parallax, 1998, vol. 4, no. 1, 89± 113 Book Reviews Stephen Moore God ’s Gy m : D iv in e m ale bod ies of th e B ib le (London: Routledge, 1996), ISBN 0-415-91756-5 hardback, US $59.95, UK £40.00; ISBN 0-415-91757-3 softback, US $16.95, UK £12.99. Towards the end of the last chapter of God’s Gym , Stephen Moore concedes, `The avoidance of anachronism is not, perhaps, my strong suit as an exegete. Indeed, I have deliberately employed anachronism throughout this book (taking as my cue the fact that anachronism is what biblical scholars fear most, that fear is the obverse of fascination, and that the fascinating merits pursuit more than ¯ ight)’ (p.123). It is from such a position (one not unrelated to Marx’s observation that it is the physiology of humans which teaches us about the physiology of apes and not, as Darwinian rationality would have it, the other way round) that Moore presents us with a subtle and complex genealogy of the superlatives at play which have led to the phenomenon of modern bodybuilding, coupled with a retroactive portrait of the ancient Jewish and early Christian God. Intertwined with this `corporeal exegesis’ (the retrieval of an embodied God from traditions that have preferred to bury the body in favour of the concept) is a reading of the archives which detail the birth of anatomy, a reading which is a good example of Foucauldian method reapplied, a one which relies explicitly on D iscipline and Punish to expediate the project. God’s Gym is a work of biblical exegesis which will surely ful® l all of the criteria required for it to be considered `controversial’. But it is only controversial if two unscholarly conditions are applied to it. First, if its perfectly conventional methodological premises (and modest hypotheses) are not granted acceptability `for what they are’Ð namely, as being completely in-tune with anti-essentialist academic thoughtÐ and therefore eminently respectable in the context of any cultural study. And second, if biblical scholarship refuses to allow for the thorough historical and conceptual analysis of both sides of the phrase, `The Word of God’ . Moore looks at the words in order to ® nd the body. It is what Moore deduces about that body and the account of both the reasons why God should possess such a body and the light that this physicality sheds on the divine utterances which is unique and, presumably, controversial. In terms of cultural analysis, what Moore oå ers is a breath of fresh air, or a new lease of academic rigour, into the moribund, or at least enervated platitude that `the West is a Christian culture’. As a history it draws clear and uniquivocal comparisons and well researched examples of male narcissism as a hyper-corporeality (or corpo-hyperreality?). As a piece of literature it takes full account of the rationalist fallacy of disinterested objectivity, with Moore giving an introductory account of his own personal investment in his object (which is `a phobia and two fascinations’, the preface tells us, i.e., torture, anatomy and the male body), as well as regular subjective interjections and `digressions’, all of which serve to seduce the reader into accepting that this text is `honest’ in intent. So, ® rst of all, what is `the point’ of God’s Gym ? What work does it do? It is an exegesis which looks for the Christian God’ s `body’ in biblical texts. Yet it does so in a novel Foucauldian and deconstructive way. In each of its three major sections it goes beyond `interpreting’ its objects (the birth of anatomy, the expurgation from the Bible of references to God’ s body, and modern bodybuilding) from an easy premise of some always-already existing history of the Western imaginary, choosing instead to construct a genealogy of this imaginary from Olympus via the Cruci® xion to the Mr Olympia bodybuilding competition. It is a reading of the power networks which have resulted in the inscription of a `symbolic universe’ onto the male body; power that sustains the legibility of bodily masculinity, whilst remaining unarticulated. The book is deconstructive, feminist, and political. As to whether the discipline of biblical studies will know what to make of such a deconstructive genealogy, this is a question which takes us into the realms of asking what it is to `read’, which itself is not too far away from the issue of what it is to write. For this is a reading of contemporary culture through a thorough reading of the Bible, apocrypha and Book reviews 89 1353± 4645/98 $12´00Ñ 1998 Taylor & Francis Ltd pagan texts that is itself, of course, a writing of history. Thus, in this way, God’s Gym is an excellent example of just what `interdisciplinarity’ is , what it can do, and its principal mode of validation: it aå ects a displacement, or supplanting, of canonical truths by self-consciously re-reading/re-writing the archives of `what is’. Surplus meaning is no empty signi® er: it is a political space. The main work(out?) taking place in God’s Gym is that of the process of drawing out the implications of several diå erent historical discourses followed by their subsequent (and telling) transformational reconstruction: we are presented with the (re)connection of three intimately connected narrativesÐ narratives that history has kept distinct in a process of eå acing perhaps the most fundamental evidence of `phallogocentric’ truth around. The ® rst debate is that of whether God has a body, and if so what it looks like. This is the main corpus of actual exegesis, with Moore playing `the innocent ¯ ower’ (`But [being] the serpent under `t’?), dissimulating guile and reading all scriptural references to God’ s body and parts thereof as literal references to a body , and not as metaphors deployed by a language which cannot ® gure the divine in any other terms (i.e., as negative theology would have it: `Here’s the image of God in the only language we have, but remember that God ``transcends’’ this baseness’ ). What Moore presents us with, as ¯ eshed out by Moses and all the prophets, as well as justi® ed by scores of citations, is a God who requires massive amounts of meat daily (as received in the form of sacri® ces); a God who does fantastic workouts; a God keen to show oå the spectacularity of a well muscled back, in particular; a God who would seem to have functioning breasts; who keeps the Divine genitalia well concealed; who suå ers from terrible mood-swings and randomly deals out rage and indiscriminately-landing vengeance; and seems, all in all, somewhat paranoid, insecure, and constantly trying to deny something to do with the body. And this denied thing? Moore refers to creation myths, apocrypha and Judaic scriptures to show how all the evidence points to the contradiction at the core of God’ s being: God, it would seem, is a hermaphrodite. The second key biblical component of the study proceeds from the `obvious’ and compelling observation that `the central symbol of Christianity is the ® gure of a tortured man’ (p.4). Immediately one can connect this with the central `no pain, no gain’ tenet of bodybuilding. But Moore does not rush into this until much later in the book. For among the ® rst of his concerns is the curious existence of two diå ering `discourses of cruci® xion’: on the one hand, there are a multitude of historical texts which widely catalogue the horrors of cruci® xion, and its unquestioned Book reviews 90 status as the absolute worst and most torturous way to die on oå er in the ancient world. Yet on the other hand there is the curiously blase, banal and inci dental manner with which the Gospels tend to skip over the fact of Jesus’ torture and execution. Without so much as an adjective. From this discussion of torture, Moore maps the birth of anatomy and the discourse of the male body in a ¯ uid style which comfortably ranges between Classical Greek civilization, the B ook of R evelations , the Californian body building scene, ethos, mythos, and rituals, Foucauldian panopticism and Freud’s discussion of the child’s worship of the omnipotent father, to details of the ancient Roman penchant for building ever bigger and more impressive statues of their dei® ed emperors. And out of this cocktail of perfections comes the by now unavoidable conclusion, worthy of Baudrillard at his best (even a well-researched Baudrillard, were such a monster thinkable): God is a steroid junkie. The second clue to the secret of Yahweh’ s size lies in his or her violent temper. For the biblical God is a God of wrath, as everyone knows... The wrath of God in the Bible is nothing other than `roid rage’ . (p.96) We are presented with an account of God-asbodybuilder, as steroid-user; and as a steroid-using, `contest-ready’ bodybuilder who is suå ering from the same kinds of problems as the man who desires above all else to keep his body looking like a hyperreal anatomy chart. And what this amounts to is the sign of virility which is literally impotent; the useless and shrunken testicles of one who relies on synthesized testosterone `supplements’ ; and some fairly stereotypical psychological tendencies. Not only this, but God appears to be suå ering from a very speci® c aƒ iction peculiar to the bodybuilder who has stayed on a course of steroids for too long: `gynecomastia’, or `bitch tits’ in gym-speak, the result of aromatization or the chemical upsets of steroid abuse. In short, Moore draws God as a hermaphrodite whose desire to be like all the other, older, bigger, better, and just generally more masculine pagan gods has led Him/Her to become so embroiled in this problematic bodybuilding life. The paradox is that, like the spectacle of the male bodybuilder who attempts to `embody’ the ultimate male, the end result is a confusion of gender encoding, the manifestation of the undecidability of the gendering semiotic frontier, and the achievement of nothing less than transsexuality. At the point of ultimate masculinity, the bodybuilder is merely an object, a statue, a shaven hermaphrodite. God’s Gym is a successfully interdisciplinary text, which re-negotiates and seeks to recon® gure bib- lical exegesis from the analytical positions supplied by a broadly deconstructive approach to its `text’ , and also to supply those involved in the study of culture with a seductively subversive genealogy of God’ s physical predicament, Jesus’ paradigm-case workout (the Cruci® xion: remember, `no pain, no gain’ ), and the sadomasochistic plight of those dieting, weight-lifting, chemical abusing, displaced religious fundamentalists to whom it is obvious and necessary to devote their lives to the impossible, appeal to superlatives of purity, nature and perfection, whilst practicing the supplementary and arti® cial in the worshipful act of mirroring the deity. dealing with the media, there are those `who prefer a good ``story’’ to the truth’.1 So, who then, has the `real’ hard facts? Not commonsensical knowledge, but studies, samples, observations, and carefully calculated research, are the means to this explicit end. Need I even say it¼ Truth is alive and well despite what poststructuralists and pragmatists say. It resides in the self righteous rhetoric of Ill E å ects . Ill E å ects is a collection of essays originally presented in 1994 at a conference entitled: `Challenging the Eå ects Tradition’. Its introduction claims `a radical re-examination of the whole ``media eå ects’ ’ debate’ , followed by a body of various articles ranging from histories of `eå ect’ to children and `the media’. The book concludes with a section depicting various writer’s experiences on, as they phrase it, `going public’Ð meaning when [their] hard `evidence’ is presented in the hope of changing the tide of events, or in this case, public opinion. I am not concerned with producing a comprehensive recital of the text. Well, for one reason, many of the articles tend to bleed into one another. Particularly, the works of Barker and Petley oå er a regurgitation of previous pieces garnished with fresh newspaper clippings. However, to give credit where it is due, one article stands out for me. Incidentally, it also seems very out of place. Mark Kermode’s `I was a teenage horror fan: or, ``How I learned to stop worrying and love Linda Blair’’’, is a personal account of his relationship with the horror genre. What impresses me most about this piece is what it is not. Or more to the point, what w ords are not included. Kermode does not adopt the jargon and style of fellow contributors. `Scapegoating’, `evidence’, `the media’, `sensationalism’ , and `the media debate’ are absent from his writing. His is a storyÐ perhaps even an appeal to what Richard Rorty would regard as a poeticised redescription of rationalist and scienti® c discourses. To illustrate why I feel Kermode writes with more `® re power’ and succeeds in creating an enjoyable, fruitful, and critically persuasive story, as opposed to the dry and dull prose of other contributors, I use the remainder of this piece to critique a sentence written by Barker in his article: `The Newson Report: a case study in ``common sense’’’ . Barker’s intention in this article is as follows: `In this chapter, I aim to demonstrate just how bad the Newson Report was.’ 2 I wish to discuss this quote, not by adopting a similar stance, one that would attempt to `demonstrate’ how `bad’ this sentence is. Value, it seems to me, is a useless category from which to mount a defence for a project of this calibre. The Newson Report, which claims that ® lm, television, video etc., do have profound eå ects on the young, may succumb to all of Barker’s accusaBook reviews 91 Paul Bowman University of Leeds L oa de d weapon Martin Barker and Julian Petley (eds) I ll E ffe c ts : T h e m e d ia /v iole n c e d e b ate (London: Routledge, 1997), ISBN 0-415-14673-9 softback, US $17.95, UK £12.99; ISBN 0-415-14672-0 hardback, US $59.95, UK £40.00. This book is not addressed to those whose minds are so ® rmly closed on the issue of `media violence’ that, when they speak, slogans drop from their mouths. This book is addressed to those who are worried, who sense that something is very wrong with those arguments but ® nd it hard to say why and how. We want to provide ammunition to the uncon® dent. M artin B arker and J ulian Petley It would seem that we are in the midst of an idealised arms deal. Vital information, it is suggested by the writers, must reach uncon® dent souls in desperate situations, situations which demand that one know the `real’ arguments that inform discussions of media eå ects. These conclusions can, of course, be reached by empirical media research. But let us ask, who possesses this essential information, the truth behind rhetorical veils? Obviously, it is not those groups and individuals who splatter their opinions across newspaper headlines. No, the David Altons of the world only brandish half-baked illegitimate accounts according to the writers of Ill E å ects . Accusations espoused by MPs, religious groups, and `the media’ endeavour to persuade and control `the debate’ , although they lack ample evidence. For as Bill Thompson, one of the book’s contributors cunningly reveals Ð when tions. It may be the case that the report is based on `common sense’, little if any `evidence’, `poor argumentation’ and may even be misleading in its style. Yet regardless of how bad it actually is, it achieved its task. The Newson Report organised its rhetorical devices venomously in order to persuade, to `demonstrate’ that violent images and media produce undesirable eå ects. On this point I will be very clear: the Newson report may, as Barker contends, be `bad’ science, yet it is highly useful rhetoric in persuading certain people to the `dangers’ of the media. If say, for the last 20 or 30 years the so-called media debate has been conducted in a fashion that shuns `accurate data’ or `valid evidence’ then why continue to address the `problem’ in the most banal way imaginable? Why hold rhetoric accountable to scienti® c methodologies, rather than acknowledge `science as rhetoric’, and come up with new and interesting ways of persuading prominent groups or `public opinion’ that certain statements are limiting, boring, out of date, tiresome etc¼ ? Why fall into the `I aim to demonstrate¼ ’ tone that `the public’ gets from both ends? Baudrillard’s words from `Radical Thought’ come to mind: `better a despairing analysis in happy language than an optimistic analysis in a desperately boring or demoralizingly platitudinous language, as is often the case’ .3 Take the following passage from Alexandre Koyre,  who, in his introduction to Descartes Philosophical W ritings wrote: Eloquence and poetry are, undoubtedly, beautiful. But neither of them can be taught. They are natural endowments of the mind, not fruits of study. In order to convince people, one must speak to them clearly so as to enable them to understand easily; one must heap upon them a mass of rhetorical ® gures. Plain speech is the best rhetoric.4 I do not believe that many would regard Descartes as a brilliant rhetoricianÐ the `father’ of modern thought and Western metaphysics, yes, but master of rhetoric? Probably not. This goes against what Descartes was, in fact , demonstrating. And this is exactly why his rhetorical devices work so well: they are disguised, dressed up in logic and metaphysical argument. Is `plain speech’ or the act of `making one’s ideas clear’, the best tactic for approaching `the media eå ects debate’ ? I do not know. But what I do see is that the lines of argument in Ill E å ects , and those stemming from politicians and journalists, have both latched on to the technique of clear expression. Both shun technical jargon and overt theoretical ways of writing and speaking. To reach `the public’, `the masses’ , or even you the uncon® dent Book reviews 92 reader, issues of concern are redescribed in a simplistic manner [`Ð I aim to demonstrate just how bad¼ ’] and science is utilised as the means by which all concerned get to the truth. I guess my supreme gripe, or more speci® cally why I feel ill towards the whole eå ects debate, isn’t whether or not Ill E å ects has succeeded in making a relevant intervention into the tiring debates on censorship in Britain or whether or not the book’s articles are w rong or right . I’m curiousÐ why does clarity have to mean simplicity and banal writing? Descartes was not banal! Neither was C. S. Peirce, a fellow advocate of clarity. Maintaining this way of discussing `the debate’ , if that word can still be utilised, will always come down to: `are you for or against censorship, no matter how many case studies are presented or graphs employed to prove otherwise?’ For every article written to illustrate that media’s eå ects do not function in this or that manner, another two articles will say the complete opposite. This on g-o-i-n-g debate reminds one of a spoiled brat who refuses to share its toys with other children. Rather than covet the brat’s toys, the other children should create other games. My point is that new, useful ways of speaking about censorship and `the media debate’ need creating (so that one can write an article on the subject without having to employ sooo many quotation marks!). So, instead of a `radical re-examination’ of the debate, or to continue with the military metaphors Ð to `out¯ ank the enemy’, I put forth that Barker and Petley should redescribe their entire project. Perhaps, they ought to acknowledge Richard Rorty’s liberating statement: `a talent for speaking diå erently, rather than arguing well, is the chief instrument of cultural change’. 5 This is where Kermode outshines his surroundings. He is writing something diå erent. Kermode eloquently exempli® es Bill Thompson’s distaste for stories which he considers the antithesis of truth. Truth, not as something happening to an idea, as a pragmatist would maintain, but as something external to thought, something that can be discovered by the writers of Ill E å ects . 1. B. Thompson, `Taking on the media’, in M. Baker and J. Petley (eds), Ill E å ects: T he media/ violence debate (London: Routledge, 1997). 2. M. Baker and J. Petley (eds), Ill E å ects: T he media/ violence debate (London: Routledge, 1997). 3. Jean Baudrillard, `Radical thought’, parallax, 1 (1995), pp.53± 63. 4. A. Koyre , `Introduction’, in R. Descartes, Philosophical  W ritings trans. & ed. E. Anscombe and P. T. Geach (London: Nelson [1950] 1970), p.105. 5. Richard Rorty, Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989). Ray Guins University of Leeds Remembering to forget Elaine Showalter H y s torie s : H y s teric a l ep id em ic s a n d m od e rn c u ltu re (London: Picador, 1997). Case I: Miss X is a thirteen year old girl suå ering from a severe case of progressive mutism. Her silence has advanced considerably since the arrival of a verbally and physically abusive young man who is the father of her child and lives with her family. The girl’s father is a long standing alcoholic. Her mother is a wheelchair bound cancer suå erer in her last days, and her younger brother may well have a growth de® ciency, perhaps due to malnourishment. Miss X is bulimic, and she is prone to vomiting after eating. She has been absent from school for almost two years and is guilty of administering unnecessarily excessive layers of blue eyeshadow, without due cause or provocation. Case II: Miss Y is a woman in her sixties. She has a nervous temperament, but the consequent somatic features oå er no sign of the existence of organic lesions. Most marked is her speech disorder. She has a syndrome that would be unintelligible without the sustained work of Giles de la Tourette. Her vitriolic obscenities, directed at all without concern for race, class or gender, borders on a psychosis. In contradistinction to this verbal hyperbole, accompanying deafness does not exist, nor does evidence of impaired hearing. She carries a cigarette glued to her lower lip and children have begun to regularly refer to her as `Fag Ash Y’. For work, she assists in the gathering of empty glasses at a public house. She has a beard. No family history is forthcoming. Case III: Mr G, a man in his mid thirties, suå ers from an as yet unknown condition which causes him great motor and muscular trouble. He has a small paralysis in the left side of his face and neck, causing him to hold his head to one side, and complains of numbness. His stiå gait often reroutes his progress and refuses to obey the laws of gravity. This stagger and lack of directionÐ there is no evidence of ocular impairmentÐ have caused some to initially accuse him of being a malingerer. His right hand is spasmed into a ® xed, claw-like grip about the size of a beer can, which he always carries with him like a talismanic object. He is not without many friends. Etiologically, there may well have been a prior incident or shock to explain the breakdown of select parts of his nervous system. There is no information pertaining to such an incident. I would never romanticise or castigate my neighbourhood, the people who live here or those that use it as a thoroughfare. It is made up of a series of terraced streets, built in the late nineteenth century, which still bare the industrial scars of heating and plumbing anachronism: the outdoor toilets, used until the 1970s, are still very much in evidence. Sometimes they continue to be used by the more unscrupulous. Like elsewhere in the city, the local council have gone to great lengths to restructure and gentrify the built environment, to replace vanishing heavy labour and the ghosts of the riots in 1995 and 1997 with the signs of a ¯ ourishing service industry. Leeds is a cultural capital to rival Paris, Milan and New York. To this end, we have had new road markings painted on our street. The council is organising an outdoor festival, `Unity’, so that we can show our public gratitude for their eå orts. Given the diversity of peoples living in my neighbourhood and their mutual animosities, this seems like a misconceived and dangerous event, with a particularly inappropriate name. This dialogic animosity is, in part, due to the local council’s remit to rehouse what they call `problem families’ from other, far-¯ ung areas of the city. The council has also designated the area as suitable for setting up half-way houses and hostels for the mentally ill, the homeless, young oå enders and almost ex-prisoners who serve community punishment and are said to be ready for reintegration. The other day a friend and I were almost hit by a ¯ ying uncooked baking potato. That it missed is not the point. What matters is the unprovoked nature of the attack, its humorous undertones and the ensuing desperate, if brief, desire to feel victimised and seek retribution. I don’t remember the stirrings of this feelingÐ elicited, as it was, by my neighbourhood and directed at usÐ before. I remember it all being quite diå erent around here years ago. But then my memory, much like my diagnostic skills, is faulty and prone to error. In a strange way, the con¯ uence of memory and error is at the heart of Elaine Showalter’s new book, H ystories: H ysterical E pidemick and M odern Culture. As many have said before, the invention of hysteria can be considered one of the founding moments in the history of psychoanalysis. And yet, perhaps, it may well be not hysteria per se, but the awkward status of memory in the discourses of hysteria that holds this privileged position. For the Freud of Preliminary Communication and before, at the heart of the hysterical attack is a memory, the content of which is either a psychical trauma or an event which has become a trauma. As such, the memory is not determined by chance. It is causal. Amnesia can only ever be a prelude to remembering. When the memory is forcibly returned, and its content put into words and narrated, the hysterical symp tom is abreacted and disappears. Voila ! In a sense, memory, like dreams, hallucinations and slips of Book reviews 93 the tongue, `prove’ the existence of the unconscious and validate psychoanalysis. It is worth repeating Freud and Breuer’s familiar formulation, just to be reminded of the interruptive nature of these memories, their psychical causality and consequent physical symptomatology: `Hysterics suå er mainly from reminiscences.’ This is all well and good. But it seems to me that the entire dilemma of the relationship between hysteria and psychoanalysis might just be caught somewhere in betw een the diå erent temporalities of this much quoted and under theorised formulation. Hysteria can never be more than an inaccurate translation of psychosexual trauma. In a sense, it is experienced too late and is thus, by necessity, a traitor to the event. Basically, memories aren’ t trustworthy. Elaine Showalter knows this. H ystories is the story of the rise of modern hysteria in Showalter’s more extensive backyard. It takes us from Charcot and Freud, through the woman’s movement, on to recent feminist rethinkings of hysteria and ® nally arrives at the popular narratives, circulated in the media, of contemporary mass hysterias and contagious epidemics. These popular narratives are a result of: our age of communications; a crisis in religion; polls documenting strange experiences which then go on to function as blueprints for others who adapt their symptoms and memories accordingly; the integration and broad dissemination of medical narrative strategies; a shift from the action and responsibility of the 1970s to victimisation and accusations; and general ® n de Á siecle panic and anxiety, amongst other things. To quote Showalter: Infectious diseases spread by ecological change, modern technology, urbanisation, jet travel, and human interaction. Infectious epidemics of hysteria spread by stories circulated through self-help books, articles in newspapers and magazines, TV talk shows and series, ® lms, the Internet, and even literary criticism. The cultural narratives of hysteria, which I call hystories , multiply rapidly and uncontrollably in the era of mass media, telecommunications, and e-mail [....] As we approach our own millennium, the epidemics of hysterical disorders, imaginary illnesses, and hypnotically induced pseudomemories that have ¯ ooded the media seem to be reaching a high-water mark. (p.5) H ystories is also an archaeology which ranges across medical texts and military history throughout France, Germany, Austria, England, Scotland and the USA, from the mid-nineteenth century to our present day. And, in much the same way as in her Sexual Anarchy , it also makes a particular eå ort to interweave these texts with those of the popular media, literary and ® lm history, theatre and drama. Book reviews 94 This lacing together produces many fascinating conjunctions. And because of the careful historical work done by Showalter in the ® rst few sections of the book, she is able to sustain these connections. This is the books’ greatest contribution: its rigorous historical number crunching constructs an archival framework in which potentially contentious and in¯ ammatory speculations about present conditions can be considered and supported. Connections can be made, and lines of ¯ ight followed. So, for instance, from the bemused passenger suå ering the hysterical trauma of railway spine or railway brain to Charcot’s disenfranchised male hysterics, through the shell shock and war neurosis of the Great War, the post-traumatic stress disorders of Vietnam veterans, the psychosomatic eå ects of combat on Israeli soldiers and on to Gulf War Syndrome, a history is being written. (Again Showalter must be applauded for continuing to draw attention, as she did in T he Female M alady , to the cultural implications of hysteria as a site of gender warfare not only for women, but also for men.) The nature of hysteria demands that it have an elusive history. From Plato’s characterisation of hysteria as a wandering womb akin to a small animal, to the meanderings of homeless hysterics in the late nineteenth century and on to Gulf War soldiers roaming their way across the organo-phosphate soaked deserts of the Middle East, it is a disorder which has never been able to stay still. Hysteria is nothing if not slippery. For Showalter, hysteria is not an invention of the late nineteenth century which disappeared as quickly as it had emerged. If anything, she contends, the disappearance of hysteria as a medical category proves, in a sense, the refusal of a disorder to be conquered by the medical establishment. Like a host of other evasive psychogenic diseases, it has been continuously reclassi® ed and relabelled. Always distinctively. And while this was always the case in hysteria’s history, the hysteria of the 1990s is somehow diå erent. What Showalter describes as the speci® c nature of our hysterical condition is the contagious, self-generating, self-perpetuating mass hysteria of the ® n- de- millennium. Individual chapters are given over to Chronic Fatigue Syndrome, Gulf War Syndrome, Recovered Memory (of sexual abuse), Multiple Personality Syndrome (or Dissociative Identity Disorder), Satanic Ritual Abuse, and Alien Abduction. Pointing to the importance of unexplained, particularly minor, ailments and the absence of a single, discernible causality, she draws out the symptomatology of these disorders which display many of the signs of classic hysterical stigmataÐ fatigue, feeling achy, paralysis, bleeding, dizziness, lapses of memory, rashesÐ and shows how they are intim- ately bound to medical and ® ctional accounts of hysteria, with its huge range of constantly changing and mutating symptoms. The transitory comings and goings of symptoms seems to be at the centre of hysteria as a problem and thus at the heart of psychoanalysis, which really doesn’t know what to do with them. Yet suå erers, Showalter suggests, believe that their illnesses simply can’t be psychological. The signs are all too real: Contemporary hysterical patients blame external sources Ð a virus, sexual molestation, chemical warfare, satanic conspiracy, alien in® ltrationÐ for psychic problems. A century after Freud, many people still reject psychological explanations for symptoms; they believe psychosomatic disorders are illegitimate and search for physical evidence that ® rmly places cause and cure outside the self. (p.4) Who could question the indignation of those suå ering from Gulf War Syndrome when they are being accused of actually suå ering from something as ® ckle as post-traumatic stress disorder? Consequently, they are not concerned by a lack of organic causality when it comes to denying the possibility of psychological causes. Big boys don’t cry. And when they do, it’s because a nasty man put something in their water, not because they have just been covered with the ¯ ying entrails of their best friend. H ystories is made up of such stories. In fact, it’s all about stories. Hystories. For Showalter, `hystories’ is the compound she proposes to describe the multiplication and dissemination of cultural narratives Ð `the epidemics of hysterical disorders, imaginary illnesses, and hypnotically induced pseudomemories’ (p.5)Ð that run our modern world. Her chapter `Hysterical Narratives’ is most instructive here. The plurality of hysterical narratives emerges at `the busy crossroad where psychoanalytic theory, narratology, feminist criticism, and the history of medicine intersect’ (p.81). This is not a point for the beginning of a story, the origin for a critical interrogation of a history of hysteria as a coherent narrative, but rather an attempt to understand hysteria as what Roy Porter has called `scatters of occurrences’ . Hystories have their own narrative structures and Showalter uses these conventions against themselves, so to speak. (Sincere and sympathetic or laced with genteel sarcasm, it is sometimes diæ cult to work out how she feels about the stories she retells. They can be taken either way. We have to listen carefully to her tone. It is much more nuanced than it ® rst appears.) She bends these structures out of shape by using the narrative process to unfold her arguments. This often works to good eå ect like, for instance, when she explores the rhetorical technique of writing medical case histories in the manner of the French novel and, con- versely, how these ® ctions of hysteria ® lter back into the medical literature. Here, Showalter takes great care in unearthing the ways in which Freud’s narrativisation of his case studies, as short stories, smoothes out and completes the repressed and thus disordered and distorted personal histories of his patients. For Freud, this very inability to order personal history is the meaning of hysteria. Perhaps for us, it is Freud’s narrativisation that is the only real meaning we can give it. The symptoms, without their causal links, are almost meaningless in themselves. But as Showalter points out early on, she doesn’t have a quarrel with hysterical symptoms per se, but rather with their social appropriations. H ystories is an attempt to show the diå erence between the two: Showalter does not claim that Gulf War Syndrome is not real, that those suå ering from Chronic Fatigue Syndrome are not genuine or that child abuse does not happen. What she does attack are the ideologies of the various institutions attempting to control the terms of any given debate: `I have come to doubt the validity of therapeutically recovered memories of sexual abuse, but I do not wish to belittle those who believe in their memories.’ (p.147) And again later: `My quarrel in this book is not with the realities of child abuse, or the vigorous investigation of children’s complaints, but with the ideologies of recovered memory and the process of accusation based on adult therapy.’ (p.158) To this end, she rages against irresponsible journalism, scare tactics, vague statistics and, most vehemently, against our climate of conspiracy. This climate of suspicion, Showalter claims, is responsible for the need patients have for institutional legitimisation and goes a long way towards explaining how disorders appear through language and discourse, in much the same way as traumatic sexual abuse is induced or dragged out of a long forgotten past and remembered. For it is the institutionalisation of these disordersÐ the ways that they are taken up by both the media and medicine, patients and therapists, chat show hosts and evangelist preachers etc.Ð which produces a hysterical epidemic: `I don’t regard hysteria as weakness, badness, feminine deceitfulness, or irresponsibility, but rather as a cultural symptom of anxiety and stress. The con¯ icts that produce hysterical symptoms are genuine and universal¼ histories are constructed by suå ering patients, caring psychologists, dedicated clergy, devoted parents, hardworking police, concerned feminists, and anxious communities.’ (p.9) Would-be patients, victims and survivors look for credibility and search for a name for their disorder in an eå ort to qualify as a suå ering member of a `real’ disease. And this legitimisation allows the private con® dentialities of religion and psychoanalysis to ¯ ower into bawdy public testimony. It authorises the move from out of the darkness of Book reviews 95 the guilt riddled and cushionless confessional or the semi-comfort of the incriminating couch and into the glare of the public domain. Into the highly charged political and juridical realms, where the very real eå ects of accusation, whether true or false, are con® rmed by prosecution and do damage. Against this scenario, and making careful distinctions between a disease and a syndrome, Showalter attempts to recognise psychical disorders as `proper’ illnesses which, when acknowledged as such, will be willingly accepted. The extensive public interest that Showalter’s book has received in the press should have contributed to an opening-out of academic interests into the public realm already hemmed in by the stakes of this debate. But productive confrontation, let alone dialogue, was not forthcoming. Unfortunately for Showalter, H ystories has marked a vociferous crisis which began its own series of hysterical narratives and epidemics. These have included hate mail, accusations of fascism, being publicly tormented on chat shows and even threatened with assassination. Ironic is not a word I feel comfortable using to describe this irony. As such, it has been necessary to clarify a few points about this book which, it seems to me, has been misrepresented in both its non-academic reading and the ensuing reportage. Nonetheless, for my own part, there were a number of things that troubled me while reading H ystories. Showalter’s insistence that those suå ering from hysterical disorders can and should be helped by certain kinds of psychotherapy is unexpected in light of her attacks on the analyst or therapist as investigator; the one who suggests, coerces, hypnotises and then goes on to mould the retrieved scraps of experience into narrative coherence with little concern for the overwhelming lack of substantial or concrete evidence to back up their own measured stories. (Strange also is her continued call for evidence and truth to prove the validity of such histories. That it is not forthcoming proves nothing. That the solution to this denial of the psychological is education in the psychological seems too obvious.) Mostly, I was confused by the presumption, repeated throughout, that our culture denies the existence of the psychological as a possible source of illness and that because of this it shows contempt for psychogenic illness and does not accept the reality of its eå ects, thus destroying self-esteem and forcing suå erers themselves to refute the psychological root of their symptoms. It is only once people are allowed to acknowledge this emotional source, Showalter says, and accept that strong emotions lead to physical symptoms, that they are able to consider themselves legitimately ill and therefore entitled to all the privileges that come with being sick. I just don’t buy this. Book reviews 96 Ultimately, this faith has something to do with Showalter’s unending belief in psychoanalysis as a model of explanation and therapeutics. At one point she does suggest, without reservation, that we live in a psychoanalytic century. There is little doubt that this is untrue. But this suggestion seems to ¯ y in the face of the ways in which she has characterised the cultural narratives in H ystories. For Showalter, just because we live in a psychoanalytic century, doesn’t mean that we will live it as such. It seems to me that we live in a culture which knows nothing but psychology. It’s just that the narratives have been somehow reversed. Cures are not necessarily only found in analysis and analysts themselves are no longer necessary, the numerical explosion of practitioners and patients notwithstanding. In an indirect homage to Nike advertising, victims, survivors, patients and suå erers all wield the language of psychoanalysis themselves. They are doing their own successful diagnosing. This is what happens in a culture awash with informed self-analysts. Just because people may not be willing to recognise psychology as the originary site of their illness, this doesn’t mean that they are not familiar with its words, techniques and eå ects. It is their voice. That all this has nothing to do with psychoanalysis, as it might be understood historically or philosophically, is incidental. I have one ® nal concern. Sections of the earlier historical chapters are sometimes derivative, which is surprising in light of Showalter’s previous extensive and rigorous historical work on these matters. And on a few occasions in these chapters where she does make her own position apparent, her courageous polemic often borders on the pedestrian and platitudinous. I only say this because it was so bewildering. And it may, perhaps, have something to do with her eå orts to write a text which walks the awkward tightrope between scholarship and journalism. It is perhaps because this decision (concession?) that the liberal tone one hears in H ystories, permeating the agenda and ideological bent of its attempts to defend the integrity of the human, must be in evidence. Yet there is something disquieting about all of this. It may well be that in Showalter’s careful and precise critical interrogation of our contemporary condition, the reasons why she still feels the need to oå er a curative psychotherapeutics simply makes me feel a little wary. But then that’s my problem. We live in diå erent neighbourhoods. And I have no more to contend with than the threatening memory of ¯ ying potatoes to come. Marquard Smith University of Leeds How not to give way on your desire Alain Badiou  L ’e th iq u e. E s s a i s u r la c on s c ie n c e du M al (Paris: Hatier, 1993), 80pp. The work of Alain Badiou holds a singular yet highly in¯ uential place in contemporary French philosophy, but remains as yet untranslated and relatively unknown in the English-speaking world. My intention here is simply to present uncritically some reading notes on his theory of ethics as pre sented in his L’ethique. E ssai sur la conscience du M al . On this basis, it would be a question of critically linking his ethical theory to the vast and systematic à   philosophical vision elaborated in L’etre et l’evenement (Paris: Seuil, 1988) and more accessibly and brie¯ y presented in M anifeste pour la philosophie (Paris: Seuil, 1989). Badiou writes with an almost algebraic economy, and his work is a welcome antidote to the agonising prolixity of much contemporary French philosophy.  The 80 pages of L’ethique fall, very roughly, into two parts: (i) a refreshingly direct, but ® nally rather approximate and overly polemical presentation and critique of the so called `return to ethics’ in contemporary French philosophy; and (ii) a more interesting exposition of Badiou’s ethical theory in relation to the problem of evil. Consequent upon this divi sion of the argument, the intention of L’ethique is twofold: (i) to show how the contemporary in¯ ation of ethics in French philosophy is a symptom of a more general nihilism; and (ii) to provide a quite other meaning to ethics, by relating it not to abstractions, like Man, God or the Other, but to concrete situations. That is, for Badiou, what is ethical is the production of durable maxims for singular and determinate processes. Thus, what is at stake in ethical debate is not some generalised victimology, or the massaging of a conservative good conscience, but what Badiou calls `the destiny of truths’. I shall try and explain this presently. The subtext of the opening chapter is a countercritique of the `return to ethics’ in the critique of  la pensee ’68 found in the work of Luc Ferry and Alain Renaud, but also `les nouveaux philosophes’ (Bernard Henri-Levy, Andre Glucksmann). Badiou   rightly understands the critique of la pensee ’68 , and its defence of human rights, democracy and individualism, as a reactionary response to the foundering of revolutionary Marxism in France. Badiou defends the anti-humanism of Foucault, Althusser and Lacan because it was complicit with the critique of (and rebellion against) the estab lished order, whereas the critique of la pensee ’68 , with its defence of ethics, of the individual and human rights is simply at the service of oæ cial Western ideology. For Badiou, with some justi® cation, the contemporary return to ethics is essentially a return to Kant and to a Kantian conception of the subject of the moral law as universal and context-free. Reading Kantianism a little too straightforwardly as an ethical formalism, Badiou basically runs a quasi-Hegelian-Marxist critique against this position by claiming that a neo-Kantian ethics is incapable of thinking the singularity of situations, that is, of being orientated to praxis. Beneath the de-contextualised pallor of contemporary neoKantianism, Badiou detects in its ethical universalism an implicit apologia for Western ideology insofar as all human beings are judged according to the same standards, Western standards. Badiou also tags on the more Nietzschean thesis to this critique of Kantianism insofar as the traditional notion of ethics turns human beings into victims. It is an ethics of ressentiment, of blaming the other and selfblame (in the auto-laceration of conscience), of reactive rather than active forces. Against the neo-Kantianism implicit in the contemporary `return to ethics’, Badiou poses three theses: (i) That the human being identi® es itself, in the Freudian sense (i.e. we are always already intersubjectively situated), through an aæ rmative thinkingÐ by action rather than reactionÐ by `singular truths’, that is, truths that arise from and apply to singular situations. It is this process of identi® cation with singular truths that make of the human being what Badiou provocatively calls `une immortelle’ , although this should not be understood literally. (ii) That it is from this aæ rmative processual character of the human, and its ethics of truths, that one is to determine, and determine positively, the Good. Namely, that evil is derived from this good by privation and not vice versa as in the conservative Kantian picture. Badiou reads Kantian ethics, with Hegel, as a form of ethical stoicism in an evil world devoid of value. (iii) ` humanity enroots itself in the identiAll ® cation in thought of singular situations’(p.18). That is, there is no ethics in general, there is only an ethics of processes whereby one deals with possible courses of action that arise in a speci® c situation. So much for the contemporary `return to ethics’ in French philosophy insofar as it is based on the ® gure of `man’ or the Same. The question posed in second chapter is whether the contemporary ethics of the Other, habitually derived from Levinas, disrupts this critique. Unsurprisingly perhaps, Badiou’s response is negative, and it must be said that the critique of Levinas is extremely savage Book reviews 97 and based on limited reading. However, he does make a good point in claiming that in order for the relation between the Same and the Other to escape from narcissistic and agressivistic logic of identi® cation described by Lacan in the Mirror Stage, there is a requirement that the alterity of the Other be supported by an alterity or exteriority that transcends ® nite human alterity. This alterity is that of the `tout-autre’, namely God. This move enables Badiou to make his coup de grace (although he is à hardly the ® rst to make it), namely that ethics as ® rst philosophy is dependent upon an axiom derived from religion. Thus, Levinas’s claim that ethics is ® rst philosophy subordinates philosophy to theology, `L’ethique est une categorie du discours   pieux’. Although this thesis is very crudely stated, and the argument needs to be ® nessed, to say the least, Badiou has a point here. However, there are other ways of reading Levinas. For Badiou, quite simply, there is no God. This is also to say that `the One is not’ [`l’U n n’est pas ’, p.25]. Hence, multiplicity is the general law of à being, what Badiou means by etre. Every situation is a multiplicity composed of an in® nity of elements. Given this facticity of the multiple, there is a requirement when thinking about ethics for a return to the Same. For Badiou, the Same is not à what is simply givenÐ e tre Ð but rather ce qui advient , that which comes to itself in relation to the facticity and alterity of multiplicity. What Badiou sees as the `à etre immortel ’ of each singularity is its capacity for the true, that is, to become this Same that constructs itself, that ad-venes to itself, through the processual character of Sameness. A subject is not something that I am, it is something that I become, that comes to itself in a process of becoming. Thus, for Badiou, there is only an ethics of truths, that is, an ethics of processes of truths, of the labour that allows truths to `advient au monde’ , to ad-vene to the world. Thus, ethics in general does not have any validity, it is always an ethics in relation to a speci® c situation under particular conditions. That which is ethical corresponds to what Badiou adjudges as the four conditions for philosophy: politics, love, mathematics, poetry (cf. M anifeste pour la philosophie , Chapter 2). But, in order to understand these ideas, we will have to turn to Badiou’s own theory of ethics elaborated in the central fourth  chapter of L’ethique . In passing, one might say that Badiou’s ethics is an entirely formal theory, an ontological grammar of moral insight, and not a speci® c determination of the good. However, what seems to be motivating this ontological formalism is a theory of the subject that does have strong normative connotations, as we will see, although the speci® c content given to the good is subject-relative. Book reviews 98 Ethics cannot be premised upon any pre-given account of the subject because, as stated above, the subject is not something that one is, it is something that one becomes. One can only speak of the subject as a subject in becoming or a becoming-subject. For Badiou, we are simply the sort of animals who are claimed by circumstances to become a subject. What are those circumstances? For Badiou, they are the circumstances of a truth. What are they? These circumstances cannot be what there is [ce qu’il y a]. What there is for Badiou is the facticalbeing-multiple of the world, a plurality irreducible to any theological principle or henology. Thus, the circumstances of the being-multiple of the world do not place a claim on the subject; for example, our ordinary life in the world with others only places a claim upon us when the relation to the other becomes a relation of love, trust, hate or whatever. A subjectÐ which is that which becomesÐ demands something more, it demands that something happens that supplements its ordinary insertion into that which is. Badiou calls this supplement an event, hence the distinction between l’etre et l’evenement (although the latter might also be à   called a decision). Thus, the event is what calls a subject into being, into the creation of a truth (maybe the order of episteme in Plato), whereas being is that which simply is, which is the order of opinion [doxa]. Badiou gives examples of such events according to his four conditions for philosophy: the French revolution, the creation of a mathematical theorem, poetic invention, an amorous meeting. A subject is the local occurrence of a process of truth. For example, the subject who is lead through ® delity to an amorous encounter, the subject of love, is not the `loving’ subject described by classical moralists, because the latter is a psychological subject dependent upon a conception of human nature and a logic of the passions. The subject that we are talking about has no `natural’ pre-existence, the lovers enter as such into the composition of a subject of love that exceeds both of them. Equally, the subjectivity of a political revolutionary is not the militant individual, and no more is it the chimera of a `class-subject’. It is rather a singular production, which has had diå erent names (sometimes `party’, sometimes not). And the militant certainly enters into the composition of this subject which once again exceeds it (it is rightly this excess which allows it to become immortal). Or again, the subject of an artistic process is not the artist (the `genius’, etc.). In fact, the subject-points of art are works of art. And the artist enters into the composition of these subjects (the works are `his or her own’ ), without these works in any way being reducible to `him or her’ (and moreover, what `him or her’ is it a question of here?). Events are irreducible singularities, the `beyond-the-law’ of situations. The processes faithful to truth are immanent ruptures, each time entirely invented. Subjects, who are the local occurrences of processes of truth (’points’ of truth), are particular and incomparable inductions. It is in relation to such subjects that it isÐ perhaps Ð legitimate to speak of an `ethics of truths’. (p.40) What decision originates a process of truth? For Badiou, it is the decision henceforth to relate oneself  to the situation from the point of view of the supple ment e venementiel , the event-mental supplement.     Badiou calls this relation une ® de lite, a faithfulness. To be faithful to the event is to move oneself within the situation that this event has supplemented, to regard the situation from the perspective of the event. Going back to Badiou’s familiar list of examples, It is clear that under the eå ect of an amorous encounter, and if I really want to be faithful to it, I have to transform completely my ordinary manner of `inhabiting’ my situation. If I want to be faithful to the event `cultural revolution’, I must in any case practice politics (in particular the relation to workers) in an entirely diå erent way from that proposed in the socialist or syndicalist traditions. And in the same way, Berg and Webern, faithful to the musical event that bears the name `Schoenberg’, cannot continue as if nothing Á had happened after ® n de siecle neoRomanticism. After Einstein’s texts from 1905, and if I am to be faithful to their radical novelty, then I cannot continue to practice physics within the classical framework, etc. Event-mental ® delity is a real rupture (in thought and practice) in the order to which the event belongs (political, amorous, artistic, scienti® c)¼ ). (p.38± 9) Thus, a truth is the real process of a ® delity to an event, to what that ® delity produces in the situation. Thus French Maoists, however deluded they might have been, were faithful to what the events of 1968 and the Chinese cultural revolution had produced. At bottom, a truth is the material outline, in a situation, of an event-mental supplementation. The subject is the support of a ® delity, of a process of truth. The subject does not pre-exist the process that it supports. The process of truth is itself the coming into being of the subject. By `subject’ here is meant not some punctual individual, for example the subject of love is that which exceeds each of the partners to the relationship, the subject of art is both the artist and their work. On this basis, Badiou proceeds to the formal de® nition of an ethics of truths: one might say that the ethical is de® ned here as the free submission to a principle that decides to continue with a process of truth. To translate this into Kantian terms, one might say that what is ethical is the autonomous subject’s free submission to the moral law, which is intended to produce speci® c justi® able action in particular contexts. More generally, the ethical is that which gives consistency to the presence of someone ( un quelqu’unÐ the speci® c, punctual individual that pledges itself to a process of subjectivisation) in the composition of the subject that eå ectuates the process of truth. This ethical consistency on the part of someone is a ® delity to a process of subjectivisation that is in excess of that someone. That is, it is a process of subjectivisation that passes through the speci® c, punctual individual, but which the latter cannot exhaust or fully know. Thus, the someone is ethically committed to a process of subjectivisation that exceeds its knowledge, that existe a son insu, that is, to this extent, unconscious. Á Badiou reads Lacan’s ethical imperative from  Seminar VII, `ne pas ceder sur votre desir’ [do not give way on your desire {i.e., unconscious desire}], as `ne pas ceder sur ce que de soi-meme on ne sait pas’ [do not give way on that of oneself one does not know]. For Badiou, the someone who embarks upon a path of subjectivisation is seized by a process of truth that cannot be cognitively or re¯ ectively exhausted. Thus, the someone has to be faithful to a ® delity that it cannot understand, which is perhaps one way of understanding the analytic pact of transference in psychoanalysis. For Badiou, there is only one question at stake in an ethics of truths: how am I to continue to exceed my own being? How am I to continue to be the subject that I am coming to be? How am I to go on in not giving way on my desire? Unsurprisingly, given the Platonism expressed elsewhere in Badiou’s work, the concept of truth is rigorously opposed to opinion [doxa], and the latter is judged to be the stu å of communication. Thus, contra Habermas, to speak of an ethics of communicative action is to miss the point of ethics. What arises from a process of truth cannot be communicated, it is rather ce qui vous arrive . An ethics of truths is not an ethics of communication, but of the rencontre, where you meet with a situation that claims you, and addresses you in a certain way. Badiou claims, with some justi® cation, that this is an ethics of the real insofar as the real is of the order of the rencontre for Lacan, it is that which we cannot know, what resists symbolisation, where das D ing addresses and Book reviews 99 claims the subject without the subject being able to address and claim it. Of course, as Lacan shows, the prime ® gure for das D ing in Freud is the fellow human being, der Nebenmensch; that is, the ethical relation to the other person is a relation to the real. Thus, ethics on this account is that which governs our lives as subjects, what gives them consistencyÐ although the sources of subjectivity are unconsciousÐ and its only maxim is `Continuer!’. Submission to this ethical principle involves a certain asceticism, a certain renunciation, but this is only at the service of our desire. As is well known, and in ® delity to a tradition that stretches back from Heidegger to early German idealism, Lacan’s prime example of someone who acts in accordance with their desire and who continues is Antigone. However, for Badiou, as is shown in his wonderful   little book B eckett. L’incre vable de sir (Paris: Hatier, 1995), it is the characters who populate Beckett’s ® ction that best exemplify the maxim `Continuer!’, `¼ il faut continuer, je ne peux pas continuer, je vais continuer’.  The concluding chapter of L’ethique deals with the problem of evil, which, for Badiou, it is necessary to think from the positive character of the good and not vice versa. The obvious objection to Badiou’s ethical theory is simply that evil is a possible consequence of a process of truth, that is, Hitler didn’t give way on his desire!. Although he admits that evil exists, Badiou claims that it is not part of human nature but a category of the subject, and is therefore culturally locatable within a process of subjectivisation. However, an ethics of truths, enshrined in the maxim `Continuer!’, is intended to confront or challenge evil. But how exactly? Badiou outlines a theory of evil based on three items: simulacrum/terror (pp.64± 69); betrayal (pp.69± 71); and the unnameable (pp.71± 77). Simulacrum/ terror That to imagine that an event does not take place in relation to the emptiness of the situation, but rather to its fullness, is evil as simulacrum and terror. This concept of fullness is a little diæ cult to grasp, but it can perhaps best be understood in relation to the theory of political ideology where the ® eld of the social can be sutured with categories like race, nation, community, class, as imagined plenitudes. The point here is that such plenitudes are simulacra and the consequence of their imposition is terror. B etrayal Deceiving a ® delity is evil insofar as it constitutes a betrayal of the subject that one is or that one is coming to be. Vice is destructive of self. T he unnameable To identify a truth with a total power is, for Badiou, evil as disaster. On this point, Badiou concludes Book reviews 100 with a note of modesty, namely that `le Bien n’est le Bien qu’autant qu’il ne pretend rendre le monde  bon’ [`the Good is only the Good insofar as it does not claim to make the world good’]. Thus, aspiration to transform the worldÐ to achieve a cultural revolution, or write the romantic novel of modernity, to achieve sexual liberation, to instantiate a new symbolic order Ð is doomed to fail because it identi® es the creation of a truth with total power. Such is disaster. An ethics of truths is the creation of singular truths and the power of truth is thus also, in an opposed and equal measure, an impotence. And this is essential: namely that the fact that truth does not have total power means that the subject always abuts elements of the real, it confronts aspects of the situation that remain inaccessible to the subject and its work of truth and which return the subject to the plurality of doxai . Such is  the unnameable in any situation, `le pur reel de la   situation, de sa vie sans verite’ [`the pure real of the situation, of its life without truth’]. An ethics of the real im-potentialises the potency of any politics of the will. Under the simple imperative `Continuer!’, ethics for Badiou combines the three virtues of discernment (do not be taken in by simulacra), of courage (do not give way), and reserve or modesty (do not imagine yourself powerful). Although this is modest, one can already detect here the pro® le of a political programme, of a passage from ethics to politics, as can be seen in a paper that Badiou gave in Slovenia in 1994 (F iloz ofski Vestnik, XVI/2 [1995], pp.9± 14). Badiou writes, and I will ® nish with this quote, Finally, if we call `ethics’ a subjective maxim, an action strictly bound to universal principles, then we have to say the following: the only politics that could be seen to derive from ethics would have the following four characteristics: (i) it is not representative, it presents itself directly; (ii) it does not seek State power, it only seeks to constrain it; (iii) it is not juridical, it is subjective; (iv) it has no particular referent, it is not bound to the interests of a group, a community, a nation or a class. It is universal and disinterested. And does such a politics exist, or can it exist? Such is the whole problem. It depends upon the chance of the event. But perhaps the ® rst ethical exigency is the following: to desire that such a politics exists. And, as Lacan says, do not give way on your desire. Simon Critchley University of Essex Emmanuel Levinas P rop er Na m e s trans. M. B. Smith (London: Athlone Press, 1996). Perhaps the names of persons whose saying signi® es a faceÐ Proper Names in the middle of all these common names and commonplacesÐ can resist the dissolution of meaning and help us to speak. Emmanuel Levinas, Foreword, Proper Names Everyone deserves (we all deserve) a proper name and no one has one. Octavio Paz, T he M onkey Grammarian I chose to review Proper Names with no knowledge of Emmanuel Levinas but that I desired to know him. I don’t. I don’t know him: the lesson of Levinas’s collection of reviews. Yet, that lesson was neither the only nor the last that Proper Names had to oå er. Proper Names is an expansive mosaic. Levinas pieces together a lifetime’s worth of intellectual engagement within which I encounter my own myopia. The big picture escapes me. But here and there, among the more than a dozen reviews in Proper Names are a few pages I recognise. A refuge from the scope of Proper Names entirety, they catch my attention. Dedicated to Sù ren Kierkegaard, these pages sketch out two aspects of the Kierkegaardian oeuvre that Levinas ® nds disturbing. Problem One: `Kierkegaard rehabilitated subjectivityÐ the unique, the singular Ð with incomparable strength. But in protesting against the absorption of subjectivity by Hegel’s universality, he bequeathed to the history of philosophy an exhibitionistic, immodest subjectivity.’ (p.76) Problem Two: `It is Kierkegaard’s violence that shocks me,’ writes Levinas; for apparently, `the manner of the strong and the violent, who fear neither scandal nor destruction’ leads to National Socialism. (p.76) Kierkegaard’s passion, the violence of passionate thought is aligned with fascism. `But Levinas’, I say, `passion and violence cannot be simply equated with evil, and harm need not always be in¯ icted with violence.’ In short, that which disturbs Levinas about Kierkegaard disturbs me about Levinas. The gaunt beauty of many of the texts treated in Proper Names emerge plump charges of Levinas. `The full importance of my fellow human being’s need for food and drinkÐ all philanthropic mysti® cation aside Ð bursts forth from the serenity of the categories.’ (p.6) Their need commands attention. Furthermore, this concern for nourishment `is a form of intelligibility that goes from the Same to the Other without suppressing diå erence.’ (p.6) Yet in thinking of Levinas’s tyranny of nourishment, something is suppressed: hunger¼ desire¼ need¼ passion. Reminiscent of the old philosophical maxim whereby one is forced to be free, texts and people alike are forced into a bloated satiety. Every face (even of texts) must content itself with intelligibility. `The body naked and indigent¼ aæ rms ``exteriority’’’.1 Yet `exteriority cannot match human interiority. The subject has a secret, for ever inexpressible, which determines his or her subjectivity.’ (p.67) And nakedness, I suspect, is not a feature exclusive to the exterior. Nakedness, the unabashed vulnerability of Kierkegaardian subjectivity, induces Levinas to avert his gaze. And what of this naked secret? For what Levinas ultimately fears in Kierkegaard is disorder: the disarray of the stripped subjectivity, the passion with which it is expressed, and most importantly, the necessarily unspeakable interiorityÐ the ```everything is possible’’ of madness’ 2 Ð that Kierkegaard’s caustic irony frees. ` After one hundred years of Kierkegaardian protest,’ writes Levinas, `one would like to get beyond that pathos.’ (p.71) What sort of unblemished super® ciality would Levinas like to ® nd or manufacture over the seemingly obscene passion of singularity? Was such a desire to cover the naked behind Levinas’s decision to gather a series of scattered reviews and commentary 3 into a single book which purports to deliver Proper Names ? Viewed as such, the correlate of Levinas’s discomfort with Kierkegaard is his treatment of Blanchot. Blanchot, a man who studiously blurs the boundary between interiority and exteriority through practices of obscurity is forced into Levinas’s own mould of exteriority. Where is the unspeakable otherness of Blanchot (of Derrida, Delhomme and Proust¼ of Laporte, Celan, etc.)? Perhaps the surprising allure of reviewsÐ the solace of a surreptitious naming held sway. I only ask since Levinas comments that with Blanchot, `saying lets go of what it grasps.’ (p.146) And too infrequently have I encountered Levinas’s letting go. Instead, I face the stern and in¯ ated assurance that `someday the latent meaning of Blanchot’ s novelistic work will have to be articulated.’ Its naked secrets will have to be covered. Yet to give Levinas his due, Proper Names includes beautiful moments of humility. One glimpses a vulnerability which entices from alterity the ¯ avour of its unbreachable distance. This is the ® rst lesson of Proper Names revisited. One learns when not to know. For example, although touched¼ the unspeakable in Blanchot is ultimately left unspoken. Thus Levinas falters. His proclivity for naming appears too eå ortless. It from time to time eclipses Book reviews 101 the struggle of uncertainty that attests to the unknowablility of the other. But perhaps this failure of Proper Names , either willingly or unwittingly demonstrated, is more promising than their security. Perhaps Levinas understands this when he writes: `Spirit is no longer the Said once and for all. It is the Saying that always opens up a passage from the Same to the Other, where there is as yet nothing in common.’ (p.6) I am reminded of Kierkegaard’s `review’ of Mozart’s D on Giovanni. Within this piece, Kierkegaard candidly admits that he has no expertise in the ® eld of music. He fully acknowledges that he isn’t necessarily the most `quali® ed’ person to judge a musical performance. But he does have something that even the most learned musician may not possess. Kierkegaard harbours a childlike passion for the opera. His is a validating ardour. Accordingly, one need not always be an expert to share one’s experience as there may be even in the words of the unrestrained novice something worth learningÐ or at the least expressing. And if reviewing imparts to me a capacity to judge, then perhaps I can also adopt the role of confessor. If so, I absolve Levinas. I understand the sometimes overwhelming fullness of his reviews `as the coinciding of the lover and the beloved¼ [which] charged by their duality¼ is simultaneously fusion and distinction.’ 4 Mourning, admiration, discomfort, and other encounters taken up in Proper Names hold more promise as presences in his work than as vehicles to ideas expressed. In closing, have I been unfair to judge a man, to a judge a writer, to judge Levinas according to a few passages in a book of nearly two hundred pages? Yes. But failure is the condition for speaking here as it was in Proper Names . Always, thankfully, incomplete. 1 ± Emmanuel Levinas, Totality and In® nity , trans. Alphonso Lingis (Pittsburg: Duquesne University Press), p.127. 2 ± Ibid., 55. 3 ± The articles in Proper Names were published between 1947 and 1975 in over a dozen journals. 4 ± Levinas, op. cit., 270. and provided an opportunity to concentrate on Syed Manzu Islam’s exploration of the distinction between sedentary and nomadic travel; between the kind of travelling which goes nowhere, because it amounts to no more than the transposition of the world of the same onto that of the other, and the kind of travelling which, according to this book, accomplishes a self-transformation, or, a becoming other of the same. The book is made up of two long complementary essays of similar length: the ® rst, entitled `Travel and the ethics of the other’, establishes the theoretical parameters of discursive production of otherness, through a series of minor readings of recent philosophical sources of thinking on boundaries, limits and the same/other distinction. The second essay, entitled `Marco Polo: travelogue as the machine of othering’, presents a detailed reading of Marco Polo’s travelogues on the basis of ideas explored in the ® rst essay and shows the `discursive machinery’ in action. Marco Polo’s accounts of his travels exemplify the determination of the other within the domain of the same, but also permit a tracing of the breach of the totalising process, which gives rise to the ethical encounter with the other. Taken together, the book’s principal and twofold theme is travel as a mode of `becoming other’ and the rethinking of the ethical, which, it is made clear in the course of the combined work, all would-be escapees of sameness must address. It is concerned, therefore, with the possibility of a `cross-cultural ethics’ of travel and encounter, and is an inquiry which proceeds largely on the basis of a genealogy of systems of `othering’ . The ® rst essay hops, skips and jumps across the work of a pantheon of German and French thinkers, such as Nietzsche, Heidegger, Bergson, Bachelard, Merleau-Ponty, Lyotard, Levinas, as well as Fanon, Barthes, de Certeau and others. Throughout, literary illustration as much as philosophical theory serves to link the elements forming its chain of reasoning which, as it uncoils, articulates the book’s primary working distinction between `sedentary’ and `nomadic’ travel, beyond which it aims at a notion of travel which coincides with the traveller’s self-transformation, or, `becoming-other’. The theoretical trajectory adopted is both a distinctive and a risky one, in which ideas are grabbed along the way and used as stepping stones. This strategy of selectively raiding continents of thought for sketches of thinking on time, space, geography, dwelling and relations to the other, may strike the reader as an unsound basis for the decision to leave behind, in passing, huge tracts of thought only accessible at a slower pace. But speed is of the essence when it comes to escape velocities, more so than the interminable hermeneutics in which thinking can become mired when Omayra Cruz University of Leeds Syed Manzu Islam T h e E th ic s of Tra v e l F rom M a rc o P olo to K a fk a (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1996), 240pp., ISBN 0± 7190± 4119± 8. The ten hour delay of a holiday ¯ ight from Gatwick proved to be an apt interruption to my journey Book reviews 102 it tarries too long in one place. Only as the read gets into gear does it become clear that philosophical theory is used here to provide sketches of the terrain the reader is travelling through, as she is transported along the book’s own route, which is most directly indebted to the style of Deleuzian plateaux. Out of this movement emerges a subtle analysis of unusual breadth, of the process of `othering’ , which is exposed in relation to a range of ontologies of space, boundary and diå erence in circulation today, and in view of current crossdisciplinary discussions of the same/other and inside/outside distinctions. What might easily be taken as a series of unrespectably brief forays into the thinking of major philosophers of the twentieth centuryÐ a formula all too familiar in the genre of the secondary source summationÐ is, in fact, a resourceful movement through whatever philosophical material can be used to stoke the engine of its own original account of `travel’ in discursively constituted space. As it moves along it re¯ ects on the trace of the ethical, discernible in its wake. A theoretical, ® ctional and historical crossdisciplinary convocation of voices too numerous to mention, including those of Robinson Crusoe, Zarathustra and Gregor Samsa, is mustered in preparation of a journey to a `place of impassable height’; a point from which the escape from sameness can be proposed as `the necessary preparation for hearing the call of the other’. Travel to this unmappable non-place involves a joyous casting oå of oneself and a hurling into the play of forces: an absolute and wilful deterritorialisation. But departure cannot not proceed on the basis of a simple decision; attaining the necessary height and sensitivity to be open to the ethical requires also a philosophical strategy for casting oå the sedentary aspects of our thinking: the dead weight, the gravity, of sameness. The task of thinking identi® ed in this work, must be undertaken rather like a journey itself, and its destination is, paralogically, described as a non-telos; as a re-placing of `destination’, or, its placing under erasure. The vast array of both literary and philosophical sources are eruditely tapped and used by Syed Manzu Islam as a source of propulsion for the journey this work itself undertakes toward the moment of `othering’ ; the moment in which my relation to the other person is decided. It moves along its own path by examining various forms of travel/thinking, some of which selfconsciously address the need to redress the sedentary tendency, but which, in their own distinctive ways, fail to overcome it and grind to a halt. At this stage, it appears, the Deleuzian concept of ligne de fuite is privileged as the most promising theorisation of `nomadic’ travel and a basis on which travel as the transformation of the traveller can be best understood and expressed in terms of the style of movement adopted. The theoretical vantage point attained at the end of the ® rst essay, is, to its credit, one from which one could move oå in many directions. The author chooses to move oå into what he himself will ® nally describe, in decidedly Levinasian terminology, as a `bearing testimony’ to the trace of alterity within sameness. The sameness in question is identi® ed in the second essay, in the context of a detailed study of Marco Polo’s travelogues. This investigation sets out to show how Marco Polo’s travelogocentric writings produce, or, other others, and the role these writings have played in the historical selfassertion of the Western way of thought as it progressively maps the world. Somewhat surprisingly, despite the fact that the theoretical pallet for the second essay is undeniably the same or similar to that which we ® nd in the ® rst essay, the mixing and proportions of components used now leads to an altogether diå erent style of analysis and focus. This second study is by nature retrospective; it is a kind of return journey to Marco Polo. It deploys a Foucauldian model of discursive conceptuality or the episteme , again along with other items in the theoretical tool box, such as `the gaze’ , `the machine’ and `deconstruction’ , to expose the mimetic, ocularcentric and representational thinking of Marco Polo, who is captured as if in freezeframe, being transported through the Orient on the wheels of a `ready-made index’ machine. Holding the sextant of Christendom in his hand and plotting the relative position of all the possible stars in the universe; no matter where he goes, he remains at the centre of his world, measuring and judging `the relative distance of all habitudes’. The outcome is that the `civilising machine’ , of which Marco Polo is but one cog, has the eå ect of forcing the other into the order of the same, an order in which the other appears as inferior and perverse and is represented as despotic, monstrous and primitive in opposition to a West which is democratic, normal and civilised. Despite laying all of this at Marco Polo’s well-travelled feet, Syed Manzu Islam reappropriates the travelogues for the thinking of a cross-cultural ethics which exploits, as well as side-tracks, the `machine of othering’. The travelogues are said to be `less’ totalitarian than, for example, the modern discourse of colonialism: they can consequently be read so as to reveal the unethical machinations of discursive power in general. The analysis discerns in Marco Polo’s travelogues, the sign of the other’s alterity: his `unreserved and reverential avowal of (his) world’s other-origin in his narrative, signals a certain openness and humility to a world which is very diå erent from his own¼ He does not (therefore) quite become other, but carries the trace of the other when he comes back to his own world.’ In the short postscript concluding the book, we suddenly ® nd what appears as a self-assessment of Book reviews 103 the journey it itself has undertaken, presented now in distinctively deconstructive terms; in terms of the enclosure of thought within a `breached totality’ , and the claim that `this paradoxical mode of thought constitutes the ethical project itself ’. It proposes in eå ect, a happy marriage between Deleuzian molar identity and Levinasian obligation, as a solution to the sedentary tendency: a consummation which would throw a spanner in the works of the steam-roller mode of travel which the book shows to be characteristic of the historical journey of the West, and its encounter with the other. `Only a passive obligated molar subject can undertake nomadic travel, and can become other in encounter’. The book does not satisfactorily demonstrate, however, how the molar subject in aæ rmative `¯ ight’ can encounter the other on the basis of a Levinasian notion of the same’s passivity, but, to be fair, nor does it generally set out to solve such theoretical problems. What it does admirably accomplish is the transportation of its crossdisciplinary reader, and by a fascinating route, to a point where the ethical encounter with the other may be recognised as the most pressing issue of the post-colonial world. considered as a whole leaves one wanting and wonderingÐ above all in terms of what the book represents. In his introduction to the collection, Cuban art critic and historian Gerardo Mosquera describes the book as a selection of `new theoretical discourses on the visual arts in Latin America, dealing with the critical thought characteristic of the 1980s, which is still current today’ (p.10). His eå ort to position the collection as both old and new is somewhat confusing, although it later becomes evident that Mosquera is claiming for the anthology the status of a break with 1960s and 1970s critical social approaches to Latin American art in relation to the broader context of Latin American culture and society. The earlier moment of cultural criticism and critical visual interpretation was in¯ uenced by a rich tradition of regional Marxist heterodoxy dating to the 1920s, structured by a dependency theory paradigm linking cultural analysis to the relative socio-economic power of nations at the center and periphery of international capitalism, and often allied to national liberation struggles aiming to instantiate a modern national project over and against the enforced `backwardness’ of their relation to neo-colonial forces. The anthology’s announced move beyond this previously Marxist framework of analysis and critical motivationÐ which had ® gured most prominently in the work of Juan Acha, Nestor Garcõ a Canclini, Mirko Lauer, Marta Traba, Aracy Amaral and othersÐ is represented by a diverse array of authors, including Canclini and Lauer as bridges from the old to the new. Nonetheless, the embrace of a possible theoretical common ground or even of shared terms of discussion is a decidedly tentative one: `While it may be simplistic to label this new moment as postmodern, there can be no doubt that it is conditioned by poststructuralism, cultural studies, and by what we tend to call a postmodern awareness’ (p.10). Of course, `what we tend to call a postmodern awareness’ is a condition that cuts at least two ways, conditioned on the one hand by the ever-expanding and self-referential circulation of cultural expression as commodity and, on the other, conditioning a healthy suspicion about representation in general. This awareness, understood as the simultaneous and radical politicization and commodi® cation of cultural expression tout court, is nowhere more necessary and dangerous than in the abandonment of the terms of engagement of Latin American Á dependency theory vis- a- vis regional cultural criticism. Whereas the move beyond the critical paradigms of the 1960s and 1970s has entailed, generally speaking, an almost exclusive focus on the mechanisms of cultural diå usion rather than counter-hegemonic projects aspiring to state power, this `new’ critical moment is haunted by entanglements Dave Boothroyd University of Teesside Beyond Latin America Gerardo Mosquera (ed.) B ey on d th e F a n ta s tic : C on tem pora ry a rt c ritic is m from L a tin A m e ric a (London, Institute of International Visual Arts, 1995), 343 pp. The set of intellectual and institutional practices that constitute the ® eld of cultural studies, broadly construed, are generally grounded in the terms of the problem of representation, the cultural critic’s responsibility being, in eå ect, to bring attention to representation as a problem by demonstrating it as the shared ground of both cultural expression and politics. This problematic has, in recent years, worked its way into the international networks comprising Latin American regional studies. While B eyond the Fantastic does not go so far as to announce itself to its reader as a speci® cally `cultural studies’ document, expectations run fairly high in this regard because of the intellectual investments of many of its contributors and their participation in the slow accretion in recent years of a textual ® eld working toward the consolidation of a regionally focused Latin American cultural studies. Despite important individual contributions, however, the collection of essays comprising B eyond the Fantastic Book reviews 104 in precisely those market mechanisms. B eyond the F antastic is an interesting case in point. The volume contains a number of very interesting critical interventions into the cultural arena where images of the region are constructed and circulate. And yet, the reader is left with the vague sense that the circuitry of publicity and diå usion has won the game. When cultural production must announce itself in order to be consumed, the moment of expression and the moment of publicity are often rendered as nearly inseparableÐ making novelty a fait accompli , even though it is exactly this which most needs discussion. The recycled character of this collection (while not exactly uncommon in the publishing racket) is a particularly striking indication of this problem, especially when one considers the claim submitted by the publisher’s associate editor in the text’s `Foreword’, averring that the book represents `the ® rst time an English language audience can have access to the writings of the most important cultural theoreticians of contemporary Latin America’ (p.9). This latest discovery of the region proves, on closer inspection, to be as burdened with misconception as the Columbian voyage. Most of the collection’s contributors have not only had their work published in English previouslyÐ Garcõ a Canclini, Transforming M odernity: Popular Culture in M exico (University of Texas, Austin, 1993) and H ybrid Cultures (University of Minnesota, 1995); George  Yudice, et al. (ed.), On E dge: T he Crisis of Contemporary Latin American Culture (University of Minnesota, 1992); Celeste Olalquiaga, M egalopolis: Contemporary Cultural Sensibilities (University of Minnesota, 1992); and Guillermo Gomez-Pena, W arrior for Gringostroika Â Ä (St Paul, 1993), to mention only the more well known book-length texts, the last two written in EnglishÐ many of them also live and work in the United States. Nine of the volume’s 22 articles are quite simply reproductions of texts from earlier English-language publications. No further comment is required concerning the fact that there are certainly any number of very important Latin American cultural theorists and critics (also readily available in English at the time of publication of B eyond the F antastic ) that are not represented here. The recycling involved in the publication of B eyond the Fantastic is interesting for reasons other than the spurious representations of its publisher. Most obviously, this novelty as re-presentation draws attention to the family resemblance the anthology bears to the diå usion elsewhere of Latin American perspectives on postmodernism. The authorship and thematic interests constituting B eyond the Fantastic evidence a close kinship with earlier collections On E dge (see above) and T he Postmodern D ebate in Latin America, a special issue of boundary 2 edited by Jose  Oviedo and John Beverley (Duke University, 1993).    Nestor Garcõ a Canclini, George Yudice, Tomas Ybarra-Frausto, and Nelly Richard all contribute essays to B eyond and at least one of the other two earlier collections, with Canclini contributing to all three. Similar thematics (postmodernism, identity, hybridity, etc.) further cement this kinship. There are, however, sharp contrasts between B eyond and these other volumes, including greater theoretical scope and clarity in the latter. In important ways, these diå erences recommend the other volumes as a pre-requisite for enhancing the legibility of B eyond. Mosquera’s introduction and the collection’s general avoidance of debate aim at constituting a tenuously consensual image of contemporary regional art criticism as a postmodern cultural ® eld. The other publications, on the contrary, oå er strong evidence that the ® gure of `postmodernity’ is far from a settled term of engagement for regional cultural criticism. In contrast to B eyond’s settlement on a generic `postmodern awareness’, `the postmodern’ in the broader context of debate in Latin America turns out to be a constellation of false cog nates, including George Yudice’s emphasis on  regional postmodernism avant la lettre ; Hernan Vidal’s determination of postmodernism as a technocratic cultural import to Latin America; the  claim of numerous authors (Nelly Richard, Jose Oviedo, Jose Joaquõ n Brunner, and others) that  postmodernism represents a strategy for cancelling hegemonic impulses in the regional move toward democratization; and Anõ bal Quijano’s critique of postmodernism as an abandonment of the utopian promise of peripheral modernity in favor of Euro-North American rei® cations. Nestor Garcõ a Canclini’ s essay `Modernity after Postmodernity’ , the only fully ¯ eshed out theoretical position on the matter in B eyond, contains a synopsis of his earlier contribution to this regional exchange concerning postmodernism. His is the most substantial contribution to the volume Ð possibly intended as guarantor of the publication’s theoretical currencyÐ explicating usefully and at greater length his position on the question of `the postmodern’. In the process, Canclini also discusses with considerable acuity the institutional mechanisms for the production of art markets in the Argentine and Mexican national contexts, detailing shifts in oæ cial cultural policy and thereby usefully situating postmodernist claims within the institutional processes speci® c to a con¯ ictual regional modernization politics. Canclini eludes, in a sense, the con¯ ictual determinations of `the postmodern’ by showing preference for the term `semi-modern’ instead. Identifying his own position with those of Frederic Jameson and Andreas Huyssen, he nonetheless pointedly characterizes postmodernism not as a new tendency replacing modernity and traditionalism, but rather as `the reorganization of Book reviews 105 [modernism’s] internal forces and its relationship with tradition’ (p.46). This means for Canclini that postmodernism is `a complex situation of cultural development’ , an understanding that positions postmodernism ® rmly within the problematic of socio-cultural modernization in Latin America. Canclini’ s essay is accompanied by two others under the shared heading of `Continental Divisions’Ð Andrea Giunta’s (Argentina) `Strategies of Modernity in Latin America’ , and `The Void and the Dialogue in the Western Hemisphere’, by Paulo Herkenho å (Brazil)Ð each striking up a resonance with Canclini on the note of North-South relations and a partial regional modernity. Neither of these contributions, however, adds or challenges much with regard to Canclini’ s exposition. Employing a postmodernist vocabulary (fragment, cut, diå erence, transgression, deconstruct, etc.), Giunta essentially oå ers broad-brush descriptions of strategies of modi® cation applied to European modernisms (in particular Futurism and Cubism) in order to adapt them to Latin America in the early twentieth century. `Modernity in Latin America’ , she tells us, `was a misappropriated and modi® ed project’ from the beginning (p.55). While such a statement is far from controversial, she never explains how her own discourse relates to the back-and-forth tactical movements of Latin American artists and intellectuals she describes as enacting critical re-appropriations. In other words, she shows no interest in a parallel distinction between a misappropriated and a re-appropriated postmodernity. Herkenho å ’s very brief intervention (only three pages of text) uncovers in the experimental artwork of Helio Oiticica and Cildo Meireles the experience  of the exclusionary character of cultural `dialogue’ in the Western hemisphere as well as the key to the breaking down of these limits. What Herkenho å has in mind is the insistence on the speci® cities of artistic discourse and its ethical dimensions against the vagaries and exclusions of national identities and the art markets. Herkenho å ’s concerns provide an illuminating window of insight into the diasporic character of the book’s interventions. To refer, as the book’s dustjacket does, to `contemporary art criticism from Latin America’ [my italics] is an almost impossibly indexical eå ort to locate and contain the identity of this array of cultural commentary. The fact that one half of the articles were originally published or presented in a language other than Spanish or Portuguese for an audience outside Latin America, and that eight of the 18 authors are identi® ed with a dual national status (e.g., Venezuela/USA or Mexico/Argentina), belies an ethereal current in the geopolitical claims of the anthology. What this means for the general constitution of the volume is that detailed engagements with national settings Book reviews 106 and local aesthetic production are rare or secondary, often superseded by ruminations on the relation between core and periphery rather than peripheral experience. There are noteworthy exceptions to this tendency. Gustavo Buntinx’s `The Power and the Illusion: Aura, Lost and Restored in the ``Peruvian Weimar Republic’’ (1980± 1992)’Ð which opens with the salutation `To my friends in Diaspora’Ð is a particularly interesting engagement with a speci® c national context. Buntinx analyzes the combined aesthetic of myth and demysti® cation during Peru’s brief period of electoral democracy. Bringing to bear the interest in the auratic characterizing the work of Walter Benjamin, Buntinx analyzes the artistic production of two artist collectives in a climate of fractious left politics, drawing parallels to the experience of Weimar Germany and conclusions regarding the so-called post-ideological cultural landscape. `The Occidental discourse on the end of ideology is the least accidental and the most ideological of all discourses. Absolute demythi® cation is in itself a myth’ (p.320). The lessons of the Peruvian experience are augmented by Gabriel Puluå o Linari’s discussion of the Uruguayan crisis in `Crisis of an Inventory’. Linari chronicles the shift of national cultural production `away from the state’ , eå ecting a crisis in the monumental inventory of national identity paralleled by `the strengthening of the market as the legitimizing agent of particular ethical and aesthetic tendencies’ (p.291). The most promising feature of his analysis is his focus on the city (Montevideo) as the space of this crisis, and hence an arena for further investigation of the speci® cities of the region’ s belated modernity. Similarly Ticio Escobar (`Issues in Popular Art’) and Mirko Lauer (`Populist Ideology and Indigenism: A Critique’) focus on subnational contextsÐ the `indigenous’ in Paraguay and Peru, respectivelyÐ in order to interrogate the impositions of a dependent modernity without abandoning the liberatory promise of modernity categorically. These essays are allocated under the heading ```Other’’ Modernities’ along with articles by Gerardo Mosquera (`Modernism from AfroAmerica: Wilfredo Lam’ ) and Pierre Bocquet (`The Visual Arts and Creolite’), both of which add suggestive detail to the category of the popular abandoned by much of the rest of the volume, although they approach their objects somewhat more generically than Escobar and Lauer. In fact, it seems that the greater the focus on particulars of regional experience, the less likely is an uncritical universalizing of postmodernist currency. Lauer and Buntinx both extend, with diå erent motivations, the heterodox legacy of Jose Carlos Mariategui, a Peruvian   communist of the 1920s who fused Gramscian and Nietzschean currents into an appropriation of Marxism for the speci® cities of Peruvian reality. Mariategui’s work contains striking aæ nities with  poststructuralism, aæ nities too often left unexploited because of his commitments to national realities. Lauer is especially thought-provoking in this respect, arguing against the inert model of indigenism as a negative appendage of modernity, gesturing instead a la Mariategui toward an alternative  modernity adequate to popular interests and indigenous socio-cultural forms. The paradox in this volume, however, is that it is diaspora that has the most distinctly national ¯ avour. Nearly one half (nine) of the volume’s 22 articles, sprawling across three of the anthology’s six sections (`Contextualizing Multiculturalism’, `Out of the Mainstream’ and `Realignments of Cultural Power’) center their discussion on US cultural phenomena. Several of these demonstrate a healthy interest in the aesthetic production and experience of migrant populations. In fact, one of the more notable aspects of B eyond the Fantastic seems to be its expansion of the category of `Latin American’ to include the subjects of Latino/ Chicano Studies within the US national context. This is the implicit message behind the inclusion  of Tomas Ybarra-Frausto’s contribution, `The Chicano Movement/ The Movement of Chicano Art’, in which the author situates a variety of Chicano cultural forms as emergent from the ideological and tactical lines of political movement from the 1960s through 1980s. Chicano activist and self proclaimed `High-tech Aztec’ Guillermo GomezÄ Pena, who locates himself unequivocally within the US national context with `The Multicultural Paradigm: An Open Letter to the National Arts Community’, also partakes of this tendency. Luis Camnitzer raises complementary issues by discussing the problematic relation between art and public confronted by the artist uprooted from his/her nation of origin in `Wonder Bread and Spanglish Art’. Interestingly, Gomez-Pena and Â Ä Puerto Rican Camnitzer distinguish themselves as the only authors that engage the structure of the art market from the perspective of the artist and cultural activist rather than that of the critic. Camnitzer contributes an additional essay, ` Access to the Mainstream’, which also furthers this perspective. The overwhelming majority of the essays analyzing US cultural phenomena are concerned more with techniques of cultural marketing, distribution and circulation than with speci® c cultural forms, innovative trends in visual discourse/interpretation or historiographical lacunae. This is not to say that there are no critically valuable contributions in this area. George Yudice’s `Transnational Cultural  Brokering of Art’ examines to interesting eå ect the `brokering role that such phenomena as multicultu- ralism and identity politics oå er to Latin American artists’ (p.197). Yudice is concerned with detailing  the relationship between regional art markets and a US-centred politics of identity and multiculturalism which allocates the `alternative’ and the `marginal’ to its own institutional terms. His analysis at times evokes a critical immanence to the position staked out by the anthology, particularly with regard to the volume’s gesture toward a representational terrain `beyond the fantastic’. In discussing performance art as an emblematic form of artistic practice for the US art market of the 1980s, for example, he explains the absorption of its aesthetic impact into the social conventions of US institutional life in terms adequate to the anthology’s own presentation to this market (and to its British relative): `Today¼ the enactments of defamiliarization seem to have lost their ``transcendent’’ reference to a beyond (the sacred, the unspeakable, the absurd)’. Gestures toward a beyond `no longer beckon from the uncanny, as the underside of normalization’, but instead `account for the social production of identity’ (p.203). This may be the book’s most worthwhile critical appreciation of its own terms of production and consumption beyond Latin America. Nevertheless, the sometimes overriding interest in `market politics’ often seems to enforce discourse more adequate to the promotional function of the traditional art critic than to critical interventions aimed at overturning relations of unequal power. Mari Carmen Ramõ rez’s `Beyond ``the Fantastic’’: Framing Identity in US Exhibitions of Latin American Art’, the article from which the title of the volume is derived, is basically a critical review of three book-length art publications based on US museum exhibits during the late 1980s. While Ramõ rez debunks the exoticisms with which these exhibits hang the category of `the fantastic’ on Latin  American art, Monica Amor’s `Cartographies: Exploring the Limitations of a Curatorial Paradigm’ extends a review of a more recent 1994 New York exhibit into a re¯ ection on the regime of essentialist concepts governing the access of the `Third World Subject’ to the public sphere. In keeping with a market-based, technocratic lens of analysis, she discerns `Latin America’ to be a `totalizing term’ and argues that categories like `Latin American’ art `should be reduced to an instrumental level in institutionalized circuits such as the museum and the university’ (p.252). Oddly enough, Carolina Ponce de Leon’s `Random Trails for the  Noble Savage’ accomplishes the same task in fewer pages. Celeste Olalquiaga goes one step further by turning the art market out of doors in `Holy Kitschen: Collecting Religious Junk from the Street’, a reproduction of a chapter from her book M egalopolis. In this article, artistic production is cancelled out entirely by the logic of commodity Book reviews 107 consumption, as she intersperses a discussion of kitsch aesthetics with prices and alluring descriptions of the merchandise arrayed in specialty shops in New York City. The presentation of the book in its introduction as `representative not of countries but of authors’, and of its purpose as an eå ort `to structure its own discourse as a book through a conjunction of issues, authors and discourses’, does not quite remedy the reader’ s sense that the text represents a certain absorption of the Americas into America. (Given that this volume is an EnglishÐ and not only English languageÐ event, this may be an indication of the extent to which a British audience consumes images of Latin America through the funnel of its own former colony. Postcoloniality, after all, has an extremely long shelf life.) This is largely an eå ect of the marketing orientation of many of its articles, as well as the disproportionate attention to the US context. Herkenho å ’s concern for the fate of the aesthetic under pressure from market structures or political instrumentation is overly ¯ eeting within the structure of the volume as a whole. The discursive structure and distribution of issues and authors in the anthology seem too often to indicate the US as the magnetic North for the play of Latin American identities otherwise being emphasized. But this is only one of several ways in which the text leaves one wondering about its representation of art criticism and cultural analysis in Latin America. Nowhere is the severely circumscribed character of the anthology’s `representativity’ more in evidence than in the section titled `Feminism and Periphery’ . The only contributor to this sectionÐ with two essays Ð is Chilean art critic Nelly Richard, who also contributes to the book’s ® nal section `Realignments of Cultural Power’. Richard has weighed in signi® cantly elsewhere in English language publications that cast the regional debate of the terms of postmodernism to a wider audience. Her discussion in `Chile, Women and Dissidence’ oå ers a thumbnail sketch of these earlier contributions. She argues for a postmodern logic of appropriation and fragmentation against the backdrop of `the dependent situation [Latin America] occupies within an international network of ideas, a network that distributes the weight of domination and subalternity and whose distribution determines privileged access to the centres of production and to the legitimization of references and models’ (p.137). Arguing that this maneuver is necessitated by the Chilean recovery from nearly two decades of dictatorial rule under Pinochet, Richard advocates turning the discursive openings made available in this way toward a corrosion of the legacy of monolithic masculinism instantiated in the public discourse of national security doctrine. Book reviews 108 Her arguments are rendered less convincing by the brute fact that the reader has no idea whatever of who her feminist interlocutors are. This is partly a matter of Richard’s cryptic style, but largely due to the absence of any other version of `peripheral’ feminism in the volumeÐ thus undermining her own claim to represent the periphery at the very moment she appropriates the center. The ironic cast given Richard’s arguments by the structure of B eyond is widened by the fact that her discussion registers something of the earlier context of T he Postmodernism D ebate in Latin America. She had been a participant in one of the more interesting moments of diå erence in the earlier anthology, exchanging arguments with fellow Chilean Hernan  Vidal over the political signi® cance of the `postmodern turn’ in the context of Chile. Vidal’s suspicions about postmodernism as a technocratic foreign export akin to neoliberalism leave traces in Richard’s discussion of the dangers of willfully appropriating without diå erentiation. Otherwise, she reminds us, `we have the paradox of theories, which in their original context attack dogma, being transformed over here into monuments, into the revered and worshipped symbols of an axiomatic culture’ (p.138). Given the circulation of the essay in B eyond, there is an unsettling dissolution of the indexical `here’, leaving one with the sense that the paradox of theory in a dependent situation is being incidentally performed as an eå ect of its return to the metropolis. Richard’s other contribution to the book’s section on feminism, `Women’s Art Practices and the Critique of Signs’, rescues the context for her theoretical discussion mainly because she presents concrete examples of women’s artistic practices and demonstrates their interventive value in Chile. The collection as a whole evinces a certain hesitation concerning the objects of its representations. Given the anthology’s de® ning gesture toward somewhere `beyond the fantastic’, the subtitle, promising contemporary art criticism from Latin America, raises the question of representation on not one but two fronts. Not only is one left wondering about the extent to which the criticism here presented is representative of speci® cally Latin American criticism, but one also winds up questioning the extent to which this move `beyond the fantastic’ is representative of art from Latin America. In other words, the collection’s emphasis on marketing and curatorial regimesÐ art critic’s talking amongst themselves to the near exclusion of the artistsÐ leaves one wondering as much about current regional trends in artistic production as anything else. This is especially vexing because `the fantastic’ referenced in the title was never simply an interpretive scheme or taxonomic category applied `from the outside’ to the region by scholars, curators and critics but rather an aesthetic streak coursing through the literary arts (perhaps most famously in the work of authors such as Gabriel Garcõ a Marquez, Jorge Luõ s Borges and Alejo  Carpentier) as well as the visual (Frida Kahlo, Wilfredo Lam, Roberto Matta and Fernando Botero, to mention only a few of the many distinct versions of `the fantastic’ in Latin American artistic expression). Interestingly, the most prominent theorists of this regional tendency in the arts have often been its practitioners. Alejo Carpentier, for example, was responsible for the notion of the `real maravilloso’ [`marvellous real’]Ð one of the most theoretically grounded embodiments of `the fantastic’Ð which situated itself as a critique of modernity precisely by appropriating the terrain of critical representation of `the real’ from European aesthetic `realism’ while pressuring `the modern’ in European `modernism’ . Although the common ground represented by B eyond the Fantastic is characterized by Mosquera in his introduction as `the framework of a critique of modernity’, the problem of the critical representation of `the real’ cannot be eluded by claiming a territory beyond the fantastic. This is especially so as he describes `one of the most useful achievements of the contributors’ to the anthology as `a reaæ rmation of the margins’ of economic and symbolic power. This may explain the relatively anomalous inclusion of Mirko Lauer’s brief but incisive essay `Notes on the Visual Arts, Identity and Poverty in the Third World’ at the end of the book. It certainly goes far toward explaining Mosquera’s own ambivalence toward postmodernism, adduced in the ® nal paragraph of his introductory remarks: The book ends with a text by Lauer that could almost act as a readjustment of the anthology itself, or at least as a very apposite warning against certain postmodernist deliriums that ignore the dire social situation of the continent. Alongside globalization and decentralization, poverty remains the same. At least, I have not yet heard of `postmodern poverty’ (p.16). That Mosquera’s coda is deemed necessary at all, suggesting Lauer’s text as a kind of Derridean supplement to `the anthology itself ’, appears to be evidence of the stubbornness of the problematic of representation conjured in the collection’s title. If representing what is new from Latin America entails a passing beyond the representational limits of `the fantastic’, what is old about the region is not necessarily redeemed by this maneuver. The point I want to make in conclusion is not so much that `postmodernism’ is `bad’, as that the diå usion of much of the discussion animated by it in relation to Latin America is determined by the globalization of cultural markets and the de-racination of intellectuals (or at least those taken by publicity networks to be most `representative’ of critical regional discourses) from the speci® cities of national contexts. If we are aware of the institutional contours of this context, as some of the volume’s contributors clearly are, we can make the critical turn toward an awareness of what gets left out or behind by the novel foci of attention constructed within publicized intellectual discourse. In this case, important elements of national socio-political realities and related cultural problematics are transcended under the sign of a move beyond the aesthetics of `the fantastic’ upon which some high cultural representation of the region was previously predicated. In B eyond the Fantastic , no alternative aesthetic appears on the horizon, and no signi® cant debate is engaged about the passage. The aura of postmodernism is settled on by default as intellectuals are drawn instead into an encounter with the fantastic relation to `Latin America’ available to the consumer in the mass mediations attending economic globalization. Bruce Campbell University of Minnesota Stephen Melville Edited and Introduced by Jeremy Gilbert-Rolfe S e am s : A rt as a p h ilos op h ic al c on tex t (Amsterda m: G+B Arts International, 1996). One writes to be read, just as [¼ ] one paints to be seen¼ that is, for the writing to be read (the painting to be seen)¼ and what the hesitation and quali® ed repetition intends to make clear is that the boundary between showing one’s self and showing something other than one’s self (an object, a text, a representation, a mask, a veil, a work¼ ) is hardly clear. Writing, one means to enter a space between one’s self and [¼ ] that of the `other’. (p.210) Ironically, by his own account, it is almost as if this collection of Stephen Melville’s essays need not be read. It reads itself. Each essay in Seams is constituted by a voice which speaks and is read with and against another text in the volumeÐ often written a decade apart. The texts echo one an other. And it is within the reverberations between the texts that the reader enters the scene. The sutured polyglotal voices of the `space between one’s self and that of ``the other’’’ adds another dimension of diå  erence to this already complex textual dialogue. The reader is confronted with a textual situation made up of diå erent historical moments of writing, Book reviews 109 voices of otherness and intratextual overdeterminations. And, these disparate utterances are bound by the Seams of philosophy’ s dialogues with painting and painting’s dialogues with philosophy. The intermingling of these voices and their echoes produce a Melvillian in® nite conversation. Seams is a gathering of Melville’s work spanning the years 1982± 1996. It is divided into ten chapters, plus postscript, and is edited and introduced by Jeremy Gilbert-Rolfe. Rather than following a chronological narrative, Gilbert-Rolfe has rightly, in my view, placed the texts in quasi-thematic groupings. I say quasi, because Melville’s writings are musings which are bound together by certain overarching concerns that are never quite absent: object(ivity)Ð or the objectness of the art object; philosophyÐ although often phenomenology; psychoanalysis; and art history. As such, Seams is divided into a series of conversations guided by the following thematics; description, interpretation and the object of painting; psychoanalysis, jouissance/ jouis sens (`the logic of pleasure and the pleasure of logic’ [ p.90]), the gaze, colour and phenomenology; deconstruction, allegory, painting and colour; and three telling book reviewsÐ Derrida’s T he Truth in Painting, Michael Fried’s Courbet’s R ealism and an extended book review/ article of the latter’s Absorption and T heatricality . And it is these books and the other works by the respective authors Ð how can one consider the object of painting without reference to Fried’s Art and Objecthood?Ð which haunts the conversations within Seams , making it a critical adventure into the margins and interlacings of philosophy and painting. The product is a complicated relationship of mutual diå erence, wherein `Every object must appear as an occasion for a reinvention of deconstruction: Every object is diå erent(ly)’ (p.137). And this reinvention occurs during occasions in which not only deconstruction but phenomenology, psychoanalysis and art history undergo diå erence. In these Seams , painting becomes a philosophical context, and philosophy a painterly one. Stephen Melville takes the object of art history seriously, indeed. On the one hand, Seams is concerned with the discipline of art history, as an object. It is interested in art history’ s tradition, its emergence and its philosophical partnerships. On the other hand, it seeks to question, write and reinvent art history’ s object: speci® cally, the object of painting. Its status as object. These two hands write one another: [¼ ] what interests me about deconstruction in art history or art history in deconstructionÐ is that it refuses [¼ ] to separate observations about the discipline from observations about objects within the discipline, and that it does so, on my understanding, not by claiming Book reviews 110 to dissolve art history into some broader ® eld [¼ ] but by entering more deeply into how it is that there is a ® eld: what it is that our knowledge can never take the ® nal shape of some clear view across the whole terrain but must be built always out of a thick interplay of language, object, and discipline in which no one of the terms stands wholly inside or outside any of the others. These things then turn within and through each other, creating complex pockets and interlacings, skeins and foams and knots. (p.144) The encounter between object, discipline and language is well played out in the 1995 essay, `Description’. This text represents a conversation on interpretation, description, phenomenology and criticism between Merleau-Ponty, Husserl, Heidegger, Gadamer, Derrida, Schapiro, Panofsky, Wolƒ in and Melville. Melville begins with a history È of this hermeneutic tradition and its reliance on description: Merleau-Ponty’ s ```primitive contact’’ with the world’ (quoted on p.42); Husserl’s `intentionality’; Heidegger’s D asein; and Gadamer’s model of `how objects are in history and in interpretation’(p.46). From here, he turns to the Schapiro-Heidegger debate on van Gogh’s painting and explores the interpretative failure of both analyses: both Shapiro and Heidegger’s interpretation fail because they elide description. However, Heidegger, at least, knows the failure of having an interpretative appeal to external criterion which neglects to consider the painting’s status as a work or not. This status is dependent upon the function of the frame, and Heidegger, although deeply dependent upon the frame, is also unwilling to acknowledge its location. Derrida’s response to this debate through the notion of the frame as parergon,Ð the frame as undecidable, both producing and violating that which it surrounds and constitutesÐ allows Melville to insist on the necessary diå erence and mutual interdependence of description and interpretation. Following on from this rather dense and convoluted series of (pro)positions, Melville takes up the art historical frame in È the work of Panofsky and Wolƒ in. For each of them, albeit in diå erent ways, the frame is a means of surrounding description with interpretationÐ either by taking the object for granted or by proving it, over and over again (p.58). These art historical framings present Melville with the opportunity to reinvent a formalist art historical tradition. One which being imbued with both the oå erings of interpretation and the necessary ® ndings of description have a bearing on the object of painting. And it seems to me that like Heidegger, whose failure for Melville, is dependent upon the painting and frame he fails to attend to, Melville’s text, while insisting on the diå erence (and interdependency) of description and interpretation, fails in its failure to precisely locate the diå erence. Melville’s emphatic focus on the objectivity of painting does not seek to account for the object through empirical criteria or to place it within an overall logical system, his interest is much more subtle and philosophically nuanced. There is a determinative ontology of the object at work hereÐ `the demand to think objects ``as such’’ is made within the context of a sharp distinction between ``individuality’’ and ``uniqueness’’ , a distinction that follows from the identi® cation of ``being as¼ ’’’ (p.140)Ð which at times, makes me suspicious of this project’s implicit aim for singularity and essence. I say implicit because the 1982 text `Robert Smithson: `` Literalist of the Imagination’’ ’Ð A which performs dialogically with `Description’Ð is a brilliant example of the dissemination and insistence of this ontological event. Melville’s thesis is simple: `[¼ ] I insist on writing here of Smithson’s work as painting’ (p.31), and it is this task which produces for him, the object of Smithson’s painting. Through the patternings of mirrors and windows, Smithson’s work is a procedural displacement: a displacement of art history’ s and the viewers/ readers expectations of the object(ivity) of painting and of painting itself onto `three-dimensional objects’, which are in turn displaced. It seems to me, that it is impossible to reconcile the object of painting as object with a series of displacements into a singular ontological essence. The absent presence of an ontological determination may be the reason why Melville is able to demand the `recognition’ and `acknowledgement’ of an object’s speci® city as objectÐ often in the location of colourÐ without allowing for a textuality or hermeneutics to overwrite the object, entirely. I would have to agree here with Melville’s manoeuvrings between object and text, and suggest that the object’s excess, its undecidability, its materiality, history, as diå erence, is its productivity; it cannot be consumed, completely, through a textual turn. And I would argue that, this eå ectivity and aå ectivity of the object, as excess, oå ers art history its epistemological status. Throughout Seams , Melville’s concern for the objectivity of painting disturbs the object’s status as a philosophical, phenomenological and art historical problem. And while presenting us with an astounding breadth of knowledge and speculative re-invention, the most intriguing aspect of these conversations are the parenthetical digressions which form a curious marginalia. They form the frayage of the Seams . And while producing and working through the Seams opened up between philosophyÐ Hegel, Merleau Ponty, Heidegger, È Sartre, Lacan and DerridaÐ art historyÐ Wolƒ in, Greenberg, Panofsky, Schapiro, Fried, Krauss and OwensÐ and the object, Melville consistently performs a suturing process in which the wounds never heal, and the scars remain, tellingly. Joanne Morra University of Leeds `Part II: On the Association of Ideas Chapter I: Knowledge or Improved Perception’ Roger Silverstone (ed.) V is ion s of S u bu rbia (London: Routledge, 1997). Knowledge or improved perception? When, in 1940, Nikolaus Pevsner hauled the Picturesque, and along with it the ideas of Richard Payne Knight and Uvedale Price, kicking and squealing from the context of their peculiar, nuanced contributions to the eighteenth-century’s diverging struggles to focus the classical landscapes of Claude and Rosa into an image of urban bourgeois democracy, he did so against a backdrop of his own despairs. And, he did so in order to make an intellectual point. Nikolaus Pevsner liked suburbia, though he seemed, perhaps with good historical and social reason, loathe to let on. When he did write about them, with an uncharacteristically boyish enthusiasm, he did so pseudonymously, as Peter F. R. Donner, in T he Architectural R eview . These essays, more vignettes really, weren’t entirely what you might like to label Pevsnerian. Adopting the now popular guise of an architectural detective, he outlined a very diå erent account of architectural modernity than the one with which people are perhaps most familiar; a Coburg-Windsor `style for our epoch’, one of Dutch gables and half-timbering, sunrise gates and applied Ë classical detail. The fac aderie of English, middle-class architectural individualism. Some were never able fully to forgive him for this perceived betrayal of ideals. Along with J. M. Richards, with whom he shared a fondness for the visual and intellectual cultures of suburbia, and from whom he assumed the editorship of T he Architectural R eview whilst Richards was in Egypt doing his bit for the war eå ort, Pevsner was accused of hijacking the one crusading journal for the ambitions of Modern Movement sensibilities, sullying its purposeful, rationalising urbanity with a digressive, apologetic reverie of sentimental domesticana. Reyner Banham, one of those younger modernists whose architectural education was battered by the war, was beside himself at his mentor’s desertions and it certainly appears that his narrative reevaluations of the icons of the pre-war, Modern urbanist tradition was in part shaped by this Book reviews 111 suburban Oedipal carelessness. But even Banham, at various moments, spoke sympathetically of some suburbs later in his career. And, it’s worth knowing too that even the incorrigibly formal, Modernist vociferations of Henry Russell-Hitchcock himself were tempered at times by occasional yet ® rm suggestions that his students take a long and considered look at the writings of `Mr Donner’. Even at the time of the articulation of their most bloody-minded, project-de® ning intransigence, the players of the history of Functional architectural modernity have had interests in suburbanisation and the romantic, demotic semantics of its street furniture that is other than the conventionally expected, sneering contempts. Suburbs, in short, are important. Equally, the accepted protocols towards such historians as these demand that they be ordinarily understood as ® gures who are squeamish at even the thought of the potential valencies of the objects they squabble over. For each, Corb, for instance, and his despisal of the tentacularity of suburbs, is meant to mean x and only x in a novel architectural history designed to ¯ ummox the particular, singular historicism that prevailed before it. Corb, or something like Corb, is supposed only to be got haecceitically wrong or right, made of this and not that kind of historical force. These secretive interests in suburbia cast a rather visceral shudder through this spick and span historiography too. Aggrieved at the suburban bad-cases he saw developing in Becontree and Dagenham from his Hampstead home during the 1930s and 1940s, Pevsner eventually decided to equip his contemporaries with a few Picturesque guidelines to lend the suburb maturity and orientation. In doing so he evinced a desire for a semiotic playfulness, not simply in the sense of enriching the suburban landscape, but also in the sense of a principled preparedness to accept the productive indecidability of any historical token. His recourse to the interpretative poetics of Payne Knight and his speculative connoisseurship in particular seemed to confound any notion that the archetypal Modernist architectural commentators of the 1930s and 1940s really thought that they objectively knew anything, let alone the historical nature of modernity. This tacit admission of wilful uncertainty represents a complex and inventive soteriological proposal for the analysis of urban and ex-urban culture. Suddenly the landmark architectural and urban historians of, I suppose, the `heroic phase’ of architectural-history writing, step from the shadow of their caricatures. A discipline-led, unbending set of academic pedants now look like an interesting group of cultural theorists involved in a more associative, risk-taking and creative manner of inquiry, people who are prepared to educatedly guess at the answers to questions regarding the cultural signiBook reviews 112 ® cance of this or that architectural detail, willing to experiment with any cultural framework in order to conjure up potential responses. In his introductory piece to Visions of Suburbia, Roger Silverstone speaks of a series of questions raised by the collection of essays he has edited, `more questions than can possibly be answered’. It’s an interesting observation. What it hints at is the way that an attention to suburbs might prompt the acute embarrassment of those who practice `recognisable’ disciplines, those whose brittle territorial-pissings demand the omnipotence of their elected outlook. It’s not as if these formally recognised disciplines have been able to see suburbs all to clearly in the past. Silverstone’s comment is suggestive in other ways. This book exists in a framework of the rather longer duration and extension of such speculative and inconclusive attitudes at the core of Modernist intellectual specialisation than some post-Modern claims for the radical novelty of such semantic and historical erudition might feel comfortable in admitting. An attention to the suburb might nowadays produce all sorts of detournement of conventionalised modes of cultural-historical inquiry, that’s only to be expected. Sitcoms and situationism have long held each other in high regard. The point is that perhaps those subversions were already there and were quietly performed by the very `masters’ who did so much to structure discrete disciplines. In the light of this, perhaps the clearest thing oå ered by the collection of essays that Silverstone has edited here is the decision, in the context of an increasingly widespread and intense interest in suburbs, not to attempt to establish a founding rubric for something that might one day institutionally ossify into something called `suburban studies’. There is a diversity of approaches, from Alison Clarke’ s magni® cently assured and conventionalised social and design-history of Tupperware to Deborah Chamber’s acutely feminist observations on women’s domestic roles in Australian suburbs, from John Archer’s architectural study of colonial centres in South East Asia to Andy Medhurst’s personal-political recognition of an English disdain for its cities’ residential peripheries, and Gary Cross’s everyday invention of the weekend. What they highlight, collectively, is that the suburb is not something that it is useful at present, if ever, to think about as a disciplinary entity, something known or knowable. Creative approaches to cultural history and cultural study have no need for another something to be insistent about, to recognise and repeat. As a term of abuse, suburban also means inconsistent. The recent proliferation of literary, cultural-theoretical and aesthetic conjuring of suburbias overwhelmingly shows an interest in the invention of a kind of space where a lot of diå erent, perhaps unrecognisable, things might be said, diå erent interpretative parameters applied, where rude questions may be asked of the insuæ ciencies of smug parent disciplines, where inquiries may be made about otherwise derogated deposits and experiential formations of cultural modernity and allegorical manoeuvres might be made between something like the ordering of urban space and the taxonomies of historical apprehension for instance. What was it like for a young woman like Julia Almond to take a bus from Hammersmith to her school in Chiswick in 1929, mentally rehearsing bits of Dvorak as she speculated on the commuterly and commercial activity she saw going on around her suburban high window, little knowing that in ® fteen years time, to the minute, she and her younger lover were going to be famously executed for the tragically accidental murder of her husband? What kind of historical question is that, what sort of object does it represent and what has it to do with the fate of contemporary cultural studies, or even architectural history for that matter? No cultural critic is ever going to be able to fully and successfully class, ethnicise, gender or sexualise a suburb viewed thus. Suburbs simply aren’ t susceptible to the imperiousness of that sort of categorical description. They’ll smirkingly point-up rather than cower to the vulgarity of such essays. Complex, densely layered, disassembled mediations of innumerable cultural conditions, historical forces and domestic and municipal intrigues, as diå erent from each other as they are similar, suburbs demand a supple historical sensitivity and creative wit as well as an ability to philander with poetic and intellectual forms in order to be able to say anything about them. And, frankly, a selection of exercises in devising and exploring such testing cultural problematics is just what Silverstone has managed to bring together here. I was interested to browse the bibliographies of some of these essays, to see what is common and what is characteristic. There is a surfacing of many of the current heroes of cultural studies. Lots of footnoted deferences to Bourdieu, Berman and Soja. Hardly surprising perhaps, but watching the particular signi® cance of these names develop from various disciplinary takes on them is a hoot. There are more than a few mentions of the core membership of academia’s inventors of suburbia. Whyte, Gans, Dobriner for instance, the Chicago-tradition sociologists who started to make the intellectual presence of the American suburb known during the 1950s, often in response to cognitive oversights by the great names of that tradition; Louis Wirth and his like. There is a delightful absence of Walter Christaller, though it might have been nice to see something by someone whose urban view centres on an oedipal resistance to the metaphysics of centre-place theory. There are essays here by some of the major players in the contemporary investigations into suburbia. Anthony King’s essay for example represents a continuation of a long-standing and productive interest in the cultural signi® cance of the Bungalow. It is fascinating to watch the way that the great and the good of cultural theory suddenly ® nd their words rather confounded in these texts through a propinquity with the fragments of domestic life. The way that Lynn Spigel turns T he J etsons into a prescient metaphor for the suburban pastime of netsur® ng via an allusion or two to Tzvetan Todorov is worth beholding. It is unfair to isolate one essay in particular, and I should say that the reason that I liked Andy Medhurst’s `Negotiating the Gnome Zone’ was because I liked it. On the other hand the way he grounds his text in personal recollections of an impatience with this residential divide between his inner London home and the delights of Brighton, sweetly restages the supposed disinterested objectivity of someone who might ground their text in the expectations of a discipline. It raises the image again, one that Payne Knight might recognise, of the almost heroically amateur dilettante, someone happy to move from particular to particular with no attempt to extrapolate a general rule. What he manages, with his constellation of an extremely broad range of resources, from Noel Coward’s script for B rief E ncounter to an observation that commuting from South East London is an aå air of overland, rather than Underground rail travel, from Tony Hancock’s `Railway Cuttings’ spleen to the anti-bureaucratic invective of Victor Meldrew, is to stimulate speculation on traditions and individualisms. It’s a kind of aimlessly contemporary, associative philology. It depends on knowing a lot but because it has no particular organising ambitions it is bound to throw-up all sorts of re-evaluations and insights as a matter of course. There is a general character to the book in some senses Ð white, middle-class, academic, employed etc.Ð and oå erings from a more varied subjective perspective would have been welcome. It is only one contribution to a burgeoning research interest however, and these essays will soon surface. Some of them have already been written, quite a while ago. There are other complaints to be made, most notably Silverstone’s curious insistence that such a volume could be produced only in the intellectual culture of an old and noted seaside university. Well, research assessment exercises aå ect people diå erently I suppose. Despite this, the book remains thankfully, largely unmarked by a professionally grubby, convenor’s ventriloquy. It works as a caution to the guardians of any dreamed, unitary orthodoxy of cultural study. I’d like to be able to say that that this is an admirably authoritative, foundational text for the study of a largely overlooked cultural deposit. But, who’d want that said about them? Rob Stone University of Newcastle Book reviews 113