DOCSLIB.ORG

Download (8Mb)

Total Page：16

File Type：pdf, Size：1020Kb

Download full-text PDF Read full-text
Download (8Mb) A Thesis Submitted for the Degree of PhD at the University of Warwick Permanent WRAP URL: http://wrap.warwick.ac.uk/110900 Copyright and reuse: This thesis is made available online and is protected by original copyright. Please scroll down to view the document itself. Please refer to the repository record for this item for information to help you to cite it. Our policy information is available from the repository home page. For more information, please contact the WRAP Team at: wrap@warwick.ac.uk warwick.ac.uk/lib-publications THE BRITISH LIBRARY BRITISH THESIS SERVICE COPYRIGHT Reproduction of this thesis, other than as permitted under the United Kingdom Copyright Designs and Patents Act 1988, or under specific agreement with the copyright holder, is prohibited. This copy has been supplied on the understanding that it is copyright material and that no quotation from the thesis may be published without proper acknowledgement. REPRODUCTION QUALITY NOTICE Th e quality of this reproduction is dependent upon the quality of the original thesis. Whilst every effort has been made to ensure the highest quality of reproduction, some pages which contain small or poor printing may not reproduce well. Previously copyrighted material (journal articles, published texts etc.) is not reproduced. THIS THESIS HAS BEEN REPRODUCED EXACTLY AS RECEIVED FLATLINE CONSTRUCTS: GOTHIC MATERIALISM AND CYBERNETIC THEORY-FICTION Mark Fisher Presented for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy Department of Philosophy University of Warwick July 1999 Numerous Originals in Colour Abstract FLATLINE CONSTRUCTS: GOTHIC MATERIALISM AND CYBERNETIC THEORY- FICTION Cyberpunk fiction has been called “the supreme literary expression, if not of postmodernism then of late capitalism itself.” (Jameson) This thesis aims to analyse and question this claim by rethinking cyberpunk Action, postmodernism and late capitalism in terms of three - interlocking - themes: cybernetics, the Gothic and fiction. It claims that while what has been called “postmodernism” has been preoccupied with cybernetic themes, cybernetics has been haunted by the Gothic. The Gothic has always enjoyed a peculiarly intimate relation with the fictional. Baudrillard's theories, meanwhile, suggest that, in a period dominated by (cybernetic) simulation, fiction has a new cultural role. By putting “theory” into dialogue with “fiction”, the thesis examines Baudrillard's suggestion that the era of cybernetics (what he calls “third order simulacra”) “puts an end to science fiction, but also to theory, as specific genres”. The version of the Gothic the thesis presents is one stripped of many of its conventional cultural associations; it is a material (and materialist) Gothic.The machinery for re-thinking the Gothic comes from Deleuze-Guattari’s A Thousand Plateaus. Deriving not from the familiar literary sources (the so-called Gothic novels of the late eighteenth- and early nineteenth century) but from Wilhelm Worringer’s work on “barbarian art”, Deleuze-Guattari’s version of the Gothic departs from any reference to the supernatural. The crucial theme in Worringer, Deleuze-Guattari establish, is that of nonorganic continuum. Following Deleuze-Guattari’s lead, the thesis analyses key cyberpunk texts such as Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner, David Cronenberg’s Videodrome and William Gibson’s Neuromancer in terms of what it calls this “hypematuralist” theme. While these texts have often been analysed in terms of “postmodernism” and “cyberpunk,” they have rarely been discussed in terms of the Gothic. Here, though, it will be shown that these texts, and important precursors, such as Ballard’s The Atrocity Exhibition, are centrally concerned with the breakdown of the boundary between the animate and the inanimate. (A theme that cybernetics has also confronted). The thesis aims to demonstrate that, in its fixation upon catatonic trance, bodies that do not end at the skin, and agency-without-subjectivity, cyberpunk or “imploded science fiction” converges the Gothic with cybernetics on what, following Gibson, it calls the flatline. The fiatline has two important senses, referring to (1) a stale of “unlife” (or “undeath”) and (2) a condition of radical immanence. The thesis is divided into four chapters, each of which considers the flallinc under a different aspect. Chapter 1 concerns the flatlining of cybernetics and postmodernism; Chapter 2 deals with the fiatlining of the body, paying particular attention to the Deleuze-Guattari/Artaud concept of the Body without Organs; Chapter 3 focuses upon the flatlining of reproduction, opposing both sexual and mechanical reproduction to Deleuze-Guattari’s idea of (Gothic) propagation; Chapter 4 considers the flatlining of fiction itself in the context of (Baudrillard’s) hyperreality. 2 Contents Title page 1 Abstract 2 Contents 3 Notes on References 4 Introduction 6 1. Screens, Screams, Flatlines: Cybernetics, Postmodernism and the Gothic 17 How an Android Must Feel 17 Cybernetics, Postmodernism, Fiction 27 Flatlines 35 Constructs 45 Second Naturalism 49 2. Body Image Fading Down Corridors of Television Sky: the Media Landscape and the Schizophrenic Implosion of Subjectivity f»(> The Body Without Image 60 The Body without Organs and Intensive Quantities 61 Intensive Voyages and Cyberspace 64 The Mediatized Body 67 Jumping Out of our Skin 70 From Narcissism to Schizophrenia 73 Stimulating the Gothic Body: Videodrome X1 Tactile Power 85 The Atrocity Exhibition 95 Atroci-TV 102 C alastrophe M anagement 1 (16 Beyond the Pleasures of the Organs 107 3. Xerox and Xenogenesis: Mechanical Reproduction and Gothic Propagation 110 Let Me Tell You About My Mother 111 The Simulacrum’s Revenge 117 Samuel Butler and Surplus Value of Code 124 Nuptials Against Nature: Sorcery and Propagation 134 The Wasp Factory: Neuromancer 140 Capitalism and Isophrcnia: Ashpool 142 Wintcrmutation: Neuromancer as Sorcerous Narrative 146 4. Black Mirror: Hypernaturalism, Hyperreality and Hyperfiction 152 Never Mind Metaphor 153 Borges Doesn’t Make it into Cyberspace 155 Hyperreality and Postmodernist Fiction 162 S(x:ial Science/ Social Science Fiction (How the True World Became a Simulation) 170 The Decline of the Shadow (or, the End of the Marvelous) 175 Machinism and Animism (or, Gremlins in the Hyperreal) 182 Capitalism as Toy Story: Hyperfiction, Strange Loops and Rhizomes 190 A Closing Parable: Hyperfiction and In the Mouth of Madness 196 Conclusion . 202 Bibliography 206 3 Notes on References Abbreviations - as listed below - are used for frequently referenced texts. To avoid cluttering the text with dates, and to enable the reader to easily identify texts cited, other references are given in footnotes. The full reference for each text is given both in the bibliography and when first cited in the thesis. Subsequent references are given in the shortened form of author and title, c.g. Jameson, Geopolitical Aesthetic AE - Ballard, The Atrocity Exhibition, London: Flamingo/ HarperCollins, 1993 - n denotes annotations made by Ballard AO - Dcleuzc-Guattari, Anti-Oedipus : Capitalism and Schizophrenia, trans. Robert Hurley, Mark Seem and Helen R. Lane, London: Athlone Press, 1984 C - Wiener, Cybernetics, or Control and Communication in the Animal and the Machine, Cambridge, Massachussctts: M.I.T. Press, 1961 CZ - Gibson, Count Zero, London: Grafton, 1987 EC - Baudrillard, ‘The Ecstasy of Communication”, in The Anti-Aesthetic: Essays on Postmodern Culture, ed. Hal Foster, Port Townsend: Washington Bay Press, 1983 ETH - Spinoza, The Ethics, Treatise on the Emendation o f the Intellect, Selected Letters, trans. Samuel Shirley, Indianapolis/ Cambridge: Hackctt Publishing Company, 1992 F - Jackson, Fantasy: The Literature of Subversion, London and New York: Methuen, 1981 GGi - Wiener, God and Golem inc.: A Comment on Certain Points where Cybernetics Impinges on Religion, London: Chapman and Hall, 1964 HUHB - Wiener, The Human Use o f Human Beings: Cybernetics and Society, London: Free Association Books, 1989 MLO - Gibson, Mona Lisa Overdrive, London: Grafton, 1995 N - Gibson, Neuromancer, London: Grafton, 1987 PCLLC - Jameson, Postmodernism, or the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism, Verso: London and New York, 1991 PF - McHalc, Postmodernist Fiction, New York: Methuen, 1987 PFL - Penguin Freud Library; volume numbers as indicated in the text S - Baudrillard, Seduction, trans. Brian Singer, New York: St Martin’s Press, 1990 SED - Baudrillard, Symbolic Exchange and Death, trans. Iain Hamilton Grant, London/ Thousand Oaks/ New Delhi: Sage publications, 1993 SS - Baudrillard, Simulation and Simulacra, trans. Sheila Faria Glaser, Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan Press, 1994 4 TP - Deleuze-Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, trans. Brian Massumi. London: Athlone Press, 1988 Notes on quotations To avoid confusion, square brackets have been used where an excision has been made in a quotation. Wherever dots appear in the text without square brackets, they are originally present in the text quoted. 5 INTRODUCTION Isn’t it strange the way the wind makes inanimate objects move? Doesn't it look odd when things which usually just lie there lifeless suddenly start fluttering. Don’t you agree? I remember once looking out onto an empty square, watching huge scraps of paper whirling angrily round and round, chasing one another as if each had sworn to kill the others: and I couldn’t feel the wind at all since I was standing in the lee of a house. A moment later they seemed to have calmed down, but then once again
Load more

Recommended publications
  • Schelling's Naturalism: Motion, Space, and the Volition of Thought
    View metadata, citation and similar papers at core.ac.uk brought to you by CORE provided by Scholarship@Western Western University Scholarship@Western Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository 9-23-2015 12:00 AM Schelling's Naturalism: Motion, Space, and the Volition of Thought Ben Woodard The University of Western Ontario Supervisor Tilottama Rajan The University of Western Ontario Joint Supervisor Joan Steigerwald The University of Western Ontario Graduate Program in Theory and Criticism A thesis submitted in partial fulfillment of the equirr ements for the degree in Doctor of Philosophy © Ben Woodard 2015 Follow this and additional works at: https://ir.lib.uwo.ca/etd Part of the History of Philosophy Commons Recommended Citation Woodard, Ben, "Schelling's Naturalism: Motion, Space, and the Volition of Thought" (2015). Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository. 3314. https://ir.lib.uwo.ca/etd/3314 This Dissertation/Thesis is brought to you for free and open access by Scholarship@Western. It has been accepted for inclusion in Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository by an authorized administrator of Scholarship@Western. For more information, please contact wlswadmin@uwo.ca. Schelling's Naturalism: Motion, Space, and the Volition of Thought (Thesis Format: Monograph) by Benjamin Graham Woodard A thesis submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctorate of Philosophy in Theory and Criticism The School of Graduate and Postdoctoral Studies The University of Western Ontario London, Ontario, Canada © Ben Woodard 2015 Abstract: This dissertation examines F.W.J. von Schelling's Philosophy of Nature (or Naturphilosophie) as a form of early, and transcendentally expansive, naturalism that is, simultaneously, a naturalized transcendentalism.
    [Show full text]
  • Near Vermilion Sands: the Context and Date of Composition of an Abandoned Literary Draft by J. G. Ballard
    Near Vermilion Sands: The Context and Date of Composition of an Abandoned Literary Draft by J. G. Ballard Chris Beckett ‘We had entered an inflamed landscape’1 When Raine Channing – ‘sometime international model and epitome of eternal youthfulness’2 – wanders into ‘Topless in Gaza’, a bio-fabric boutique in Vermilion Sands, and remarks that ‘Nothing in Vermilion Sands ever changes’, she is uttering a general truth about the fantastic dystopian world that J. G. Ballard draws and re-draws in his collection of stories set in and around the tired, flamboyant desert resort, a resort where traumas flower and sonic sculptures run to seed.3 ‘It’s a good place to come back to,’4 she casually continues. But, like many of the female protagonists in these stories – each a femme fatale – she is a captive of her past: ‘She had come back to Lagoon West to make a beginning, and instead found that events repeated themselves.’5 Raine has murdered her ‘confidant and impresario, the brilliant couturier and designer of the first bio-fabric fashions, Gavin Kaiser’.6 Kaiser has been killed – with grim, pantomime karma – by a constricting gold lamé shirt of his own design: ‘Justice in a way, the tailor killed by his own cloth.’7 But Kaiser’s death has not resolved her trauma. Raine is a victim herself, a victim of serial plastic surgery, caught as a teenager in Kaiser’s doomed search for perpetual gamin youth: ‘he kept me at fifteen,’ she says, ‘but not because of the fashion-modelling. He wanted me for ever when I first loved him.’8 She hopes to find in Vermilion Sands, in its localized curvature of time and space, the parts of herself she has lost on a succession of operating tables.
    [Show full text]
  • A–Z Glossary
    Page 279 16 A–Z Glossary Adorno A critical theorist, essayist, philosopher, musicologist and social critic, Theodor Wiesengrund Adorno (Frankfurt am Main 1903 – Visp 1969) is best known as a leading member of the Frankfurt School. Following the submission of his doctoral thesis on Husserl he studied composition and sought a career in music. Though by the end of the 1920s his essays on music had become more popular, Adorno’s early work as a composer and music critic was not well received and he came to devote more energy to philosophy, beginning his association with the Institute for Social Research in 1928. For Adorno, thought generally misrepresents reality by making it con- form to the instrumental human interests which dominate under capitalist modernity. Under Adorno’s analysis, modern society falsely understands the world as a totality of facts, when it can never be fully described or cognized in general terms. He was deeply critical of what he saw as the political conservativism of scientific positivism, and argued for dialectical method in philosophical research. Rejecting the idea that philosophy pro- vides access to a direct or unmediated set of truths, Adorno suggests that only dialectics can escape ‘identity thinking’: thought distorted by relations of social power which attempts to make objects conform to inadequate con- cepts. It is therefore in the anomalous – or ‘non-identical’ – that Adorno finds the strongest indictments of the poverty of the present state of things. Dialectics is ‘the consistent consciousness of nonidentity’, he writes in Negative Dialectics (1966). Though heavily indebted to Marx, Adorno remained sceptical about the revolutionary potential of the working class, preferring to speak of the way in which late capitalism permeates all levels of society with its own instru- mental logic.
    [Show full text]
  • Is There a Future for Accelerationism?
    Is there a Future for Accelerationism? Abstract Accelerationism emerged from the insatiable market of ideas, a market that it attempts to intensify and ultimately repurpose in its own image. It is, however, an idea with consequences. The logic of accelerationism is not simply to exacerbate an inherent crisis of capitalism, either in order to provide a remedy in a more speedy fashion or consign it to its doom as a merciful gesture – putting it out of its misery, as it were. The process of acceleration underpinning the theory, of speeding up or intensification, is instead an active component of a re-imagined (post-)capitalism. This re-imagining is hyperstitional – a performative fiction invoked to overturn many seldom-questioned assumptions held across the academic spectrum. In attempting to foment the approach it both craves and envisages renders accelerationism almost unrecognisable as a serious contribution to academic debates on organisations and their management, even from critical perspectives. This article is not an attempt to accelerate nor to exemplify accelerationism, but instead contributes to the debate by identifying, examining and connecting core features of the conceptual framework underpinning the different approaches to accelerationism. It will focus in particular on Deleuze and Guattari’s contribution to this framework (desiring production; deterritorialisation; Body Without Organs, etc.) and examine their version of assemblage (agencement) as a way of conceptualising both the transformation of the machinery of capitalism
    [Show full text]
  • Masses, Turbo-Capitalism and Power in Jean Baudrillard's Social
    International Journal of Theology, Philosophy and Science No. 3, Year 2/2018 MASSES, TURBO-CAPITALISM AND POWER IN JEAN BAUDRILLARD’S SOCIAL AND POLITICAL ONTOTHEOLOGY PhD. Prof. Spiros MAKRIS Assistant Professor in Political Theory University of Macedonia, Thessaloniki, GREECE Email: smakris@uom.gr ABSTRACT If postmodern Jean Baudrillard (1929-2007) could be defined as a theorist of power - to the extent that for some this is a contradiction by definition, although something very similar takes place in the case of Michel Foucault, he could be defined as a theorist of meta-power in the globalized era of turbo-capitalism. In his late texts (2005), which were published in 2010, the eminent French philosopher builds a provocative theory about power by using the classic concepts of domination and hegemony within the contemporary social, economic, political and ideological context of neoliberal globalization. In these papers, he analyzes in-depth the meta- power of hegemony in comparison with the power of domination. Actually, by signifying the critical passage of postwar capitalism from the phase of production to the phase of consumption, as Zygmunt Bauman does in his relevant work, Baudrillard formulates a meta-power theory as the equivalent of what he defines as turbo-capitalism. What is at stake is no longer the conventional issues of state sovereignty, Marx-inspired concept of alienation and Critical Theory-like negative dialectics but the crucial questions of hegemony, hostage and evilness. In short, Jean Baudrillard builds a new ontological and by extension disciplinary and theoretical field concerning global power, where the ‘Empire of Good’, or turbo-capitalism in his own terminology, is reborn in a totally catastrophic way (see simulation in the sense of a capitalist hypocrisy) either as an ‘Axis of Evil’ or as the ‘problem of terror’ (see simulacrum in the sense of a Lacanian stage of image within which turbo-capitalism represses, through a Freudian process of repelling, its unfamiliar self/i.e.
    [Show full text]
  • King's Research Portal
    King’s Research Portal DOI: 10.1080/21693293.2019.1609199 Document Version Peer reviewed version Link to publication record in King's Research Portal Citation for published version (APA): Michelsen, N., & de Orellana, P. G. (2019). Discourses of Resilience in the US Alt Right. Resilience, International Policies, Practices and Discourses, 7(3), 271-287. https://doi.org/10.1080/21693293.2019.1609199 Citing this paper Please note that where the full-text provided on King's Research Portal is the Author Accepted Manuscript or Post-Print version this may differ from the final Published version. If citing, it is advised that you check and use the publisher's definitive version for pagination, volume/issue, and date of publication details. And where the final published version is provided on the Research Portal, if citing you are again advised to check the publisher's website for any subsequent corrections. General rights Copyright and moral rights for the publications made accessible in the Research Portal are retained by the authors and/or other copyright owners and it is a condition of accessing publications that users recognize and abide by the legal requirements associated with these rights. •Users may download and print one copy of any publication from the Research Portal for the purpose of private study or research. •You may not further distribute the material or use it for any profit-making activity or commercial gain •You may freely distribute the URL identifying the publication in the Research Portal Take down policy If you believe that this document breaches copyright please contact librarypure@kcl.ac.uk providing details, and we will remove access to the work immediately and investigate your claim.
    [Show full text]
  • Language After Philosophy of Nature: Schelling’S Geology of Divine Names
    View metadata, citation and similar papers at core.ac.uk brought to you by CORE provided by University of Liverpool Repository LANGUAGE AFTER PHILOSOPHY OF NATURE: SCHELLING’S GEOLOGY OF DIVINE NAMES DANIEL WHISTLER Each mineral is a real philological problem.1 Future commentary on Dante belongs to the natural sciences… No one has yet approached Dante with a geologist’s hammer, in order to ascertain the crystalline structure of his rock, in order to study the particles of other minerals in it, to study its smoky colour, its garish patterning, to judge it as a mineral crystal which has been subjected to the most varied series of accidents.2 What happens to language after the post-linguistic turn? In what does a speculative approach to religion consist? Such are the two questions around which this essay is structured. It is not my purpose to give a comprehensive answer to either question; rather, I am concerned with one very specific approach that could be taken, and this is the approach of F.W.J. Schelling. Schelling has never been so relevant, and this is in no small part thanks to Iain Hamilton Grant’s Philosophies of Nature after Schelling. Grant’s work–part of the recent resurgence in speculative philosophies—has been instrumental in presenting Schelling’s Naturphilosophie as a viable pursuit for philosophy in the wake of Deleuze. This chapter is intended as a “regional application” of Grant’s presentation of Schelling onto philosophy of language and religion. It is important to stress straight-off that, while language and the numinous may well be two of the deconstructionist’s favourite tools for undermining theoretical discourse, this chapter has no such aim.
    [Show full text]
  • Anti-Fascism/Art/Theory an Introduction to What Hurts Us
    Anti-fascism/Art/Theory An Introduction to What Hurts Us Angela Dimitrakaki and Harry Weeks Three Narratives We will begin by stating the obvious. For reasons explained by many but averted by none, the consolidation of global capitalism executed by neoliberalism has generated such levels of polarisation and discontent as to have apparently raised fascism from the dead, given it – besides electoral purchase – an internet connection and a clickbait farm guaranteeing followers in the millions. That’s how one narrative goes. According to another narrative, it is not spectral, or even zombie, fascism that has entered the political room of the Global North while sweeping very large territories of the Global South, but a new configuration of authoritarianism and social hatred: Enzo Traverso, author of The New Faces of Fascism (2019), speaks of ‘post-fascism’, arguing that many of the authoritarian parties and rulers of the radical right do not claim a connection with fascism: On the one hand, the new far right is no longer fascist; on the other hand, we cannot define it without comparing it with fascism. The new right is a hybrid thing that might return to fascism, or it could turn into a new form of conservative, authoritarian, populist democracy. The concept of post-fascism tries to capture this.1 But at the same time, Traverso admits, ‘the new right is nationalist, racist, and xenophobic’, to which, we would add, that it also tends to be attached to strongman-type, ‘charismatic’ leadership.2 These are pretty solid attributes of fascism, especially when they congeal into a violent discourse identifying as a core cause ‘external’ and ‘internal’ enemies that must be 1 Nicolas Allen and Martín Cortés, ‘Fascisms Old and New: An Interview with Enzo Traverso’, Jacobin, 4 February 2019, https://jacobinmag.com/2019/02/enzo-traverso-post-fascism-ideology-conservatism, accessed 10 January 2019.
    [Show full text]
  • Review Article Spirit in the Crypt Negarestani Vs Land
    Cosmos and History: The Journal of Natural and Social Philosophy, vol. 15, no. 1, 2019 REVIEW ARTICLE SPIRIT IN THE CRYPT NEGARESTANI VS LAND Vincent Le ABSTRACT: Iranian philosopher Reza Negarestani’s first 2008 book Cyclonopedia was written under the influence of Nick Land’s nihilistic and antihumanist philosophy which seeks to critique anthropomorphism by confronting us with our coming extinction beyond which our concepts of reason cannot reach. Since Cyclonopedia’s publication, however, Negarestani has left behind Landian nihilism to develop in his 2018 book Intelligence and Spirit a neorationalist philosophy of mind whose primary influences are Sellars, Brandom, and Hegel. At 579 clearly written yet dense pages, it is difficult even for a review article to encapsulate the book in its entirety. The first half of this article instead aims to provide a sense of the book’s overall project by focusing on how Negarestani outlines and develops his neorationalist philosophy through a critique of Land’s antihumanism. Never one to remain silent whilst others seek to resurrect Hegel from the dead, since December 2018, Land has been releasing a draft on his blog Urban Futures 2.1 of his new monograph Crypto- Current: Bitcoin and Philosophy, which proffers the most up to date articulation of his main antihumanist tenets. Having organized Intelligence and Spirit around Negarestani’s objections to Land, this article’s second half turns to Crypto-Current to see how Land is able to provide convincing responses to each of Negarestani’s objections, showing some to be based on strawman characterizations, others to stem from misunderstandings of Land’s position, and still others to lack traction at all.
    [Show full text]
  • Friendship on Fascism, Consensus & the Politics of Philosophy
    FRIENDSHIP ON FASCISM, CONSENSUS & THE POLITICS OF PHILOSOPHY 0. When the political right declares the political left to be the “true fascists” in the midst of our contemporary culture wars, they are perhaps recognising their own aptitude for producing an internal consensus in contrast to the left’s inability to agree & its readiness to eject everything which does not wholly coincide with itself. This is, of course, to suggest that fascists can’t agree. The truth is that they must. Here, already, the fi rst of our paradoxes emerges. This essay will attempt to grapple with many. 1. What defi nes the popular conception of fascism today is itself largely in contention. Generally speaking, fascism seems to be defi ned by an indeterminate intolerance & the forced suppression of any opposition. Whilst this is indeed a central tendency at the heart of any fascism, the nature of the suppression at hand – which underpins all such accusations, knocked back & forth across the political divide – is often vague & underdefi ned. At the very least, we can say that perceptions of power are central. The left’s ability to set the cultural agenda, arguably underappreciated within its own ranks, is seen as tyrannical by a right which nonetheless has a fi rmer grip on state power than it often likes to admit. Nonetheless, the ground from which both accusations of fascism are thrown is worth taking note of. Holding these two perspectives together – with no comment made on the validity of the arguments which constitute them – we begin to see a picture of two opposing forces which give shape to our contemporary status quo; of two opposing sides which constitute the internal borders of that which is, warring over how far they can shift the Overton Window which frames our present moment.
    [Show full text]
  • Body and Space in J. G. Ballard's Concrete Island and High-Rise
    Universidade Federal de Minas Gerais Faculdade de Letras Pedro Henrique dos Santos Groppo Body and Space in J. G. Ballard’s Concrete Island and High-Rise Minas Gerais – Brasil Abril – 2009 Groppo 2 Acknowledgments I would like to thank Prof. Julio Jeha for the encouragement and support. He was always open and willing to make sense of my fragmentary and often chaotic ideas. Also, thanks to CNPq for the financial support. And big thanks to the J. G. Ballard online community, whose creativity and enthusiasm towards all things related to Ballard were captivating. Groppo 3 Abstract The fiction of J. G. Ballard is unusually concerned with spaces, both internal and exterior. Influenced by Surrealism and Freudian psychoanalysis, Ballard’s texts explore the thin divide between mind and body. Two of his novels of the 1970s, namely Concrete Island (1974) and High-Rise (1975) depict with detail his preoccupation with how the modern, urban world pushes man to the point where an escape to inner world is the solution to the tacit and oppressive forces of the external world. This escape is characterized by a suspension of conventional morality, with characters expressing atavistic tendencies, an effective return of the repressed. The present thesis poses a reading of these two novels, aided by analyses of some of Ballard’s short stories, with a focus on the relation between bodies and spaces and how they project and introject into one another. Such a reading is grounded on theories of the uncanny as described by Freud and highlights Ballard’s kinship to Gothic fiction.
    [Show full text]
  • The Complete Stories: V. 2 Ebook
    THE COMPLETE STORIES: V. 2 PDF, EPUB, EBOOK Isaac Asimov | 464 pages | 20 Mar 2012 | HarperCollins Publishers | 9780006480167 | English | London, United Kingdom The Complete Stories: v. 2 PDF Book A teenage horror buff is so smitten with a sexy classmate that he helps her use black magic on their loathsome English teacher, with shocking and bewildering results. Another adventure begins. Warner Bros. Recombine in every possible way. Don't expect too much kindness from Mr Dahl though -- the man must have had more than his fair share of demons to exorcise. From the very beginning technological innovation has replaced the delineated notion of "place" with an increasing number of meaningless, formless "spaces. Bates imposes a curfew in the open city of Los Angeles in an attempt to curb resistance activity; Donovan and Ham make plans to hit a Visitors' conference. Domestic Television Distribution. Dec 31, Ignatius Vonnegut rated it liked it. Will have to go out and buy this book as I have to give it back to the library. The women on their balconies are interchangable. Add the first question. Would recommend for those looking for excellent science fiction stories with a more literary bent. See 2 questions about The Complete Short Stories…. The one where two men conspire to sleep with each other's wives without the women's knowledge and therefore consent is hugely problematic and shouldn't be published without context, as it is done in the introduction for another story called 'Bitch'. Its title was inspired by a highly inaccurate and sensationalized article about the crash that blinded him, which claimed he had been shot down instead of simply having to land because of low fuel.
    [Show full text]