it but require analytic foregrounding. In this respect, I intend to speak to some current preoccupations in the humanities and social theory with space, time, and bodily action; with “places” and their “powers”; and with what David Parkin has recently described as a discourse “of positions, stances, moves . . . close and distant gazes . . . of spatial orientation and separation.”5

· My topic is certain Australian Aboriginal spatial interdictions that are pervasive wherever Aborigines still treat the land in everyday life as the ancestrally derived locus of Aboriginal law.6 For heuristic reasons, I focus (with one exception) on central and western desert and some desert fringe, riverine peoples of the Australian interior.7 When I use the term Aborigines without further qualification, I mean essentially peoples of these regions, although the interdictions involved may have wider applicability. These interdictions create a partially shifting range of excluded or restricted regions for each person throughout his or her life. A specific kind of spatial form is being produced: a space of deletions or of delimitations constraining one's presence at particular locales.

· 5. David Parkin, Sacred Void: Spatial Images of Work and Ritual among the Giriama of Kenya (Cambridge, 1991), p.1.

· 6. Numerous studies draw attention to these interdictions. Mention should be made of Kenneth Maddock, “Dangerous Proximities and Their Analogues,” Mankind 9 (June 1974): 206-17, and David Biernoff, “Safe and Dangerous Places,” in Australian Aboriginal Concepts, ed. Leslie Hiatt (Atlantic Highlands, N.J., 1978). I discuss only a small portion of the range of interdiction here.

· 7. The names and locations of key peoples and places discussed in the essay are as follows: the Aranda (now written Arrernte) of central Australia (The Northern Territory) who own Emily Gap (Anthwerrke) and its environs southeast of the desert town of Alice Springs; the Warlpiri (also Walbiri) who have towns and communities north and northwest of Alice Springs (I mention Yuendumu, some 175 miles northwest, and Lajamanu across the Tanami desert northwest of Yuendumu); western desert Kukatja peoples living around Balgo, near the West Australian border; and the peoples of Yarralin, in Victoria River country of the northwest Northern Territory. I also refer to the huge monolith, Ayers Rock (Uluru), of the southwest Northern Territory, which belongs to speakers of several western desert dialects, including Pitjantjatjara. The only coastal community discussed is Belyuen (home of speakers of a number of languages), which is near the north central coast of the Northern Territory, west of the northern coastal center of Darwin.

See also: Terry Smith, Public Art between Cultures: The "Aboriginal Memorial," Aboriginality, and Nationality in Australia  ·  Elizabeth A. Povinelli, The State of Shame: Australian Multiculturalism and the Crisis of Indigenous Citizenship

Nancy D. Munn is professor of anthropology at the University of Chicago. She is the author of Walbiri Iconography: Graphic Representation and Cultural Symbolism in a Central Australian Society (1973) and The Fame of Gawa: A Symbolic Study of Value Transformation in a Massim (Papua New Guinea) Society (1986).

Here I explore the interchange between late-Victorian socialism and the arts and crafts movement on the one hand, and emergent Indian nationalism on the other. I begin by asking how two prominent British intellectuals, John Ruskin and William Morris, both important for aesthetic theory and for British socialism, responded to Indian politics and Indian traditional arts ad crafts. I also explore how two prominent Indian intellectuals, Mahatma Gandhi and Ananda Coomaraswamy, responded to Ruskin and Morris. This cultural interchange involved a creative hybridity that challenged or at least destabilized Western Orientalism and alleged Eastern mimicry. Furthermore, from this conjuncture emerged the concept and term postindustrial, together with the idea of an “'inverted Marxism,'” some thirty years before Indian independence in 1947. I conclude by considering the significance the Ango-Indian genealogy of postindustrial might have for current work on postcolonial cultures and politics.

See also: Patrick Brantlinger, Victorians and Africans: The Genealogy of the Myth of the Dark Continent

Patrick Brantlinger, professor of English at Indiana University, is the author of Rule of Darkness: British Literature and Imperialism, 1830-1914 (1988), Crusoe's Footprints: Cultural Studies in Britain and America (1990), and the forthcoming Fictions of State: Culture and Credit in Britain, 1694-1994.

In discussions of regional literature, it is customary today to begin with a negative reference to the “old concept” of national literature. In a period of newly discovered interest in so-called noncanonical literature sparked by the necessity of a multicultural approach, it is imperative that there be a reexamination of the traditional attempts to define the field. This goes along with a comparable effort to restructure the canon from the point of view of, as Edward Said calls it, a “changed ecology.”1 If the “old” modernist intellectual—fundamentally a deraciné—saw literature as a “strategy of permanent exile,” as a fundamental dis-placement (ostraneniye in Viktor Shklovsky's formulation and atopie in Roland Barthes's),2 we should be ready to recognize the “new” intellectual as, quite literally, an ecologist, someone who speaks from a place. It is from this perspective that I am tempted to take W. H. New (and isn't it true that nomina numina sunt, after all?) as the exemplary host to introduce the main assumption behind regionalism and the literature of place—namely, the idea that today “regionalism is a more appropriate frame within which to read literature than is nationalism.”3

· 1. Edward W. Said, “Yeats and Decolonization,” Dia Art Foundation Discussions in Contemporary Culture, no. 4 (1989): 11; hereafter abbreviated “YD.”

· 2. See George Steiner, Extraterritorial (New York, 1971); Victor Shklovsky, “Art as Technique,” Russian Formalist Criticism: Four Essays, trans. Lee T. Lemon and Marion J. Reis (Lincoln, Neb., 1965), pp. 1-57; and Roland Barthes, Roland Barthes, trans. Richard Howard (New York, 1977).

· 3. W. H. New, “Beyond Nationalism: On Regionalism,” World Literature Written in English 23 (Winter 1984): 13; hereafter abbreviated “BN.”

Roberto Maria Dainotto has recently completed a Ph.D. In comparative literature at New York University and is currently a visiting professor of Italian at Sarah Lawrence College. He is now working on a book on regional literatures.

It is particularly revealing that in Douglass's depictions of slave life textual signification works at cross purposes. In The Narrative, writing is at once a mark of civilization and a symbol of civilization's violence, a birthright that mutes the resonances of the slave body. By harnessing the power of script to redraw black song, Douglass seems to bring to life an unheard sonic world. “I did not, when a slave, understand the deep meaning of those rude and apparently incoherent songs,” he writes. “I was myself within the circle; so that I neither saw nor heard as those without might see and hear” (N, p. 37). In the process of recovering slave sounds, however, Douglass also reinvents them to fit the common sense of nineteenth-century Northern, literate culture. Gaining access to script, he gives a new hearing to that which is “neither [seen] nor heard,” as slave singing becomes “a tale of woe which [at the time] was . . . altogether beyond my feeble comprehension” (N, p. 37).

See also: Aamir R. Mufti, Orientalism and the Institution of World Literatures

Ronald Radano is associate professor of music and Afro-American studies at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. He is author of New Musical Figurations: Anthony Braxton's Cultural Critique (1993), which won the Irving Lowens Award for distinguished scholarship in American music. He is presently at work on a history of the modern idea of black music, from which this essay is taken.

In trying to introduce Jankélévitch, to give a sense of his philosophical distinctiveness, we have decided to include a very short essay “Do Not Listen to What They Say, Look at What They Do,” written in homage to Henri Bergson. Jankélévitch, like many philosophers of his generation, was profoundly affected by Bergson, and his book Henri Bergson remains today one of the most significant works about Bergson in addition to representing a formative moment in Jankélévitch's own intellectual development. To what he called the “caricature” that Bergson was but an “eminent spiritualist,” Jankélévitch responded that “Bergsonism was an avant-garde philosophy,” and this avant-garde orientation that he derived from Bergson, and which so infused his work, is fully evident in this brief essay.2

· 2. Vladimir Jankélévitch, “Quelle est la valeur de la pensée bergsonienne?” Premières et dernières pages (Paris, 1994), p. 87.

Arnold I. Davidson, the executive editor of Critical Inquiry, is professor of philosophy and divinity and a member of the Committee on the Conceptual Foundations of Science at the University of Chicago. He recently edited and introduced Pierre Hadot, Philosophy as a Way of Life (1995) and is the editor of a forthcoming Critical Inquiry book entitled Foucault and His Interlocutors.

This sentence, which appears several times in Les Deux Sources de la morale et de la religion,1 not only expresses Bergson's profound attachment to lived experience; first and foremost it signifies this: there are things that are not meant to be talked about but meant to be done, and those things in relation to which purely expressive language appears so secondary, so unconvincing, so miserably inefficacious, are the most important and most precious things in life. Are their names not love, poetry, music, liberty? Thus do not listen to what Zeno says, look rather at what Achilles does. Practice what you preach, or better yet practice without preaching. Such was the harsh wisdom of Tolstoy,2 for Tolstoy, apostle and hagiographer, wanted to live wisdom and not simply profess it. Such, according to Bergson, is also the message of the saint and the hero. The saint and the hero affect their fellow human beings not through what they write, as do men of letters, nor through what they say, as do public speakers, but through what they do and even more so through what they are, through the example of their lives and the poetic influence of their presence.

· 1. See Henri Bergson, Les Deux Sources de la morale et de la religion (1932; Paris, 1984), pp. 26, 149, 172, and 193; trans. R. Ashley Audra and Cloudesley Brereton, under the title The Two Sources of Morality and Religion (New York, 1935), pp. 23, 133, 153, and 173.

2. See Leo Tolstoy, The Kingdom of God Is within You, trans. and ed. Leo Wiener (1894; Boston, 1951), chap. 5.

Vladimir Jankélévitch held the chair of moral philosophy at the Sorbonne from 1951 until his death in 1985. His written work comprises more than twenty volumes, including Bergson (1931), Traité des vertus (1951), Philosophie première (1959), Le Pardon (1967), and Le Paradoxe de la morale (1981). Ann Hobart, former manuscript editor at Critical Inquiry, is currently studying law at the University of Arizona. Her previous contribution to Critical Inquiry was the translation of three essays by Georges Canguilhem (Winter 1995).

In becoming conscious now of the worldwide catastrophe triggered by Hitler's Germany, two faces can be discerned: on the one hand the epic of the Resistance and on the other the tragedy of deportation; on the one hand the heroism of the maquis and the triumphs of Free France, magnified by the stirring words of Malraux, and on the other the death camps; on the one hand Jean Moulin, honored by a crowd of patriots in a flurry of waving flags on the steps of the glorious Panthéon, on the other Jean Moulin tortured, disfigured, panting, savagely trampled underfoot by brutes—because the deportee and the Resistance fighter very often were one and the same. On one side Bir Hakeim and the Paris barricades, on the other . . . on the other an unnameable, unmentionable, and terrifying thing, a thing from which one diverts one's thoughts and that no human speech dares describe. Orchestras played Schubert while the detained were hanged. Women's hair was stockpiled. Gold teeth were removed from cadavers. That unspeakable thing whose name we hesitate to pronounce is called Auschwitz.

What Elkins takes to be dismissive of visuality because, reading too hastily, he fails to see my efforts to define visuality beyond figurative categories, is in fact a thorough investigation of what visual signs—subsemiotic, potential signs; discrete or replete signs; suprasemiotic clusters of signs ready to become texts—can be outside of the frequent conflation with linguistic categories that Elkins—just like Norman Bryson and me—rightly rejects.5 I elaborate for visual texts the narratological concept of focalization as the most productive, because almost medium-neutral, concept from literary semiotics.6

· 5. See Bal and Norman Bryson, “Semiotics and Art History,” Art Bulletin 73 (June 1991): 174-208.

· 6. For this concept, see Bal, Narratology: Introduction to the Theory of Narrative, trans. Christine van Boheemen (Toronto, 1985). 

Mieke Bal is professor of the theory of literature and academic director of the Amsterdam School for Cultural Analysis, a research institute devoted to interdisciplinarity. Her books include Reading “Rembrandt”: Beyond the Word-Image Opposition (1991), On Storytelling: Essays in Narratology (1991), and On Meaning-Making: Essays in Semiotics (1994). Her latest book, Double Exposures: The Subject of Cultural Analysis (1996), is programmatic for her new orientation toward an integrated analysis of culture according to the paradigm of “exposition.”

People who write seriously about art seem often to be disturbed by the very fact that images do not speak, that they cannot be read, that they have nothing to say except what we say to them. Even the narratives of premodern academic and religious paintings can seem too simple or insufficient as explanations. As William Rubin and others have noted, twentieth-century painting has turned away from overt, textually based narratives—almost as if there were something inherently wrongheaded about using brushes to tell stories. Pictures, it appears, are properly mute objects that have no stories to tell, no messages, no fixed fabulae. They say nothing clearly—or else, in the best case, they clearly say nothing. The antinarrative or “iconic” impulse in modern painting is one of the indispensable marks of modernism. But art history, art criticism, visual theory, visual anthropology, and visual semiotics have leaped into that vacuum and filled it with words, as if they could cover the troubling silence of visual art with loquaciousness or forget the intrinsic illegibility of pictures by becoming ever more eloquent.

James Elkins is associate professor in the Department of Art History, Theory, and Criticism at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. He is the author of The Poetics of Perspective (1994) and two forthcoming books: Pictures, and the Words That Fail Them: On the Incoherence of Pictures and The Object Stares Back.