Search results

A reading of Theory that in tracing when and where Theory arises in the event of reading proposes how Theory might best be handled in the context of higher education today. Arguing against those who propose to avoid Theory in the name of its putative obsolescence, this text sets out to challenge two aspects of this avoidance. On the one hand, Theory has been set aside in the name of identity politics, that is, the proposition that its intellectual pertinence has been overshadowed by a sense of political urgency construed as at odds with Theory. Theory itself has assumed an identity, a profile. On the other hand, implicit within the avoidance of Theory is a concept of 'context' that calls for reflection. Resisting the tendency to treat context as either negligible or obvious, this text sets out to trace, in the when and where of Theory, the rudiments of a 'sociographic' (think 'historiographic') account of context. In relation to it, the reading that is Theory can be usefully situated as part of a politics of higher education in the era of the global crisis of the university.

David Bowie's 2015 'Blackstar' has been understood by critics and fans alike to have a certain valedictory status. For them, perhaps for us, it is a 39-minute and 13-second farewell. A long goodbye. My angle is different. By situating the Bowie/Renck collaboration on "Lazarus" in the context of a meditation on the question once posed by Georg Stanitzek, "Was ist Kommunikation?" I consider the CD and the video as experiments in re-configuration. More specifically, by thinking about the distinctly cinematic iteration of the question of communication (citing here Captain's "what we have here is … failure to communicate" from 'Cool Hand Luke') I propose that mediated communication embodies the Ich/Es modality of dialogue disparaged by Martin Buber. What this invites us to consider is whether "Lazarus" in particular isn't the generation of an audiovisual tombeau from which or out of which communication strains are to be heard. Is it "saying" farewell? Is it "saying" anything? By drawing on Jacques Derrida's appropriation of the crypt in the work of Abraham and Torok, I propose that "Lazarus" manages (and the feat is neither small nor insignificant) to communicate nothing. In effect, "Lazarus" is the very sound, not of a failure to communicate, but of a "speaking" emptied of what protects it from mediation. Here, Bowie's gnomic persona assumes a political valence not typically ascribed to it.

David Bowie's 2015 Blackstar has been understood by critics and fans alike to have a certain valedictory status. For them, perhaps for us, it is a 39-minute and 13-second farewell. A long goodbye. My angle is different. By situating the Bowie/Renck collaboration on "Lazarus" in the context of a meditation on the question once posed by Georg Stanitzek, "Was ist Kommunikation?" I consider the CD and the video as experiments in re-configuration. More specifically, by thinking about the distinctly cinematic iteration of the question of communication (citing here Captain's "what we have here is … failure to communicate" from Cool Hand Luke) I propose that mediated communication embodies the Ich/Es modality of dialogue disparaged by Martin Buber. What this invites us to consider is whether "Lazarus" in particular isn't the generation of an audiovisual tombeau from which or out of which communication strains are to be heard. Is it "saying" farewell? Is it "saying" anything? By drawing on Jacques Derrida's appropriation of the crypt in the work of Abraham and Torok, I propose that "Lazarus" manages (and the feat is neither small nor insignificant) to communicate nothing. In effect, "Lazarus" is the very sound, not of a failure to communicate, but of a "speaking" emptied of what protects it from mediation. Here, Bowie's gnomic persona assumes a political valence not typically ascribed to it.

This essay proposes that we grasp whispering as a problem, a sound source haunted by the violent exclusion of the animal from the medium of communication. Justification for this proposition is provided by examining the intertwining of whispering, allegory, and trauma, especially as these motifs have come to be agitated in various discourses of popular culture. Specifically, the author traces the manifestation of the figure of the Whisperer as it appears first in both the novel and the film The Horse Whisperer and subsequently in both The Ghost Whisperer and The Dog Whisperer, where in every case whispering is entangled with the trauma that the animal and the human are for one another. Distinguishing this whispering from "actual whispering," whispering of the sort given political meaning in Orlando Figes's recent study of Stalinist Russia, this article suggests a different kind of political reading of whispering, one that emphasizes its disciplinary power in raising questions about our capacity to think the specificity of sound. Thus this essay seeks not only to listen carefully to a sound problem but to bring such listening to bear on what might be called the "sonic boom" or "sonic turn."

This essay explores some of the points of contact between philosophical reflection and dance. Paying close attention to way the figure of dance is put to work in texts by Norbert Elias, Karl Marx, Søren Kierkegaard, Friedrich Nietzsche, Paul de Man, Plato, and Jacques Derrida, the essay teases out a connection between the philosophical gesture of exemplification, the non sequitur whereby the abstract is propped up by or otherwise made to lean upon the concrete, and the move to an "outside" of the text understood either simply as reference, or more ambitiously as revolution. When, as is the case with the texts attended to here, dance is the example exemplified, a swirling field of reflexive associations arise around it, associations that invite us to recognize in dance a stance to be taken, perhaps even a set of steps to be followed, as activists and scholars alike contemplate what will be required to get from one world to another.