Naming the Noise: Postmodern Responses to the Textual Sublime

Timothy L. Spence Naming the Noise: Postmodern Responses to the Textual Sublime (on Eyal Amiran and John Unsworth, eds., Essays in Postmodern Culture [Oxford: Oxford UP, 1993]) In their introduction to Essays in Postmodern Culture, editors Eyal Amiran and John Unsworth address the relationship between their electronic journal (Postmodern Culture) and "the totemic culture of information management and transmission" (3). Amiran and Unsworth point out that their journal—the first "peer-reviewed electronic journal in the humanities"(3)—does not definitively represent postmodernism; rather, both the messages and the medium of Postmodern Culture are part of the culture they contest, even as they contest it (7). Here I want to investigate how both the theoretical content as well as the electronic form of Postmodern Culture represent the inherently transgressive technological and intellectual milieu that informs the critical industry of a postmodern academy. Amiran and Unsworth present, in print format, thirteen essays from their electronic journal in an attempt to demonstrate how the concept of postmodernism enables theorists to address a variety of issues within our historical moment without establishing "an impossibly separate , metahistorical position from which to mount such a critique." Subsequently, the essays demonstrate a wide range of topics, styles, and theoretical approaches that attempt, in their own way, "to reconstitute human agency, to rescue the liberatory potential of postmodernism, and to find a way to map what Stuart Moulthrop calls 'the networks of transnational power'" (4). That is to say, Postmodern Culture attempts to embrace the disruptive nature of postmodern theory as a means to productively analyze the disruptive nature of postmodern life. The complex components of this collection highlight the transgressive nature of a contemporary world that continually violates formal definition and categorization. For example, in "Feeding the Transcendent Body," George Yúdice investigates obesity and anorexia, finding the postmodern body to be a constitutive battleground for the subject that simultaneously desires and rejects prescribed representations . Whereas current approaches to eating disorders focus attention on the individual body, Yúdice calls for an aesthetic that re-publicizes —and thereby dismantles—the private body in an attempt to articulate the responsibilities of a socially empowered body. 292 the minnesota review The traditional notion of an autonomous body is also questioned by Allison Fraiberg and Audrey Ecstavasia, who emphasize different aspects of Donna Haraway's volatile cyborg-netic organism (a nonhumanist hybrid that transgresses boundaries between human, machine and animal). Fraiberg's "Of Cyborgs & Other Indiscretions" illustrates how the "ontological myth" of Haraway's cyborg provides an antinomic body whose interconnected nature is simultaneously potent and dangerous. Paradoxically, however, the interconnected "resurfacing" that comprises the cyborg-netic body activates a discrete unit in the struggle against traditional, fragmentary discourses surrounding AIDS (66). Thus, by insisting on a networked—as opposed to an individualized—notion of the body, the theorist might effectively overcome traditional sites of authority dependent upon structures of fragmentation and isolation. Ecstavasia's "Fucking (with theory) For Money: Towards an Introduction of Escort Prostitution" constructs the prostitute as a cyborg-subject—a subject that focuses on ruptures, gaps and fragmented identity—rather than interpreting the prostitute as a victimized commodity of masculine economic exchange. By focusing on the discursive ruptures within which the prostitute is placed, the cyborgescort breaks down binary structures (such as inside/outside, public/ private, fantasy/reality) and reactivates subjectivity on the level of interest, desire, and power. Once again, transgression of formal categorical distinctions allows for a new conception of embodiment and postmodern empowerment. The idea of transgression is also discussed in the context of postmodern writing by Roberto Dainotto in "The Excremental Sublime: The Postmodern Literature of Blockage and Release." Dainotto identifies rigid social structures, the pressure of literary traditions and the impetus towards citation and repetition as the necessary "blockage" felt before the radical subject can fully emerge in the process of expulsion. Elaborating on this process of expulsion, the postmodern subject becomes "a sphincter muscle performing its daily activity of retention, manipulation, and ex-pression" (157). Dainotto is fully aware of the psychoanalytic overtones of this analogy, reminding his reader of the rebellious , even anarchic characteristics of the anal subject. Instead of contributing to economy and order, the anal subject's...