Volume 12, Issue 2, 2009
E-ISSN: 1092-311X
DOI: 10.1353/tae.0.0072
Issue 12.2 attempts to focus on the human. In the impossibility of this task, the elusiveness of its object, it runs into machines and fantasies that produce, inspire, and disrupt the practices and imagination of the human in its relations to technology and animality. Readers will thus find in this issue explicit as well as implicit engagements with questions of biopower, bare life, the animal, environmentalism, agriculture, food, and the often invisible, potentially magic, work that goes into producing the sensible realm as one congenial to creatures deeply deceived by their own illusions of autonomy.
The issue opens with Dominic Pettman’s, “Grizzly Man: Werner Herzog’s Anthropological Machine.” Considering Herzog’s compilation of footage filmed by Timothy Treadwell over the course of summers spent with grizzly bears in the Alaskan wild, Pettman explores the interface between the biosphere and the mediasphere. Before he was mauled to death a bear, Treadwell was a man with a camera; his relations to the animals, in other words, were mediated by his activity of recording these relations. So where is the human in this interface and how does the symbiotic relation between human, technology, and animal incite us to reject the supposition that the human might be as well as be locatable? As he takes up these questions, Pettman critically engages Giorgio Agamben’s notion of the anthropological machine, particularly along the edges of food and sex, edges where urges may seem the most animalistic even as they are cooked and cultivated—and confronted with cameras.
With Elizabeth Mazzolini’s, “Breathless Subjects,” we move from the anthropological machine to the authenticity machine. Mazzolini assesses the work of oxygen, the ways it produces authenticity for high altitude mountaineers. Taking up controversies over the use of bottled oxygen by climbers on Mount Everest as well as laboratory studies of the effects of oxygen and its lack on the human body, Mazzolini encounters a peculiar paradox in oxygen as a biotechnical assemblage: the climber eschewing bottled oxygen for the sake of a more authentic, autonomous, unassisted climb loses the capacity to maintain a cognitive awareness of the experience of the climb. As she demonstrates the role oxygen plays in stories of autonomy and authenticity on Mt. Everest, Mazzolini opens up the mechanisms that produce particular fantasies of heroic, individualized achievement. She presents, in other words, the authenticity machine in action.
Cindy Patton is also concerned with making visible the boundaries and mechanisms that secure some terrains as safe, as protected domains for extreme experiences, be they those of adventure racers or ordinary travelers in the security regime resulting from the George W. Bush administration’s response to the attacks on the U.S. on September 11, 2001. Writing from her experiences as an emergency medical volunteer at adventure races, Patton details the effort involved in creating a “real life” experience, the technologies and spaces mobilized and deployed at the edge of permissible danger. How is this edge between too much and too little security maintained and for whose ends? “Real Sports” confronts readers with the risky undecideability of these questions.
The next two pieces explore the fantastic terrains of American television and faery subcultures as they seek to open up thinking and experiencing the environment. Both work against nature/culture dualisms to take up relations between the human and nonhuman worlds. Teena Gabrielson’s “The End of New Beginnings: Nature and the American Dream in The Sopranos, Weeds, and Lost” reflects on the anxieties around domesticity, masculinity, violence, and economic security as they appear in televisual depictions of the natural environment, particularly in associations that link the physical landscape to fantasies of new beginnings. Tyson Lewis and Richard Kahn, in “Exopedagogies and the Utopian Imagination: A Case Study in Faery Subcultures,” consider the potential of a “faery pedagogy” as a means for disrupting dominant regimes of biopower. In contrast to commercially popular fairies, “faeries” occupy a critical consciousness they share with radical environmental elves (ELF—Environmental Life Force). For Lewis and Kahn, such figures and groups enact new sensory practices that challenge pre-existing oppositions between the visible and invisible, the knowable and the unknowable.
12.2 also features a symposium on food, “Eating and the Imagination of Politics,” edited by Chad Lavin. It includes his article, “The Year of Eating Politically,” as well as articles by Melissa Orlie, “There is No Alternative,” and Kennan Ferguson, “Mastering the Art of the Sensible: Julia Child, Nationalist.” Davide Panagia responds with “Food as Fuel and an Ethics of Appearance.” Lavin’s approach is critical and historical. Situating current injunctions to eat locally in the context of previous celebration of organic foods, Lavin persuasively argues that localism evinces a retreat from politics, that is, a limiting of the political imagination such that the individualized actions of consumers replace the collective action of organized citizens. The underlying logic of localism, in other words, is deeply capitalist and radically anti-urban. In contrast, Orlie attempts to make “the local” appear as a necessary alternative to the contemporary food economy. Crucial to this attempt is the cultivation of care, pleasure, and joy as elements of a conscious alternative to current conditions of existence. Adopting the perspective of the national (as opposed to the global or local) Ferguson investigates the role of food in the production of a national imaginary. More specifically, he analyzes Julia Child and her famous cookbook and television show for the ways they inscribe a particular sense of France and Frenchness in U.S. culture. In so doing, he inserts the primary figure of international relations—the sovereign nation—into the domestic, feminine space of the postwar U.S. kitchen. Panagia responds by considering the ways each of the essays combine food, land, and sensation.
The issue also includes a number of book reviews. Continuing the biopolitical thematic of this issue is Miguel Vatter’s review essay, “Biopolitics: From Surplus Value to Surplus Life.” In this essay he considers recent books by Roberto Esposito, Melinda Cooper, and Thomas Lemke. Katherine Young reviews Peter F. Cannavò, The Working Landscape: Founding, Preservation, and the Politics of Place. Also included are Simon Stow’s review of George Shulman, American Prophecy: Race and Relationship in American Political Culture, Nicole M. Guidott-Hernández’s review of Dead Subjects: Towards a Politics of Loss in Latino Studies, by Antonio Viego, Lisa Disch’s review of Radical Democracy: Politics Between Abundance and Lack, edited by Lars Tønder and Lasse Thomassen and Wendy C. Hamblet’s review of Marco Abel, Violent Affect: Literature, Cinema, and Critique after Representation.
Essays
Symposium
Reviews
The Working Landscape: Between Founding and Preservation
Exceptional Americanism
Vilolence and peace, There are no violence if there is no peace!
Posted by: Buy Soma | July 10, 2009 at 01:53 AM
Looks great! I think I can get full text of this journal with J.'s U of Toronto password. Will check it out.
Posted by: old | July 10, 2009 at 08:03 AM
Old - you should be able to get it through Robart's giving that it has the best periodicals collection in Canada, but if you can't, I can hook you up.
Jodi - what sort of delay is there between submission and publication at T&E? (Assuming review goes well - minor revisions rather than complete rewrites.)
Posted by: Craig | July 11, 2009 at 08:45 PM
Craig--the time frame is uneven.
We try to get a piece reviewed in under 2 months. Sometimes we succeed, sometimes we don't. A month ago I was able to get a reviewer for a piece the same day it came in. The reviewer had time right away and loved the piece. From submission to acceptance was under a week. But this is rare.
There are 2 more issues this year and I think both are set (maybe a bit of wiggle room in the last one).
The time frame is uneven because sometimes we might hold a piece or move up a piece in order to group pieces around a theme. So, in the current issue, the Patton piece was accepted and finalized well over a year ago. One of the others was only revised and reconsidered in the last 3-4 months.
So, at this point, a piece that is accepted is most likely to appear in the Spring of 2010.
Posted by: Jodi | July 12, 2009 at 12:18 PM