Was (is) taking place a Nomadic Practice?

This paper characterises Deleuze and Guattari's conception of the majoritarian subject in A Thousand Plateaus as a particular – and inevitably transitory – manifestation of sexed and gendered subjectivity emerging with late capitalism from the always mutating flows of creative life and suggests that their notion of the schizo or nomadic subject can inspire feminist solutions to the impasses posed by contemporary forms of sexed, gendered, and sexual identity. Feminism can thus be conceived as a schizoanalytic practice that fosters the kind of alternative subjects for which Deleuze and Guattari call: subjects that move beyond oppressive self–other relations towards a form of subjectivity that can welcome differences as well as the differentiating force of life itself.

Marxism, Postmodernism, Zizek Brian Donahue Abstract This article addresses some of the challenges to Marxism posed by the conditions of late capitalism and by the theoretical discourses of postmodernism, and makes a case for the continued relevance and value of Marxist theory for an ostensibly post-Marxist, would-be post-ideological period. The developments in the theory of ideology advanced in Slavoj Zizek's work, focusing on the role of psychology in the functioning of ideology under conditions of late capitalism, are then taken as valuable criticisms and revisions of the Marxist tradition that open useful avenues for critically understanding American culture and society in recent decades. Two of Zizek's key--and related--insights are then examined in relation to two well-known American films: the first, that the dominant subjective structure of postmodern society is that of the "pathological narcissist," is developed through a reading of Citizen Kane, particularly in light of Zizek's assessment of the role of the "maternal superego" in this subjective structure; and the second, that the breakdown between the simulacrum and the Real in postmodern society must be understood in terms of the attenuation of the Symbolic order, is developed through a reading of Pulp Fiction, framed in terms of the often-repeated concern about "desensitization" toward violence in a society in which the simulacrum is alleged to have usurped the Real. The essay concludes with a claim that Zizek should be understood not as a cynical, apolitical ironist, as some have critically read him, but rather as a "late Marxist" in the Jamesonian sense.--bd This essay begins in the midst of the ongoing dilemma posed by late-capitalist society and postmodern culture, namely, whether these remain the ultimate horizon of the contemporary world and whether efforts to resist, oppose, represent critically, or propose alternatives to the “cultural dominant” of postmodernism are merely atavistic. Below, I address some of the challenges to Marxism (as the discourse of the alternative to and the critique of capitalism par excellence) posed by the conditions of what Ernest Mandel has famously named “late capitalism” and by the theoretical discourse of what Dick Hebdige has called “the posts,”1 and make a case for the continued relevance and value of Marxist theory for an ostensibly post-Marxist, would-be post-ideological period. The developments in the theory of ideology advanced in Slavoj Zizek’s work, focusing on the role of psychology in the functioning of ideology under conditions of late capitalism, are then taken as valuable criticisms and revisions of the Marxist tradition that open useful avenues for critically understanding American culture and society in recent decades. Hard Times for Marxism The zeitgeist is anti-Marxist to the same extent that it is antimodern, exhibiting what Jean-François Lyotard calls in The Postmodern Condition, in what has become one of the great slogan-definitions of postmodernism, an “incredulity toward metanarratives” (xxiv), including especially those inherited from the modern European Enlightenment tradition, such as progress and liberation. Lyotard’s argument in brief: totalizing “master narratives” no longer function to legitimate and unify knowledge; the postmodern condition is marked by heterogeneous and radically incommensurable language games; attempts to reconcile language games through the principle of consensus are “terrorist” (63). This argument is typical of postmodern neopragmatist theorizing in that it precludes the kind of large-scale analyses that would allow adequate attempts to elaborate connections between the epistemological-linguistic theory he proposes and the social, economic, and cultural forces to which he only occasionally refers. Obviously, Marxism is directly challenged in Lyotard’s analysis since it traditionally promotes both a progressive teleology and an emancipatory politics. Other specific challenges to particular Marxist concepts and protocols are widespread; for example, its utopianism, a topic much discussed by Fredric Jameson,2 often comes under fire. As Clint Burnham notes, the contemporary criticisms of utopia take two primary forms: “First, the culture doubts the possibility of some ‘better place’ than the undoubtedly excellent world of late capitalism,” a criticism that he characterizes as “‘bad,’ or negative, or ideological, or neoconservative”; and second, “that culture characterizes itself as already nonrepresentational by doubting the possibility of representationalism,” a claim that he calls the...

From a feminist perspective, it is more than a little axiomatic to say that highereducation has traditionally produced and reproduced, naturalized and valorizedspecific sets of behavior, specific forms of knowledge and specific versions ofintellectual practice which celebrate that which is coded as masculine at theexpense of that which is produced as feminine.The production of this opposition is attendant on the primacy of the westerncultural separation of the public from the private and the celebration of all that isassociated with the first term at the expense of all that is subsumed under thesecond. This, in turn, is based on the construction of masculinity as synonymouswith rationality, intellect, reason, culture and the production of femininity as all thatis not male: in this binaristic logic women are irrational, emotional and nurturing.Braidotti (1994a) summarizes the situation well when she writes:the universalistic stance, with its conflation of the masculine to represent thehuman and the confinement of the feminine to a secondary position of devalued"otherness", rests upon a classical system of dualistic oppositions, such as, forinstance; nature/culture, active/passive, rational/irrational, masculine/feminine.Feminists argue that this dualistic mode of thinking creates binary differences onlyto ordain them in a hierarchical scale of power relations. (p. 155)Consistent with this logic, the university has been naturalized as a homogeneousmale institution: the true home, if you like, of the 'enlightened male subject'.Women's marginality within academic environments manifests itself in diverse andcomplex ways. Women have been consistently absent, not just from theclassrooms, offices, and meeting places of Academe, but also from the discourses,texts, and subjects on which a university education is based (Rich, 1979). Thereare fewer women academics in universities than men, they tend to be concentratedin the lower employment categories, and by extension, more likely to be engaged inteaching than in research. Women have been under represented on decisionmaking bodies, and have encountered a 'glass ceiling' in attempts to achievepromotion (Porter, 1995).The phallocentric nature of university environment has prompted significant debateamong feminists in academia and given rise to a wide range of activities designed,in one way or another, to challenge the dominant masculinist culture. Despite manyyears of effort, however, universities remain male dominated environments withinwhich women continue to be employed at lower levels, on shorter contracts, andwith narrower career prospects.In other words, there exists a significant gap between the hopes many of us heldfor the future of women in universities and the current (on-going) realities faced bythose of us working in these environments. It is this gap and what it tells us aboutthe on-going need for feminist reform in academic circles that has inspired thispaper. More specifically, we are interested in using the work of feminist scholar RosiBraidotti as a basis for identifying a particular 'mindset' that is valuable for thinkingabout the on-going challenges associated with the cultural transformation ofuniversity environments. We will illustrate the need for and value of these mindsetsthrough a discussion of one particular university, and one specific attempt bywomen within that university to improve women's participation in research activity.This introduction, then, is followed by four main sections. In the first, wedemonstrate the ways in which our case site, Central Queensland University,reflects the same kind of phallocentric ideologies that can be seen to characterizeuniversity environments more generally. In the second, we outline some of themajor (feminist) strategies developed within this university to improve women'sresearch activity and discuss some of the differences of opinion concerning how thisis best achieved. In the third section, we will explore what it is that Rosi Braidotti'smodel of nomadic subjectivity offers to those women engaged in the work ofcultural transformation, and in the fourth and final section, we will provide a briefexample of how nomadic consciousness can shape the day-to-day practice ofwomen academics.As any exploration of gender and its consequences necessitates analysis of theparticular context within which women are located, it is necessary for us to beginthis paper with a brief overview of the particular university that we will be using toillustrate our points.Section one: An old problem in a new context

This article explores the consequences of discourses of “boundless receptivity to failure” in advanced digital capitalism, as illustrated by the Silicon Valley mantras “fail often” and “safe to fail” on the individual-subject formation. The article highlights issues related to the temporal dimension in grappling with personal experiences of failure – as a transitional moment between past, present and future – by drawing on Hartmut Rosa’s theory of the structural modifications of our relationship to time in late modernity, specifically our perception of the “speeding up of life,” and its consequences for subjective forms of selfhood. How has the peculiar relationship to temporality at stake in the subject’s experience of failure been re-shaped by structural modifications of the “materiality of time?” I first argue that the modern-day agenda for fast recovery pathologizes residual emotional attachments associated with the necessary process of “working out a narrative of failure,” as explored by sociologist Richard Sennett. This in turn triggers a greater need to “fix” failure through digital technical procedures. Second, I point to a new design model, the “lean principle,” as a paragon of structural modifications of the “materiality of time.” I show that this new design paradigm, which has been spreading beyond the industrial sector in which it originates to fuel new modes of thinking and subjectivities, strips the experience of failure out from its temporal dimension. Failure can no longer be represented as a temporal rupture between the present and the future. Such a de-temporalized and renewed signification of failure eludes any subjective libidinal engagement in dealing with “unmet expectations” (i.e., failure).

WHEN Charlotte Perkins Gilman' published Women and Economics in 1898, Feminist movement in America gained an advocate of uncommon intellectual power and insight. Quickly acclaimed on both sides of Atlantic for having written the most significant utterance on women's question since Mill,2 she became idol of radical feminists and was later judged the most original and challenging mind which woman [sic] movement produced.3 Despite this recognition of her abilities, however, she has suffered a neglect in American intellectual history difficult to explain.3a The neglect becomes especially regrettable when one reads her truly thought-provoking analyses of woman's position in a man's world-in remarkable anticipation of modern writers on subject like Simone de Beauvoir, Margaret Mead and Ashley Montagu. Though Gilman's versatile and probing mind roamed over many subjects

Reviews : Seyla Benhabib and Drucilla Cornell (eds), Feminism as Critique: Essays on the Politics of Gender in Late Capitalist Societies (Polity, 1987)

This article lays out how Kalanithi’s international bestseller and Pulitzer Prize finalist uses the infrastructures of literature to negotiate the infrastructures and the masculinist values of the medical system. The text chronicles how a promising young male neurosurgeon becomes a terminal patient himself. This radical change of perspective is represented in ambivalent terms of embodiment, vulnerability, and relational being, and as a fall from the masculinist grace of medical discursive power. The text presents the medical hospital as a social space that, in its high-tech efficiency, is ill-equipped for the negotiation of the personally and culturally contradictory process of dying that, in late capitalist societies since the 1980s, predominantly takes place in its confines. With its literary means, the text explores a critical perspective on late capitalist societies’ high-tech medical system that is geared towards the control of disease and cost at the expense of a supportive view of life’s end. With its literary address of a neurosurgeon’s experience of dying, When Breath Becomes Air offers an alternative form of knowledge production to currently dominant medical, care, insurance and legal discourses on death, and it advocates an ease of narrowly masculinist notions of control as key to more resonant social relations.

The Work of Consumption

The essay is about the feminist practice of self-help and analyses its political implications in women’s liberation movement in the ‘70s. This political practice was spread in Italy by feminist groups for women’s health. These groups are inspired by the American experiences about it, but they see the American pragmatic approach in an original way. In Italy these considerations about the body influence also the thoughts of political feminist groups not directly related to women’s health. This idea contributes to create a more complex vision of women’s movement

This article summarises and presents the main findings of Marie-Anne Dujarier’s French book Troubles dans le travail (2021). It focuses on the “travail” category of thought and practice in France, where it has become a ubiquitous and moral notion. The article traces the history of its social uses, highlighting its polysemy with respect to vernacular and scientific uses, then its limited meaning when used in institutions. It examines contemporary situations in which activity requiring effort, the production of use or exchange values, and the status of employment and remuneration are disconnected. Their frequency and importance cast doubt on who is working and when. This disruption in the “work” category of thought indicates that the eponymous institutions do not adequately accommodate real practices. They are therefore questioned. This observation is also an invitation for researchers to unpick this word for a better analysis of contemporary social, psychological and ecological issues. In France, the word “travail” is ubiquitous in our day-to-day exchanges, as well as in our scientific and political discussions (“travail” is often translated as ‘work’ or ‘labour’, translations are part of the history of the category). Although regularly given only one value, it also has a moral domain. But what does it mean? This article offers Anglo-Saxon readers a summary of in-depth sociological research on this issue, published in the book called Work Troubles. Sociology of a category of thought (French original title: Troubles dans le travail. Sociologie d’une catégorie de pensée) by the author of this article.

Contrary to traditional liberal thought that perceives the idea of multitude as a negative category which implies private sphere deprived of public presence or public voice and which designates singularized individuals as mute or invisible to/in community and alienated or expelled from otherwise united nation/state, the contemporary notion of multitude balances between binary oppositions private-public, individual-collective. This contemporary notion is not opposed to the idea of nation as a unified community/collective, but is itself determined by a different form of unity that precedes it – the general thinking ability or, as Paolo Virno calls it, the general intellect. This paper explores possibilities of contemporary collectives (as temporary unification forms of the multitude) to oppose and resist exploitation of the general intellect in neoliberal capitalist societies.

Born To Die: Lana Del Rey, Beauty Queen or Gothic Princess?

This paper argues that existing accounts of the “post-feminist” gender regime place excessive emphasis on modes of repudiation of feminism, at the expense of analysing possibilities for the affirmation of feminism in the mainstream media. I argue that this oversight may be rectified by an assessment of the ways in which feminism is affirmed, contested and spoken about in the pages of the quality press. Consequently, the bulk of the paper consists of an analysis of articles specifically about feminism and gender in two British quality newspapers with divergent political orientations. These are The Guardian, which is left-leaning and broadly pro-feminist, and The Times, which is more conservative and ambivalent towards feminism. In so doing, the paper introduces the notion of feminist “domestication” as central to constructions of feminism in The Guardian, and to a lesser extent in The Times. Domestication refers to the explicit or implicit affirmation of a safe, unthreatening form of feminism via a disavowal of a more radical feminist position. Strategies of domestication thus constitute an acceptable space for feminism to reside, whilst at the same time curtailing its more radical political dimensions. Introducing the notion of “domestication” gives us a better understanding of the conditions under which feminism can be affirmed within mainstream public discourse.

Aurora Leigh's Radical Youth:Derridean Parergon and the Narrative Frame in “A Vision of Poets” Stephanie L. Johnson (bio) With the publication of Aurora Leigh in 1856, Elizabeth Barrett Browning not only offered readers a poetic work that rivaled Wordsworth's The Prelude in innovation of form and content but also identified this work as the pinnacle of her career. In the dedication to her cousin John Kenyon, she describes it as "the most mature of my works, and the one into which my highest convictions upon Life and Art have entered."1 Following her lead, critics since the 1970s have often either discounted her shorter and earlier poetry or considered it merely as a foundation for the greater work to come. Much recent criticism maintains this view of Aurora Leigh as the height of Barrett Browning's career as well as the corresponding view that her earlier work is less "mature." In Steve Dillon's consideration of her tropic use of crying, singing, and breathing, for example, he claims to follow the lead of Linda M. Lewis, Dorothy Mermin, and Marjorie Stone in arguing for an "apprentice to master" story of Barrett Browning's career.2 Published in Poems of 1844, "A Vision of Poets" seems to hold a secure position within this critical narrative of progression because it anticipates Aurora Leigh's concern with the relationship of a female poet to the male poetic lineage. Lewis, while only briefly mentioning "A Vision of Poets," connects it to other poems of 1844 that affirm "the gospel of Suffering and the gospel of Work," representing the second stage of Barrett Browning's religious quest; Aurora Leigh embodies the final stage in which the poet preaches the gospel of "divine love and divine truth" (p. 13). Mermin characterizes Barrett Browning's progression in feminist terms and compares "A Vision of Poets" both to the earlier "A Vision of Fame" and "The Poet's Vow" and to the later works that concern the poetical position of women. Its "conclusions are unstated but obvious," she claims; "women can be poets, and women's lives can be their theme," which prompts us to think of the later novel-poem in which this conclusion becomes explicit (Mermin, pp. 87-88, 115). Stone gives credence [End Page 425] to Harold Bloom's six phases of poetic progress as paradigmatic even as she critiques his patriarchal model, and she places "A Vision of Poets" at the turn to Barrett Browning's "later phases of 'poetic incarnation,'" which culminate in the mastery of Aurora Leigh (pp. 93, 154). Additionally, Helen Cooper asserts that "A Vision of Poets" begins to reconfigure the classical relationship between the male poet and his female muse, an effort that "is consummated in Aurora Leigh."3 Finally, Dillon does not consider "A Vision of Poets," perhaps because its "breath[ing] back" the music of God's blessing works against his argument that breath is a later representation of poetic voice for Barrett Browning, following her early use of the cry and the song.4 Rather than continue the conversation about progression and the full scope of Barrett Browning's work, this study examines one complication of its trajectory. It follows Linda Shires' argument that certain female poets of the nineteenth-century, including Barrett Browning, were critiquing the male tradition and experimenting with form as early as the 1830s.5 "A Vision of Poets" presents a female poet who is more adversarial toward her male predecessors than has been recognized, positioning this poem as itself adversarial within Barrett Browning's oeuvre. While "A Vision of Poets" considers women's potential for poetry in the vein of Aurora Leigh, it does not wage the same battle to open the male tradition to the female poet. In the relationship between these two works, published twelve years apart, the later poem qualifies and tempers the earlier, more radical feminist position, problematizing any critical impulse to identify Barrett Browning's maturation as a steady progression toward feminist self-autonomy. The subversiveness of "A Vision of Poets" stems from its narrative of the death of the male poetic tradition and the survival of the independent female voice; independence is...

98 EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY FICTION 13:1 effet, d'esquisser «un nouveau visage de Robert Challe» où «vigueur protestataire» et vertiges de l'inquiétude religieuse s'expriment avec bien plus de force. Qu'on en juge par un exemple. Jusqu'à présent, lorsqu'on lisait: «je retombais toujours dans les travers que donnent les affreuses terreurs dont on a été bercé», on ne s'imaginait pas que le texte était: «je retombais toujours dans les transes que...». On voit ici à quel point la confrontation avec le manuscrit nouvellementmis aujour est fructueuse et «donne un sens à des détails qui, autrement, passeraient inaperçu». C'est d'ailleurs l'un des mérites de cette édition nouvelle: outre une pagination qui permet de se reporter sans peine aux éditions antérieures et au manuscrit luim ême, on retrouve un index où figure une liste des variantes les plus significatives, une bibliographie critique, un glossaire, en bref, tout un apparat critique qui font de cette édition un ouvrage de référence et le compagnon indispensable des études sur Challe et sur l'histoire de la philosophie clandestine de l'âge classique. Marc André Bernier Université du Québec à Trois-Rivières Charlotte Smith. The Young Philosopher. Ed. Elizabeth Kraft. Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1999. xxxv + 397pp. US$47.50 (cloth); US$17.95 (paper). ISBN 0-8131-211-6 Elizabeth Hamilton. Translations of the Letters of a Hindoo Rajah. Ed. Pamela Perkins and Shannon Russell. Peterborough, Ont.: Broadview Press, 1999. 339pp. $15.95. US$12.95; £8.95. ISBN 1-55111-175-6. Charlotte Smith and Elizabeth Hamilton are conventionally positioned as ideologically opposed by critics who make the authors' responses to the revolutionary debate symptomatic of a pervasive and entirely adversarial radicalism and conservatism . These two novels, along with their excellent introductions and notes (and, in the Hamilton edition, appendices that provide a range of contemporary materials), should do much to disallow the reductiveness of such a narrowly political approach, and to encourage a more comprehensive estimate of their authors' strengths. More particularly, both fictions reveal, in very different ways, how seemingly incompatible strands of orthodox and iconoclastic opinion can comfortably, and sometimes creatively, coexist in a single work. By 1798, the year in which The Young Philosopher was published, Charlotte Smith's support for revolutionary principles was more muted than it had been in the earlier Desmond (1791). She still works here with radical metaphors, however, brilliantly literalizing, for example, Godwin's representation in Political Justice of the old order as a small group of custodians oppressing the unawakened masses, through the device of the madhouse to which the heroine's mother, Mrs Glenmorris , is confined by her parody of an aristocratic mother, Lady Mary. And the contrast between the virtuous George Delmont and his dissolute brother Adolphus Delmont is characteristically established through their respective affiliations REVIEWS 99 with radical and anti-Jacobin positions. But many of the narrative innovations in The Young Philosopher—especially the deviations from standard English— reveal a hierarchical frame of mind that sometimes verges on the reactionary. These deviations—of dialect, of class affectation, of false learning—do not affirm aspects of a distinctive culture, as idiomatic speech in Walter Scott does. Instead, as we see in the hero's mediations on the suffering of the heroine from her contact with "the inferior ranks of people, whose grossness must shock her, whose licentious freedoms terrify her" (p. 278), they mark out for condemnation or patronizing those outside the landed gentry, especially the newly rich. Elizabeth Hamilton, too, works at once within and against a numberofdiscursive conventions associated in this instance with her conservative politics. An antiJacobin on subjects relating to religion, she held views on women's education that intersected at key points with those of the radical feminist Mary Wollstonecraft. Rejecting an older reading ofHamilton as party political hack, Perkins and Russell apply the insights of feminist, historicist, and postcolonial theoreticians to show the ways in which, both formally and conceptually, Translations ofthe Letters ofa Hindoo Rajah develops its didactic impulses without tendentiousness. Preserving and, where necessary, extending Hamilton's notes (a rich source of references to contemporary antiquarian and orientalist commentary...