Issue 100

About the Cover Art

2009-12-07T19:40:28Z

For this special thirtieth-anniversary issue of Social Text, photographer Jorge Alberto Perez took the first issue (ST 1, 1979) to Peru and created a series of images reflecting on the themes and ongoing impact of the collectively edited journal. His artwork appears on the front and back of the print journal, and also as an accompaniment to the introduction by co-editors Anna McCarthy and Brent Edwards on this website.

Social Text 1 was designed by John Brenkman, one of the journal's founding editors. Brenkman and other members of the collective handled all design, lay-out, and production of the journal before it moved to Duke University Press in 1992.

Cuban-born Perez is based in New York City. Recent assignments include projects in Africa and Latin America. He is currently at work on a photo essay that explores daily life in the occupied West Bank. To see more of his work, visit www.jorgealbertoperez.com.

Introduction to Issue 100

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The essay provides a short introduction to the special anniversary issue of Social Text, explaining the protocol for the "keyword" essays that make up the majority of the issue: each contribution takes up particular points (single essays) or threads (themes in a number of essays over the years) in the publication history of the journal as starting point for a consideration of broader issues of knowledge production, critique, or methodology. The introduction begins with a discussion of the occasion of the thirtieth anniversary of the founding of Social Text, and recounts the origins and history of the journal in some detail. The piece describes the ways the editorial collective has functioned since 1979, both in the production of the journal itself and in a variety of other activities (including meetings, soirÃ©es, and conference panels). The introduction also discusses some of the major shifts in the organization of SOCIAL TEXT, including its affiliations since the mid-1980s with the CUNY Graduate Center, Rutgers University, and Columbia University (which have provided in-kind support and funded the managing editorial position) and with the University of Minnesota Press and Duke University Press (which have published the journal's book series and the journal itself).Photo by Jorge Alberto Perez.

The Collective as a Political Model

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Fredric Jameson, Anders Stephanson, Stanley Aronowitz, John Brenkman, Sohnya Sayres, Andrew Ross, and Randy Martin discuss the role of the collective in the journal's political-intellectual work. They reflect on the alleged founding principle of SOCIAL TEXT: the idea that politics was not organized around parties but journals. The collective offered a way to learn theory and practice as political issues: it came up with political interventions that were urgent, of the moment, and had a theoretical cast.

Aesthetics

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All art is political, the problem is that most of it is reactionary, . . .
passively affirmative of the relations of power in which it is produced. . . .
I would define political art as art that consciously sets out to intervene
in (and not just reflect on) relations of power. . . . And there's one more
condition: This intervention must be the organizing principle of the work
in all its aspects, not only in its "form" and its "content" but also its mode
of production and circulation.
-- Andrea Fraser, quoted in Gregg Bordowitz, "Tactics Inside and Out,"
Artforum 9 (2004)

To break free from the cycle of commodification has been one of many underlying motivations for the resurgent interest in collectives such as the Situationists and in the aesthetics of the everyday. And yet art's power as cultural resistance and convivial exchange has been viewed with skepticism and increasing cynicism by those who are most invested in art's potential -- perhaps a feeling or sensibility shared by the editorial board of Social Text in recent years, as evidenced by the virtual absence of essays that directly engage with art and aesthetics.

Affect

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As for expression and feelings or emotions, the liberation, in contemporary

society, from the older anomie of the centered subject may also mean not

merely a liberation from anxiety but a liberation from every other kind

of feeling as well, since there is no longer a self present to do the feeling.

This is not to say that the cultural products of the postmodern era are

utterly devoid of feeling, but rather that such feelings -- which it may be

better and more accurate, to call "intensities" -- are now free-floating and

impersonal and tend to be dominated by a peculiar kind of euphoria.

-- Fredric Jameson, "Postmodernism; or, The Cultural Logic

of Late Capitalism"

In his 1984 article "Postmodernism; or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism," Fredric Jameson famously declared postmodern culture to be proliferating a "waning of affect" characterized by "a new kind of flatness or depthlessness." The integrity of the unitary modern subject was now dissolving into schizophrenic fragmentation, its depth displaced by multiple forms of discombobulating surface articulations. This waning of affect, laments Jameson, does not deflate or eradicate expressive forms, but rather shifts their register from the realm of substantive feelings to fleeting "intensities." Jameson's concerns represent the culmination of an argument he began outlining in the pages of Social Text. If, in the inaugural issue of Social Text -- in an essay titled "Reification and Utopia in Mass Culture" (ST 1, 1979) -- Jameson can yet hold out for cultural forms whose manipulation and containment of conflicting social anxieties do not close down "their Utopian and transcendent potential," by the

time he alights on "On Diva" (ST 6, 1982), he is ready to diagnose "the disappearance of 'affect' in the older sense, the sudden and unexpected absence of 'anxiety.' " Bye-bye chatty unconscious with all its anxious outpourings of repressed desires. Behold "the silence of affect" and a "new gratification in surfaces."

AIDS

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The AIDS epidemic doesn't always make sense. In fact, it often challenges the very ways we come to make sense. The usual lenses -- academic or otherwise -- fail to bring its immense devastation into any clear focus. Yet, despite the radical epistemological and emotional blur, we nevertheless discern that a chasm has opened before us and that multitudes have fallen, are falling, into the abyss. We have lost too much: friends, family, communities, networks, vast constellations of vital human potential and heartfelt connection are gone. We grieve them.

(Theorizing the) Americas

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America is saving herself from all her dangers. Over some republics the
octopus sleeps still, but by the law of equilibrium other republics are
running into the sea to recover the lost centuries with mad and sublime
swiftness.
-- JosÃ© MartÃ, "Our America," 20 January 1891

Theorizing the Americas is a long tradition in the United States and not always a felicitous practice. When JosÃ© MartÃ's 1891 essay "Our America" was published in Mexico City in 1891, the United States had been publicly debating the annexation of Cuba for a half century. The Americas, having cast off one empire, had suffered nearly a century of imperialist theorizing, beginning with the articulation of the Monroe Doctrine and culminating with the seizure of half of Mexico's territory following the Mexican-American War. But during the neoimperial campaigns of the Spanish American War, a reinvigorated opposition to empire had reached a new crisis, and a resistant critique denouncing U.S. imperialism was being voiced not only by revolutionaries like MartÃ, but by U.S. citizens in the Anti-Imperialist League, the first national peace movement mobilized in response to a foreign war. In the league's platform, they wrote:

We hold that the policy known as imperialism is hostile to liberty and tends
toward militarism, an evil from which it has been our glory to be free. We
regret that it has become necessary in the land of Washington and Lincoln
to reaffirm that all men, of whatever race or color, are entitled to life, liberty
and the pursuit of happiness. We maintain that governments derive their
just powers from the consent of the governed. We insist that the subjugation
of any people is "criminal aggression" and open disloyalty to the distinctive
principles of our Government.

Art

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Was the photograph Shepard Fairey used as a basis for his "Hope" image of Barack Obama a social text? The Associated Press (AP) thought not. Mannie Garcia, the freelance AP photographer who snapped the 2006 referent for Fairey's iconic 2008 print, did not originally recognize his handiwork when the poster first began its viral spread throughout political and popular culture. But when someone identified his own work to him, Garcia told National Public Radio (NPR) that he was "disappointed that someone was able to go onto the Internet and take something that doesn't belong to them and use it." Fairey, who as late as January 2009 was unaware of Garcia's identity, preemptively sued the AP, citing "fair use." Meanwhile, Garcia held his own doubts about the AP's claim that they and not he owned his handiwork. As the legal machinery swung into action, the National Portrait Gallery quietly invited Garcia to hang a signed print of his original photo next to the Fairey print they had earlier

acquired. Artistic rebel, meet working stiff.

Body

2009-10-30T13:00:00Z

While Barack Obama began his historic presidency with a "full plate" of economic and political challenges and an athletic build complete with a "six-pack" duly captured by the long lens of a paparazzo, the woman who had arguably paved the way for his election with her early endorse- ment began her year on a rather different note. Oprah Winfrey started 2009 by appearing in a series of television spots castigating herself for regaining the weight that she had once lost (and gained and lost and gained again over the course of her nearly three decades in the public eye). In this spectacle of self-rebuke that promoted the newest season of her LIVE YOUR LIFE BEST series, Winfrey asserted that everything she has accomplished in every other arena was rendered meaningless unless she controls her weight. "All the money and all the fame and all the attention and the glamorous life and the success," Winfrey said, "doesn't mean anything if you can't fit into your own clothes . . . if you can't control your own being."

China

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A revolution is not a dinner party.
-- Chairman Mao

Whatever the Chairman might think of it, the Cultural Revolution Dinner Theater (ç´…è‰²ç¶“å…¸, literally, The Red Classics) is located east of the Fifth Ring Road in Beijing, well beyond the newly constructed skyscrapers and glitzy hotels of the central Chaoyang business district as well as the private gated communities of the rich, both of which continue to creep eastward in Beijing's ever-expanding urban sprawl. We visited the theater one evening in early July, about a month before the opening ceremonies of the 2008 Beijing Olympics. (It took some cajoling as well as several

detours before the taxi driver managed to deliver us to this freestanding building situated on the edge of yet-to-be-developed fields.) The Cultural Revolution Dinner Theater is a dark and cavernous rectangular space, constructed of rough-hewn lumber, with a large stage on one end, numerous circular banquet tables in the center, and a number of smaller dining areas on a U-shaped elevated platform surrounding this arrangement, lining three sides of the room.

Cold War

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Totalitarianism was, in the words of George Kennan, the authoritative "nightmare" of liberal democracy. Kennan's formulation betrayed considerable skepticism about the empirical validity of the concept he helped to author, one in which the primary divisions of the post - World War II world were understood in ethico-political terms and predicated upon a transvaluation of the wartime opposition between fascism and democracy. Yet Kennan, as William Peitz suggests in "The Post-Colonialism of Cold

War Discourse," a prescient and underappreciated essay in ST 19/20 (1988), was merely one participant in a much wider and more profoundly dishonest historical conversation. As the "theoretical anchor" of cold-war political culture, the theory of totalitarianism enacted a displacement of fascism outside the main historical currents of Western moral, political, and intellectual life. In the hands of its most important intellectual architect, Hannah Arendt, it short-circuited her prior recognition of Nazism

within the family of Western imperialisms and as the exemplary modern instance of rationalized, technology-driven state terror.

The Social Life of the Collective

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Andrew Ross, Sohnya Sayres, Bruce Robbins, Randy Martin, John Brenkman, and Anders Stephanson discuss the venues where the collective met face-to-face: conversations and debates at manuscript reviews and formal meetings, but also the role of reading groups, conferences, and the soirees held at the collective members' lofts.

Collective

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Editorial collectives share features with artistic and political collectives.Â To compare them is first of all to recall that any collective is inherently,Â as Andrew Ross reminds us in his essay in this issue, an "adventure inÂ mutuality." At every level, a collective operates not by deference to hierarchy, much less by the fiction of unanimity, but instead by the premise ofÂ the "reciprocity of practice," as it is phrased in the collectively authoredÂ essay on the aesthetics of Language poetry that appeared in Social TextÂ 19/20 (1988). As is obvious throughout this anniversary issue, collectivism can involve but does not necessitate collaboration, the difficult processÂ of directly making something together. "Reciprocity of practice" impliesÂ something broader and harder to define: a mutual attention -- a poetryÂ collective is "a community of writers who read each other's work," as the Language poets put it -- that is taken to be the sign of a set of shared interests or commitments that can only be discovered and recalibrated in theÂ active selfÂreflexivity of the group. Whether it involves a farm, a protestÂ march, a dance, or a periodical, the recourse to collectivism also involvesÂ a conviction that social organization is necessarily itself political. Or, as itÂ is announced in the prospectus in the first issue of Social Text: "the journal's editorial organization is, we believe, an integral part of its theoreticalÂ and political project" (ST 1, 1979).Â

Commodity

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A commodity appears, at first sight, a very trivial thing, and easily
understood. Its analysis shows that it is, in reality, a very queer thing,
abounding in metaphysical subtleties and theological niceties.
-- Karl Marx, "The Fetishism of Commodities and the Secret Thereof"
(1887)

This somewhat enigmatic passage is useful for thinking about why the commodity resists neat categorization: whether it is illusory or real, scientific or "theological," a fundamental problem for social thought or a "trivial" matter, of a piece with the reality we all share or a "very queer thing," the commodity has -- since the time when this phrase was first penned and in the first one hundred issues of Social Text -- provoked

a series of critical conversations about a modernity that isn't nearly as secular as we had anticipated it might be -- nor as modern.

Culture

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Modern cultural criticism, like the younger discipline of cultural studies, has long struggled to reconcile the antagonistic logic at the heart of the idea of culture. SOCIAL TEXT's project as a journal has been energized throughout by the contradictory genealogy of the term itself, of the inner dynamism and instability generated by the pull between culture defined, in Arnoldian terms, as the highest, disinterested "cultural" achievements of a civilization's elites, and its contrary anthropological definition as a "whole way of life." This ethnographic expansion of the range of culture, generated in part by the colonial encounter and in part by the collision with working-class subcultures, allowed it to include the whole way of life of other populations: now culture could include the popular and demotic, the marginalized and oppressed subjects of modernity. This contradictory inheritance from the nineteenth century was complicated and enriched by the emergence in the twentieth century of successive instantiations of culture within mass communications, signifying systems, and subaltern cultural productions generated out of decolonization and further class struggle. The picture is complicated by culture's intimate ties to the state: administration, governmentality, and war. These days, the culture concept's combination of expansionist energies and inner antagonisms makes it a slippery and untrustworthy idea: it offers, at once, too much and too little. SOCIAL TEXT's long romance with culture offers some invaluable lessons about the culture concept's continuing viability, or what it means, as editors Brent Edwards and Randy Martin asked in 2002, to pursue "the question of cultural politics after cultural studies."