Introduction

Theory & Event 12: 4 features an interview with Cornel West with David Kyuman Kim, and a four essay symposium, "Theory and the City," edited and introduced by Jane Bennett. The issue also includes five additional essays:

In his "The American Spokesman: Dorothy Johnson's 'The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance' as Story, Film, and Song," Daryl Palmer draws on John Austin's, Pierre Bourdieu's and Jacques Derrida's approaches to utterances to situate the various genre actualizations of the "Man Who Shot Liberty Valance" story. Focusing on the critical aspects of narratives and legends, and summoning the language and genre insights of the three thinkers, Palmer's main conceptual persona is the "spokesman." He offers a genealogical account of the spokesman in the West, a place of "plateaus, deep canyons, and open prairies" that encourages the readers/viewers to keep the spokesmen within their memory bank and to anticipation of renewed appearances. Palmer's analysis articulates well with the new western histories, which challenge traditional narratives of the region's development.

In her "Public Intellectuality: Academies of Exhibition and the New Disciplinary Secession," Patricia Mooney Nickel begins by treating the way in which painting in fin-de-siecle Vienna constituted a mode of intellectuality within an environment "characterized by rapid technological change, conservatism, and a government bureaucracy that attempted to pre-empt individual decisions about everyday life." Focusing on the way portrayals render worlds and possibilities, Nickel analyzes the forces involved in the governance of portrayals – for example, the controversies over those of Gustav Klimt. However, Nickel's summoning of the Vienna Secession event is selected to use fin-de-siecle Vienna as "a lens through which we might view the current emphasis on pubic intellectuality in fin-de-siecle America." Ultimately, Nickel argues that critical artistic portrayal is like critical theory in general. In a treatment of Klimt's Nuda Veritas, she develops her primary analytic in which she renders critical public intellectuality as counter-portrayal.

In his "The Ontology of Action: Arendt and the Role of Narrative," Leslie Paul Thiele brings a variety of dimensions of narrative theory to a reading of Hannah Arendt's writings. He treats Arendt's political thought in general as an attempt to recover or, as he puts it, "revitalize" an Aristotelian concept of praxis He sees Arendt's invoking of narrative and interpretive arts as the mode with which she valorizes political action, where the "actor" "exposes herself to "interpretive intervention, to the waving of a story in the wake of her deeds." Noting that many otherwise effective approaches to Arendt have failed to see her construction of the relationship between action and narrative, Thiele renders Arendt's approach to action within a temporal frame – as a commitment not to master but to begin.

In his "The Democratico-Political Social Flesh and Political Forms in Lefort and Merleau-Ponty," Martin Plot approaches what he calls the enigma of modern democracy, "born out of the split of the theological and the political," with the effect that "it places society face to face with its own institution." He pursues that enigma through the thinking of Claude Lefort and Maurice Merleau-Ponty, with side trips into the contributions of Hobbes and Schmitt. He also adds Tocqueville to the mix as he endeavors to show how that "advent of the democratico-political" – a replacement of an otherworldy source of political power – necessitated the development of new premises for legitimating political order. Ultimately, Plot constructs his version of the "democratic-political as a "higher stage of society's self-reflexivity – "an opening of society to itself."

In his "Lubricative Power," Dinesh Wadiwel conceptualizes political power with resort to the "tribological system within the internal combustion engine, the dynamics of lubrication and the complex tributaries and oil ways that characterize its movement." Using the metaphors of the "fluidic relation," and the "lubricant," he contrasts his approach to power with the familiar ones of Hobbes, Foucault and Dahl. The paradigmatic venue for such an approach is the bureaucracy, which absorbs much of his analysis. However, Wadiwel turns to violent events and to alternative institutions such as the death camp as well...