Christian Moraru

The Inorganic Intellectual and the Reinvention of the Communal: A Provocation

There was, apparently, no Purgatory for arch-anti-intellectualist Spiro Agnew. Or, if there was one—better still, if there is one, in perpetuity—that would be Futurama’s ontologically ambiguous digital limbo. In it, the former Vice President stumbles around headless; no privacy up there, either, courtesy of YouTube or, if you prefer, theinfosphere.org, a website also known as “The Futurama Wiki.” If you have not watched the TV cartoon—I almost said “animated series,” but I would have been so wrong—if, as I say, you are not a fan of the cartoon, then you can educate yourself here about Agnew’s anticli-mactic departure. Rest assured, it was not a contract Richard Nixon took out on him posthumously, something Agnew did worry about while alive, but a golf cart accident in which ecofeminists were also involved and which seems to have occasioned Agnew’s decapitation.

Christian Fundamentalism and the Culture of Disenchantment by Paul Maltby (review)

the comparatist 39 : 2015 novel insists that “the articulation of rights on the basis of an individual death is thwarted in places mired with the deaths of many” (147), Anil’s Ghost forces readers to rethink a human rights framework. The next chapter moves us from the subcontinent to the UK, taking up at once how stereotypes migrate and the stereotype of migrancy in Monica Ali’s Brick Lane. In this, the very movement of stereotypes along with people puts under crisis the definition of Britishness itself. Finally the last chapter looks at the linked stereotypes of outsourcing and terror in the transnational moment. It considers Mohsin Hamid’s The Reluctant Fundamentalist alongside popular representations of outsourcings to unpack how all of these works join and hold in tension ideas of terror and labor. The book concludes with a larger consideration of the debates around world literature and global fiction, issuing a new set of theses about the stereotype. While In Stereotype is notable for its theoretical sophistication, beautiful close readings, and lush and readable prose, there are a couple of concepts that jump out of this book as having larger theoretical purchase even beyond this study’s ranging purview. For one, I believe the theorization of the stereotype and its relation to postcoloniality will be definitive. Even more widely, Chakravorty’s conceptualization of the “biocultural” draws crucial attention to, in her words, “the embodied way power is exercised culturally as well as biologically” (272). This focus on the work of culture in biopolitics is a crucial extension of Foucault’s concept. In short, this is an important book not only for postcolonial studies of South Asian Anglophone literature and culture, but also for modeling what an ethical reading practice is and does in the socalled age of globalization.

The Analog-Digital Border

Bookstore shelves, opines network theorist Alexander R. Galloway in The Interface Effect (2013), overflow with “fluff on digital this and digital that.” If this is true, then it bears asking perhaps why this stuff is “fluff.” What makes the bulk of the literature on the much bandied-about “digital turn” in the humanities and the world at large a cliché-ridden tedium? Might the repetitiveness presumably plaguing the scholarship stem, at least in part, from the quasi-invariably “presentist” approach to digitality, namely, from the widely shared assumption that digital culture—more specifically, the digital imaginary undergirding it—simply and miraculously came about on the heels of recent, post-1970 technological advances? In other words, could it be that critics have been focusing too much on their moment in history, on the “nowness” of digital newness and on the future cyber culture promises? And, if so, what can one see if one looks in the opposite direction? That is to say, in what sense does the digitally enabled future become visible, indeed intellectually inevitable, if one turns to the past instead, if one glances ahead to it? Developing arguments previously tested in The Aesthetic Contract: Statutes of Art and Intellectual Work in Modernity (1997), Around the Book: Systems and Literacy (2010), and elsewhere, Henry Sussman’s new and highly provocative monograph Playful Intelligence: Digitizing Tradition undertakes precisely this turn. In so doing, it revisits pivotal moments in literary, philosophical, and cultural modernity as allegorizing, anticipating, and at times even formulating the “proto-“ (or “soft”) cybernetic” discourse that paves the way to the post-WW II computational revolution and its “strong” systems theory. Guided by such cyber-visionaries as Douglass R. Hofstadter (Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid, 1979) and Anthony Wilden (System and Structure, 1972), Sussman’s literary-textual genealogy of the digital sets out to heal the historical wound or divide provoked—rather unnecessarily— by too narrowly specialized accounts of the rise and function of computer systems, digital literacy, online communication, and the like. More significant still is, to me, the gap his inquiry fills between the analog-oriented traditional humanities and today’s digitally minded “interdisciplinarity.” This is, in my view, the fault line most responsible for the epistemological, disciplinary, institutional, and even political configuration of our academic world and, no less, for the equally multiple predicaments following from this adversarial setup. Yet again, this is a schism that we do not need. Nonetheless, we are faced with it. To move forward, we must overcome it. I am glad to report that Sussman provides an intellectually and historically compelling rationale for doing just that. Laying out this rationale, his book’s chapter makeup foregrounds a personal take on literary-philosophical progress/innovation. This perspective, and the investigative method derived from it, is originally defined as “digitization of tradition.” Admittedly, this critical digitization can be pursued through a range of writers, thinkers, artists, places, and movements. Sussman’s chosen itinerary articulates a consistent, intriguing yet plausible, cultural narrative—a personal but compelling aesthetic prehistory of digitality before its advent proper. This story could have probably got underway with Romantic literature and its resistance to the Age of Reason’s “Prevailing Operating Systems” (POS), as Sussman’s brief discussion of “interactivity” in E. T. A. Hoffman goes to show. However, in Playful Intelligence, the digital ball really gets rolling with the “platforms” encrypted in the modernist visual arts. A case in point is, as Sussman explains in the first chapter, Wassily Kandinsky, on whose work the critic has dwelt extensively before. In leaving fauvist representationalism behind, Kandinsky’s “compositions” foreground, Sussman maintains, the “strong turn toward the digital at the expense of the analog.” Nothing short of “seismic,” the turn “allow[s]” artists like Kandinsky “a disqualification of prevailing aesthetic contracts and sub-contracts in an astonishing range of media and art-forms.” The sea-change entails practically an overhaul of the “conceptual hardware” of modernity in its more experimentalist embodiments. Thus, it comes as little surprise that the shift becomes even better marked in the “digitization of literature” obtaining in across Kafka’s oeuvre (chapter 2). A worldrenowned Kafka specialist, Sussman brings here his expertise to bear on the ways The Trial (1915) and The Castle’s (1926) subtle conversation with Dostoyevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov (1880) render “the digital underpinnings of literature explicit” by flaunting the second-order principles overseeing the intertextual dialogue. Analogously (if I may say so), the analysis of the Kafka parable “Der Bau” (The Burrow [1931]) in chapter 3,

Critique and Its Postnational Aftermath

The question, or questions rather, go, as far as I am concerned, something like this: Is critique inescapably circumscribed by mid-twentieth-century Kritik? If so—and on this ground—is critique also perhaps outmoded, on history’s proverbial ash heap? Further, if we answer with another “yes,” the last and, to me, most timely question then is, Can one still be critical—of literature, of the world, and of ourselves—after critique, in an aftermath undeniably fashioned urbi et orbi by accelerating globalization?

Who's In? Who's Out?

July–August 2011 The passing of time provides clarity and perspective on literary art for which there is no substitute. It removes the distractions of writerly personality, and foregrounds the writerly products. Today’s fashion becomes yesterday’s failure; yesterday’s failure becomes today’s fashion. Overlooked or overrated—literary and critical gems are only visible with hindsight. Consider all the emerging authors prognosticated by critics and writers to become the next James Joyce or Samuel Beckett or Jorge Luis Borges and how few have risen to the accolades. Or remember today may be viewed against the relief of time. Such acts are more than just critical games. Rather, they are important exercises in helping direct our current writing and critical energies. American Book Review wants to know what the writing and criticism worlds will be like ten years from now. What authors will be in? What type of writing will be out? What poets will have faded, and who will be high up on our radar? What will be the “in” approach to criticism, and what will look like an historical artifact? those who became recognized as masters only in the slow brew of critical time—writers like Franz Kafka, Felipe Alfau, Roberto Bolaño, and Raymond Federman. One gauge of a literary generation’s power is its ability to exhibit critical foresight. To provide sharp prognostications of fiction’s future and the trajectory of current writers. To put hype and marketing aside and focus on the impact of writing and criticism. This highly speculative endeavor is perhaps the most difficult act in contemporary letters. Looking forward to a place where the writing and criticism

Da capo, or the Politics of Running

always envied the jazz musician, the ability to break into new song day after day, night after night, to be able to listen and answer to his or her fellow musician.... By comparison poetry is so utterly solitary & interior.” Lee Meitzen Grue declares that in her “next life I would like to be a singer.” Perhaps the urge is the almost universal one, to find an audience for individual expression. No matter how much one might know about jazz and the ways contemporary writers make use of the music, this book is a find and a pleasure to read. I’m already envisioning further Feinstein interviews with such jazz-inclined poets as Bill Zavatsky, Michael Harper, Michael McClure, Charles Suhor, Quincy Troupe, and James Emanuel; other jazz record producers might include Bob Rusch of Cadence Jazz Records and Michael Cuscuna of Blue Note. It would also be interesting to hear from Samuel Charters, poet and editor of The Poetry of the Blues (1963); David Meltzer, author of Reading Jazz (1993); and the multi-dimensional David Amram, who has worked with so many poets. And then, there are Archie Shepp and other jazz artists who also write poetry. In fact, the undeniable attraction between the arts is ongoing and inevitable, and conversations about the whys and wherefores are equally engaging.

“Dancing to the Typewriter”: Rewriting and Cultural Appropriation in Flight to Canada

Abstract Books titles tell the story. The original subtitle for Uncle Toms Cabin was “The Man Who Was a Thing.” In 1910 appeared a book by Mary White Ovington called Half a Man. Over one hundred years after the appearance of the Stowe book, The Man Who Cried I Am, by John A. Williams, was published. Quickskill thought of all of the changes that would happen to make a “Thing” into an “I Am.” Tons of paper. An Atlantic of blood. Repressed energy of anger that would form enough sun to light a solar system. A burnt-out black hole. A cosmic slave hole.