James Donald

What's new? A letter to Terry Flew

Thanks for letting me see your article on ‘Creativity, the “new humanism” and cultural studies’. As always, it contains much to admire and think about. Reading it was a frustrating experience, though, not least because your silences are as tantalizing as your arguments are telling. I mean that, although you choose not to reply directly to criticism of what Ned Rossiter and Danny Butt in a series of postings and papers (at the 2002 CSAA conference, for example) have pointedly labelled ‘the Queensland Ideology’, I could not help reading the article in the context of that debate. (In broad terms, I take Ned and Danny’s objections to the ‘Queensland Ideology’ to be (a) that you and some of your colleagues have been over-enthusiastic in your embrace of Creative Industries as a feature of ‘the new economy’, (b) that you have either failed to spot ‘the new economy’ as the old wolf of capitalism in designer clothing, or else that you have embraced those underlying values uncritically, and (c) that, either way, you have abandoned defining and still worthwhile features of Cultural Studies as an educational and political project.) In my response to you here, I step back from that local engagement to set your supposedly new thinking about the Humanities in the context of a longer battle of ideas about the purpose of universities and the competing claims of critical and vocational faculties. Let me start by simply logging some points on which I agree and disagree with you. Above all, I admire your alertness and responsiveness to change: changes in the world we study and prepare students for, developments in the academic and intellectual field, and the emerging institutional and political conditions in which we work. You are dead right to focus on the outcomes and social utility of what we do, and I welcome your attempt to think through the implications of your theoretical perspectives in order to derive from them specific proposals for how we might reshape the curriculum and how we might teach new things in different ways. I am more sceptical about two of your key terms: ‘creativity’ and the ‘New Humanities’. The first is an old bugbear of mine, and I have to tell you that you fail

Kant, the press, and the public use of reason

Abstract Is it wise to structure critical discussion of the media around a normative ideal of publicness? This article suggests some potential problems by re-examining Kant’s conception of the public use of reason, primarily as articulated in his newspaper article, “An Answer to the Question: What Is Enlightenment?” (1784). Kant’s account of the enthusiasm of a German newspaper-reading public for the French Revolution not only introduces an aesthetic dimension into political judgment, but also prefigures the strategies of media critique. The limits of “the public” as an optic through which to judge the social functions of the media are discussed in the light of Kierkegaard’s phenomenology and Ian Hunter’s recent excavation of the tradition of civil philosophy associated with Pufendorf and Thomasius.

As It Happened … Borderline, the Uncanny and the Cosmopolitan

The borderline has the air of a place where the uncanny belongs: an intermediate and uneasy zone between different states, a no-man’s-land both politically and existentially. The spatial metaphor does not altogether fit, however, at least not in thinking about Freud’s 1919 essay on ‘The “Uncanny”’. In good Kantian fashion, Freud’s aim there is to draw a conceptual borderline around what is specific and unique to the Unheimlich. The term, he acknowledges, has something to do with broader categories like fear, dread and horror, but that is too fuzzy for Freud: ‘we may expect that a special core of feeling is present which justifies the use of a special conceptual term. One is curious to know what this common core is which allows us to distinguish as “uncanny” certain things which lie within the field of what is frightening.’ The desire to fix the limits of the concept leads to Freud’s opening digression into the etymology of heimlich and unheimlich. Although the opposition between the two makes it tempting ‘to conclude that what is “uncanny” is frightening precisely because it is not known and familiar’, Freud discovers, of course, that the relationship between the two is not one of a boundary or outer edge where the ontological security of the known and the familiar abuts the strangeness and danger of the unknown imagined as another space.1

Some of these days : black stars, jazz aesthetics, and modernist culture

Introduction A Migration of Stars Chapter 1 New Negro Paul Robesons Formation in Harlem Chapter 2 Between the Jungle and the Skyscraper Josephine Baker in Paris and Berlin Chapter 3 Ballet mecanique Jazz Aesthetics and Modernist Film Chapter 4 Jazz in Stone and Steel Josephine Baker and Modern Architecture Chapter 5 Borderlines Race, Cosmopolitanism and the Modern Uncanny Chapter 6 Down the River of Dreams Songs of Exile and Nostalgia Chapter 7 Here I Stand Performing Politics Coda: Nicks Bar, New York City Notes Bibliography Index

Q&A Session after the Public Lecture of Quentin Skinner

This is a publication of the Q&A session that followed Quentin Skinners lecture. He was asked to reflect on variations of dependence (as an alternative to using a general notion of dependence); to comment on the application of his (positive) notion of freedom to cases where the outcome of the struggle for freedom is a different kind of unfreedom; to clarify relationships between the concepts of nondependence and noninterference and self-realization and noninterference.Настоящая публикация является расшифровкой обмена вопросами и ответами, последовавшего после лекции Квентина Скиннера. В частности его попросили ответить на вопросы о вариантах зависимости как альтернативе использования обобщенного понятия зависимости, о трактовке свободы применительно к ситуациям, когда борьба за свободу приводит к новому состоянию несвободы, об отношениях между концепциями независимости и невмешательства, самореализации и невмешательства.

Book review: The Spaces of the Modern City: Imaginaries, Politics, and Everyday Life. Edited by Gyan Prakash and Kevin M. Kruse. Princeton, NJ and Oxford: Princeton University Press. 2008. 472 pp.

There is something of the agora about this collection. A dozen well-informed citizen-scholars gather to discuss the topic of urban space, in a reasonably unbuttoned atmosphere. (The book grew out of a series of fellowships, seminars and colloquia, led by Gyan Prakash during his tenure as Director of the Shelby Cullom Center for Historical Studies at Princeton.) The contributors think about city space in different ways, but they are all equally passionate about telling their story. As a result, they sometimes, to some degree, appear to be talking past each other. But their travellers’ tales are so engaging, well-informed and imaginative that the element of randomness turns out to be an advantage. ‘The city’ hovers just beyond definition, and slightly out of focus, in the penumbra of different perspectives and mutual incomprehension, just as it should. In this way, the volume renders, in its diversity and form, the heteroglossia and argumentativeness of the lived city. Gyan Prakash kicks the book off with brisk panache, surveying the current lie of the land with authority and insight, but also announcing the polemic of The Spaces of the Modern City. He emphasizes three informing principles. First, the new urban scholarship is global in reach and cosmopolitan in attitude: Algiers, Baghdad, Johannesburg, Dakar and ‘Bombay cinema’ appear alongside Berlin, London, Los Angeles and Vienna. Second, claims Prakash, the contributors all ‘focus on the city as a spatial form of social life and power relations, not just a site of society and politics’ (p. 2). Although that was no doubt the brief, not all the contributors stick to it; but their digressions and divergences are part of the pleasure. The third defining feature of the collection is its interdisciplinarity. Implicit in Prakash’s Shelby Cullom project, I infer, was a desire to get historians to take the question of space seriously, not least by bringing historians together with scholars from a variety of other disciplines. If that is right, then, in its own terms, this book succeeds. Setting urban case studies in their historical moment makes them all the more compelling. But The Spaces of the Modern City has a larger ambition. That, states Prakash, is to ‘rethink the history of urban modernity and urban change’. Judged against that benchmark, the book does not articulate a new paradigm. But it does represent the current state of the art in rich and engaging detail.