Public (E-Journal, York University)

Allor, Martin

Gagnon, Michelle

Singular Universalities: Quebec articulations of le culturel

Douglas, Susan

English

A Delicate Rupture

Turpel-Lafond, Mary Ellen

Oui the People? Conflicting Visions of Self-Determination in Québec

Guilbert, Charles

Murphy, Serge

Outside Looking In

Marchessault, Janine

The Women's Liberation Front of Quebec

MacKenzie, Scott

A Line in the Snow: Visualizing Borders Imaginary and Real

Introduction

Schwartzwald, Robert

Montréal By Night

Contributors
Martin Allor teaches in the Communication
Studies Department at Concordia University.
He is co-director of the Groupe de Recherche
sur la Citoyennete Culturelle which is affili-
ated with the Centre for Research on
Citizenship and Social Transformation at
Concordia.
Susan Douglas is an art historian and cultural
critic living in Montreal.
Michelle Gagnon is a Montreal writer and
research associate with the Groupe de
Recherche sur la Citoyennete Culturelle.
Charles Guilbert is a visual artist and writer
living in Montreal. His video works have been
shown across Canada and internationally. He
has recently published a collection of short
stories with Les Herbes Rouges (1996).
Scott MacKenzie is a doctoral candidate in
the Graduate Program in Communications,
McGill University. He is presently completing
a dissertation on Quebecois image-making
practices, nationalism and alternative publics.
Janine Marchessault teaches cultural studies
in the Department of English at McGill
University. She is the editor of Mirror
Machine: Video and Identity (YYZ Books and
CRCCII, 1995) and is currently completing a
book on McLuhan.
Petra Mueller is an artist living in Montreal.
Her work has been shown widely across
Quebec and Canada - most recently at Ace
Art in Winnipeg. She is currently launching a
web site called the 'Love Project'.
(nttp://www.cim.mcgill.ca)
TI~~
Contributors
Serge Murphy is a visual artist whose works
have been widely exhibited both nationally
and internationally. Sois Sage 0 ma Douleur
(winner of the 1991 Prix SOGIC) and Le Bal
des Anguilles produced with Charles Guilbert
and Michel Grou, were recently shown on
TV5 and TV Ontario.
Chantal Nadeau is Assistant Professor in the
Department of Communication Studies,
Concordia University. She has published on
women's cinema, popular cultures and lesbian
representations. She is currently working on a
sexual history of colonialism in Canada and
Quebec.
Fred Reed is a Montreal writer and translator.
His most recent book is Persian Post Cards,
Iran After Khomeini (Vancouver: Talonbooks,
1994); he won the 1992 Governor General's
Award for his translation of Thierry Hentsch's
L'orient imaginaire: Imagining the Middle
East (Montreal: Black Rose Books, 1992).
Julian Samuel has recently completed a four-
hour video trilogy on the Orient in the
Western imagination and has recently pub-
lished Passage to Lahore (Stratford, Mercury
Press: 1995), a work of fiction that examines
the pitfalls of nationalism across the world.
Robert Schwartzwald is Associate Professor
of French at the University of Massachusetts-
Amherst, where he also directs the Canadian
Studies program of the Five College Consort-
ium. He is Editor of Quebec Studies and
Associate Editor of the International Journal
of Canadian Studies / Revue internationale
d'etudes canadiennes. He has published
widely on relations between culture, sexuality,
and nationalism. He has also recently trans-
lated and written an introduction to Daniel
Guerin's La peste brune: The Brown Plague:
Travels in Late Weimar and Early Nazi
Germany ( Durham, Duke University Press,
1994).
Will Straw is Associate Professor in the
Graduate Program in Communications at
McGill University and Director of the Centre
for Research on Canadian Cultural Industries
and Institutions. He is the co-editor of Theory
Rules (University of TorontolYYZ Books,
1996) and has published numerous articles on
cultural studies, cinema and popular music.
Carla Whiteside is a visual artist living in
Quebec city. She is currently completing grad-
uate studies in Visual Arts at Universite Laval.
Anne-Marie Zeppetelli is a Montreal photog-
rapher and artist. She is a registrar at the
Musee de Contemporain de Montreal.
John Zeppetelli is a filmmaker and visual
artist currently on faculty in the Fine Arts
Department at Concordia University. He is
completing a new film called The Translators
and he recently exhibited Sweet Nothings at
Articule Gallery in Montreal.
Public
Upcoming Issues
Public 15 Idols
Back issues available at $15.00 (postage included)
Public 8 The Ethics of Enactment
Avital Ronell, Ronald Jones, David Freedberg
Public 9 Reading Our Rights
Peter Goodrich, Jeft Wall, Deborah Esch
Public 10 Love
Cornel West, Sean Cubitt, Chantal Thomas
Public 11 Throughput
Daniel Bougnoux, Allecquere Rosanne Stone, Toshio Iwai
Public 12 Utopias
Giorgio Agamben, Marc Angenot, Nicole Brossard,
Christa Wolf
Public 13 Touch in Contemporary Art
David Tomas, Richard Shift, Jacinto Lageira, Christine
Ross
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TI~~
Contributors


Contributors

FOREWORD
Cultural acts are increasingly mediated by the application of digital media. What has
emerged is a regime characterized by an incessant and aggressive pursuit of newness.
The sheer pitch of innovation has made any attempt to curate a comprehensive collection
of writings on the topic seem destined for an accelerated decline into obsolescence.
In the present moment, the pressure caused by the explosion of digital services and
commodities is such that the traditional capacities and interests of the cultural producer
are largely orphaned. It remains to be seen whether traditional methods of artistic and
scholarly production - relying on forms of intelligence cultivated by centuries of analogue
thinking - will continue to maintain their relevance. The survival of traditional forms of
art and scholarship, as well as the potential development of a new art and intellectual prac-
tice, relies (as always) on the degree to which the faculty of human imagination finds itself
replenished by the exercise of these skills.
Throughput' is clearly related to the postwar neologisms, 'input' and 'outpur', which
represent the opposite ends of the chain of information. These two words have long since
become naturalized by everyday use. The appeal of the title Throughput lies precisely in its
present unfamiliarity, which seems to promise a metaphoric potential now atrophied in its
more familiar kindred. While the idea of throughpur represents a limit, it also represents
the mutability of such limits. As we sttuggle with the recognition that the speed of analy-
sis and comprehension can never hope to compete with the speed of change, we find an
increasing need to substitute the speculative for the analytic. The necessity of speculation
could be interpreted as our inability to make sense of the present, or, more positively, as an
indication of our capacity to refigure limits as things unfold. Many of the papers found here
are actively engaged in this refiguration.
This issue of Public marks our first collaborative venture. We would like to acknowl-
edge the support that the McLuhan Program in Culture and Technology has provided for
this issue, with special thanks to the Program Director, Derrick de Kerckhove. Public 11:
Throughput contains a section devoted to an analysis of the Culture Technologies Conver-
gence Conference, organized by Professor de Kerckhove in the spring of 1994. This impor-
tant event brought together specialists from the fields of art, the academy, business and
high technology, in a fotum devoted to debating the questions posed by the intersection of
culture and technology in the wake of the digital intervention.


Foreword

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