What's new at the Institute?What's new at the Institute?...In honor of a visit from Dan Walkowski and VCU BMOC Keith (last name withheld pending notification of next of kin), the Institute served up a mess of what can only be described as "Dawg Chokin' Ribs" on Friday the 18th. They were well received, as was our first attempt at vegetarian lasagna the night before. ...In our birthday file this issue, John "Illinois" Walker turns 22 on the 19th of March, while Institute Resident Rick "no pithy nickname" Lundell attains the full measure of 25 years on March 23
...Want some friendly Macintosh advice? Don't let the Macintosh game "Spaceward Ho!" anywhere near your computer! It will wreck your marriage! Never play it for hours at a time! Don't do this! This topic formed the bulk of the discussion at the recently implemented weekly staff meetings, to which all Banzai Affiliates are invited. Currently, staff meetings occur at Graduate Student Central (Coslow's Restaurant) on Wednesday evenings at 9 p.m. Please drop by if you have research proposals or road trip plans to discuss.
...Remember last month we hinted at imminent nuptials for globetrotters Kenyon West and Karin Simonitsch? Well, the rumors have been confirmed. The date is (at least unofficially) July 27, 1991. The parties concerned put in a brief appearance at the Institute March 10-11th during their Spring Break/Wedding Planning Tour. In accordance with true Banzai philosophy, their primary mission here was to use the Macintosh and a program they had never used before to lay out a 15 page newsletter which should have been done at least a month earlier. The gods of the laser printers smiled on them, and they were able to start off for Wisconsin on the 12th with newsletter in hand. ...and one final note: This month the Institute is especially concerned about Faculty Relative and Staff Psychologist Adam Wisnewski. Adam has been working very hard lately and has only been sighted once or twice recent weeks. If you see Adam, please call the Institute to report his current location. Also, be real nice to him. He deserves it.
News of the WorldBroadcast journalist turned librarian Steve Hardin, not content with the glory of having a review and an article published recently, has embarked on a new research project uniquely suited for Terre Haute. Utilizing the incredible diversity of environmental degradation in the Wabash Valley, Hardin hopes to develop a method for determining wind direction solely by the smell at a given point.
"Residents of Champaign-Urbana are no doubt familiar with the Kraft-Humko phenomenon," he says, "in which a westerly breeze often carries with it the subtle aroma of roasting soybeans. Terre Haute, being considerably more polluted than Champaign- Urbana, offers far more opportunities for refinement of this technique."
Hardin notes that, in Terre Haute, westerly winds carry the stench of raw sewage. Northwesterly breezes carry the unforgettable bouquet of a paper mill. Winds from the northeast usually smell like coal tar. More easterly flow brings a somewhat similar smell from the coal mines a few miles distant. Breezes from the southeast and south smell like the country.
The researcher hopes to develop a Stench Directional Index (SDI) by using a compass to carefully plot the direction of each smell. "The challenge will be to produce a workable SDI before my own olfactory senses are rendered insensitive to the variations through overexposure."
Hardin is also conducting research to determine the temperature gradients in the Wabash River by the taste of the tap water in his apartment.
Those voices -- they're whispering again. They're saying he's just too weird. He's oddly folksy at one moment, steely-eyed the next. His facial expressions rival Jimmy Carter's eerie grin for incongruity. He looks exhausted, gets more colds than the average 5-year-old in day care and wears his envy of Walter Cronkite with all the subtlety of that flashy sweater vest he donned a few years back.
Precisely. But those are Dan Rather's good qualities....Unlike his competitors, Dan has already become something of a metaphor for our time. Just as Walker Cronkite's soothing, avuncular presence assured a nation it would survive such cataclysms as the assassination or a President and a war it couldn't win, so Dan embodies the cynical restlessness of the age of the shortened attention span. He is the perfect post modern anchorman, recombining styles that range from good ole boy to bleeding heart liberal in the blink of a CBS eye.
Yes, he's had a few lapses. The "get Dan" forces thought the had him on the ropes in 1987 when he left the screen blank for six excruciating network minutes....But such incidents also point to Dan's appeal. Strange men approach him on the streets of New York, address him as Kenneth, beat him and demand, not his wallet, but his "frequency." And on any given night, at any given moment, he just might unexpectedly say something (like "Courage") or do something (like hold up a plastic model of an aircraft carrier). Those with a tast for life on the edge find watching Dan, one finger poised above the mute button at all times, a singularly exhilarating experience.
Letters to the EditorsSo this reality, the agreed reality of Dan Rather Unispiring Don't-You-Think's World. The one we have to get car liscence plates in, is Reality Null. I would subscribe if I could but that don't mean that I would approve of the content. I think writing it out makes it better. Reality Null. Unless you have been drinking or running or altering your normal you, you are reading this in Reality Null.
So Reality Prime, not necessarily being government inspected and approved, would be that enhanced reality, whether through computers or herbs or head-standing.
Can you fall in love in Reality Prime? I think not. I think love is only possible in Reality Null. Normal reality, where one person has to go out and get the milk because we are all out and it's okay, stay here where it is warm and dry. So maybe Reality Null is not as void as it sounds.
I don't need to run, but until I get proper bandwidth, my friend who might need to call can't get through with me lost in cyberspace.
Setting the count to zero,
Steve
(Contributed electronically by Steven A. Stone, Information Scientist and Gradual Student. -Ed.)
I would also like to take this opportunity to applaud your top ten lists. Perhaps "Rhythm Of the Saints" by Paul Simon might also find a place in Top Ten Banzai CD's, and as for Top Ten Banzai Books, the list is almost complete. Living By the Word by Alice Walker deserves equal recognition with her Color Purple.
Thank you for your time, and please give my refund request careful consideration.
-Tina Schoeneweis
(We deeply regret the error. When Ms. Schoeneweis finally pays her bill, we will refund her money.)
Literary Theory PageThe hegemonic discourse of postmodernity valorizes modes of expression and "aesthetic" praxis which preclude any dialogic articulation (in, of course, the Bakhtinian sense) of the antinomies of consumer capitalism. but some emergent forms of discourse inscribed in popular fictions contain, as a constitutive element, metanarratives wherein the characteristic tropes of consumer capitalism are subverted even as they are apparently affirmed. A paradigmatic text in this regard is the television series Gilligan's Island, whose seventy-two episodes constitute a master-narrative of imprisonment, escape, and reimprisonment which eerily encodes a Lacanian construct of compulsive reenactment within a Foucaultian panoptic social order in which resistance to power is merely one of the forms assumed by power itself.1
The "island" of the title is a pastoral dystopia, but a dystopia with a difference -- or, rather, a dystopia with a differance (in, of course, the Derridean sense), for this is a dystopia characterized by the free play of signifier and signified. The key figure of "Gillian" enacts a dialectic of absence and presence. In his relations with the Skipper, the Millionaire, and the Professor, Gilligan is the repressed, the excluded. The Other: He is the id to the Skipper's Ego, the proletariat to the Millionaire's bourgeoisie, Caliban to the Professor's Prospero.2 But the binarism of this duality is deconstructed by Gilligan's relations with Ginger, the movie star. Here Gilligan himself is the oppressor: Under the male gaze of Gilligan, Ginger becomes the Feminine-as-Other, the interiorization of a "self" that is wholly constituted by the linguistic conventions of phallocratic desire (keeping in mind, of course, Saussure's langue/parole distinction). That Ginger is identified as a "movie star" even in the technologically barren confines of the desert island foreshadows Debord's concept of the "society of the spectacle," wherein events and "individuals" are reduced to simulacra.3 Indeed, we find a stunningly prescient example of what Baudrillard has called the "depthlessness" of America in the apparent "stupidity" of Gilligan and, indeed, of the entire series.4
The eclipse of linearity effectuated by postmodernity, then, necessitates a new approach to the creation of modes of liberatory/expressive praxis. The monologic and repressive dominance of traditional "texts" (i.e., books) has been decentered by a dialogic discourse in which the "texts" of popular culture have assumed their rightful place. This has enormous implications for cultural and social theory. A journal like Dissent, instead of exploring the question of whether socialism is really dead, would make a greater contribution to postmodern discourse by exploring the question of whether Elvis is really dead. This I hope to demonstrate in a future study.
(1) Gilligan himself represents the transgressive potentialities of the decentered ego. See Georges Thibault, Jouissance et Jalousie dans L'Isle de Gilligan, unpublished thesis on file at the Ecole Normale Superieure (St. Cloud).
(2) Gilligan's Island may be periodized into an early, Barthean phase, in which most episodes ended with an exhibition of Gilliganian jouissance, and a second phase whose main inspiration is apparently that of Nietzsche, via Lyotard. The absence of any influence of Habermas is itself a testimony of the all-pervasiveness of Habermas's thought.
(3) The 1981 television movie Escape from Gilligan's Island represents a reactionary attempt to totalize what had been theorized in the series as an untotalizable heteroglossia, a bricolage. The late 1970s influence of the Kristevan semiotic needs no further comment here.
(4) Why do the early episodes privilege a discourse of metonymy? And what of the title -- Gilligan's Island? In what sense is the island "his?" I do not have the space to pursue these questions here, but I hope to do so in a forthcoming book.
"If we're going to clean up the language, let's do it right. How about Herspanic ...antiherstamines ...herstrionics ...My cat got mad and began to hers (as opposed to hiss) ...I hurt my finger when it got stuck by ther therstle (this thistle) ...Let's get rid of the 'men' in our language altogether ...Minopause, minstruate, mintal, mintor, mintion, minu, comminsurate, mind (not to be confused with mynd), minace, minthol ...minage a trois." (from "Dygressions")
From the Banzai StaffSherry and I are still trying to get the wedding plans together (5 October 1991 - write it down). We saw the Augustana Choir play Orchestra Hall - reunion time. Thanks to Jo for the honeymoon brochures. Visit the Sears Skydeck, though the propaganda beforehand detracts.
I am suffering from post-Prelim lethargy. My consumption of books has hit an all-time low, and my interest in anything but Sherry, TV and Days of Our Lives has evaporated. I drown my sorrows in adundant dishes and cleaning.
I have successfully attritted my supply of clean clothes by visiting Chicago instead of doing the Sunday laundry. I will wash them, buy new, or perish in the attempt. But no ridge-poles. I will leave that to Anne Shirley.
I do have more room - and can write more if I want to. -REL
Next week we'll enter that portion of the Spring semester during which outdoor extracurricular activities are much more attractive than indoor scholarly ones. To make matters worse, my students (most of whom are graduating in May) have entered their "lame duck" semester, during which they receive and accept a job offer, but still have to barely pass their classes in order to get the job. One student stopped by our office the afternoon after missing the exam and said, "I've been missing class a lot because of plant trips. When's the exam?" Good job, ace.
As we go to press, I'm seeking a high paying summer job in a really exciting locale. If there are any openings in your company's "department in charge of frisbee testing and bicycle riding," please let me know. As Peter Venkman once said, "No job is too big, no fee is too big."
If you have a chance to stop by the Institute, be sure to check out the daffodils blooming in the front yard. If last year is any indication, look for other flower formations by the driveway, as well as the amazing cherry tree by the back porch. Low maintenance flowers are the best! -WFW
In a more coherent fashion, here are the events of February and March: My Mom celebrated another birthday. I attended the YWCA's annual Black Women's Achievement Dinner and was inspired to begin reading novels by authors like Maya Angelou and Toni Morison. In the second week of March, I dropped my "Uses and Users of Information" class. I hadn't done any of the reading all semester. (My colleague Steve Stone says that by this rule, he should also have dropped the class, but I understand that he hasdoen some actual work. Right on, Steve!) After a visit from Kenyon and Kari, I was quite "homesick" for Austria. Luckily, three letters arrived from there just in time to keep me from running up a MONSTER phone bill. Then came Spring Break, which kept me from going stir-crazy, and now we're back to business as usual around the Institute. We are looking forward moving our clocks ahead next week, since that will herald the opening of Official Barbecue Season. Y'all drop by for some ribs sometime.