Pivot: A Journal of Interdisciplinary Studies and Thought
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The Catastrophic Grief of De Quincey's 'Lost Girls': The Subversive Females of Confessions and Suspiria
No full textDepicted as hallucinations, hauntings, ghosts and dreams, the females of De Quincey's most controversial prose texts function as proto-feminist entities, where they usurp patriarchal linguistic structures by creating entirely new language systems. De Quincey's delirious dream sequences present a trifecta of female emotive power: analyzed through the feminist lens of de Beauvoir's "The Second Sex," this essay demonstrates how De Quincey's 'lost girls' exceed Gothic supernatural conventions to control the agency of a female-dominated dreamscape
Neo Boys
Get PDFThis paper considers William S. Burroughs’s nonfictional long-form essay The Electronic Revolution (1970) and contemporaneous fictional novel The Wild Boys: A Book of the Dead (1971) alongside some moments from the early work of Patti Smith, including her time with the Patti Smith Group and their four albums together between 1975 and 1979. I align Burroughs’s concepts of the word virus and wild boy – concepts subsequently taken up by Smith – with the three luxuries of nature identified by intellectual Georges Bataille in his theorization of general, or solar, economy. The parasitic and proliferative appearance of Burroughs’s writing and Smith’s performances – artworks that resemble electronic spam and speaking in tongues – bear some resemblance to the alien duplicates in Invasion of the Body Snatchers insofar as these artists waste their textual and physical bodies from within, thereby working against the sociolinguistic logic of identity
Reviving the Commodity: Recycling Trash and Lacan’s Master Discourse
No full textThis paper examines popular practices of recycling that give insight into the subject’s position to capitalism, and questions to what degree recycling alters the capitalist mode of production. I argue that rather than expressing a desire to forgo participation in the market, as in one does not purchase new commodities and therefore avoids the ecologically destructive cycle of overconsumption and excessive accumulation of trash, recycling posits the subject as a connoisseur of trash. I examine some specific recycling practices to shift the conversation about recycling from a (pseudo) critique of capitalism’s excesses, to a deep psychic desire for completeness. To better understand the psychic structure coordinating the subject’s thoughts and actions to the market, I turn to Jacques Lacan’s Master discourse. Using the discourse of the Master clarifies recycling’s primary function to neo-liberal capitalism
From the Ethos of Housekeeping to the Doctrine of Ecology: Paradigm-shifts in the Politics of Domestic Garbage-Disposal
Get PDFThe aim of this article is to illuminate the political dimensions of modern waste disposal practices by comparing the representation of garbage, filth, hygiene, health and efficiency during the emergence of the modern kitchen at the beginning of the 20th century with today’s discourse of ecology, recycling and global responsibility. At issue will be mechanisms of identifying, collecting and handling trash in modern homes as well as the implied hierarchical order of decay and growth, that are set in very specific contexts of normalization and deviance. With regard to the notion of an ‘aesthetic regime’ as developed by Jacques Rancière, an assumption the paper both works with and tries to make plausible is that political matters not only emerge in the realm of deliberate action and public debate, but are fundamentally played out in the realm of sensual perception, notably through everyday ways of seeing as embedded in mundane practice and discourse
“Sentimental Claptrap”: Lost Cowboys, Dead Horses, and the Discarded in Sam Shepard’s Play Kicking a Dead Horse
Get PDFThis critical essay examines how in the play Kicking a Dead Horse playwright Sam Shepard discards traditional images of the West to celebrate song and dance