USB Journals (Univ. Köln)
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Eccentricity and Deterritorialization in Natalie Barney’s The One Who is Legion
Get PDFRather than focusing on eccentricity as a character trait in human beings or literary characters, this essay engages with Natalie Barney’s experimental novel The One Who is Legion (1930) in order to demonstrate how its techniques, in following a Deleuzian trajectory of deterritorialization, are “eccentric” in the sense that they are designed to elude altogether any binary dynamics of the centre and its peripheries. Drawing on Yuri Lotman’s model of the semiosphere as a structure defined by a centre, a periphery and a boundary, the essay shows how Barney’s novel resists the normalizing attempts of a criticism eager to recover a tradition of “lesbian” writing by insisting on its own eccentric conceptions of gender and sexuality. The “eccentric” is here a literary technique that seeks to deviate from an identified centre in unforeseeable, as it were “elliptical,” ways
The Fame to Please: The Normalisation of Celebrities
Get PDFA reiterated statement following Michael Jackson’s cardiac arrest last year was that mega stardom, in western culture, had come to an end. Indeed, while fame and stardom apparently remain desirable currencies in our society, the paradigms which determine success and failure have visibly changed. On the one hand the proliferation of a public exposure of “ordinary people” has undermined the notion of exceptionality as being necessary for fame. On the other hand, while pop culture has always contributed to the public negotiation of norms and values, the current manifestations of judge and jury through different media turn celebrities into detainees and their monitoring into a panoptical affair. As public figures, who crave the spotlight, they nowadays have to accept the ongoing documentation of their doings, thereby ceaselessly supplying images for a mediarena, in which their on- and offstage conduct, especially in relation to sex, gender and sexuality is discussed and judged
Masculinities: The Million Men March
Get PDFNorbert Finzsch analyzes the Million Men March (MMM) of 1995 as an alleged attempt to redefine African American masculinities in the context of the exclusion of other forms of non-hegemonic masculinity. As a relational category, masculinity invokes and implies definitions of femininity and of other categories that support the dominant paradigm of the patriarchal, racist, heteronormative and capitalist order. It is Finzsch’s contention, therefore, that masculinity should be defined in concordance with theoretical models based on the model of intersectionality, despite the fact that this notion was developed by women of color in the context of a feminist critique of liberal (white) feminism. He also believes that the MMM should be contextualized in the history of different marches on and in Washington DC, since the MMM evoked images and myths of previous mass demonstrations in the capital
Babbling stochastic parrots? A Kripkean argument for reference in large language models
Get PDFRecently developed large language models (LLMs) perform surprisingly well in many language-related tasks, ranging from text correction or authentic chat experiences to the production of entirely new texts or even essays. It is natural to get the impression that LLMs know the meaning of natural language expressions and can use them productively. Recent scholarship, however, has questioned the validity of this impression, arguing that LLMs are ultimately incapable of understanding and producing meaningful texts. This paper develops a more optimistic view. Drawing on classic externalist accounts of reference, it argues that LLM-generated texts meet the conditions of successful reference. This holds at least for proper names and so-called paradigm terms. The key insight here is that the LLM may inherit reference from its training-data through a reference-sustaining training mechanism
The Meaning of Context and Co-text for Human Understanding and Large Language Models
Get PDFContext serves two distinct yet interrelated functions: (1) it provides a framework for interpreting symbolic expressions, and (2) it forms the core of Large Language Model (LLM) computation of numerical relationships between tokens. Each function relies on different features of context, and the widespread failure to distinguish them has given rise to confusion concerning the ability of LLMs to “understand” context and meaning. The paper distinguishes two kinds of context: (1) a broad sense, including the world we experience and live in, and (2) numerical relationships to other text parts. To clearly demarcate the two senses, the concept of “co-text” will be used for the second. LLMs transform co-text to produce text that is meaningful to humans, but this does not mean that LLMs understand meaning. Understanding the meaning of text requires embedding it in the broader context of human language use. Since LLMs do not do that by themselves, the correct question about LLM understanding is not whether they can understand context, but to what extent computations of co-text can compensate for missing context. The paper concludes with an outline of an answer: LLMs can remarkably well for missing context because the patterns they derive from human language use constitute co-texts that are intertwined with the context of sense-making
Review: Penelope Deutscher. A Politics of Impossible Difference: The Later Work of Luce Irigaray.
No full textPenelope Deutscher\u27s study on Luce Irigaray revolves around a series of questions which have long troubled critics: "Why and how did Irigaray attempt to transform a philosophy emphasizing sexual difference into the basis for pro-feminist social and institutional reform? Why did she and other French feminist intellectuals turn away from the language of equal rights self-evident to the feminisms of most earlier historical periods?" (9). Deutscher provides us with a sophisticated but very readable analysis of Irigaray\u27s works, which is not only focused on the later works (as the subtitle of the book announces), but which incorporates Irigaray\u27s whole œuvre from Le langage des déments (1973) to Between East and West (2002)
Review: Helene Moglen. The Trauma of Gender. A Feminist Theory of the English Novel.
No full textHelene Moglen intends to challenge the traditional view, most famously expressed by Ian Watt in "The Rise of the Nopvel" from 1959, that the English novel as a genre developed in the eighteenth century in response to the "rise" of capitalism and the ascent of the middle class. As a starting point for her study, she takes Nancy Armstrong, who argues in Desire and Domestic Fiction: A Political History of the Novel (New York: Oxford University Press 1987) that the economical and political concerns central to the eighteenth century novel were often masked as problems of gender relations. Moglen claims that gender relations in the novel were not, in fact, a mask for other concerns but themselves the central problem which caused the development of the novel as a means of articulating and negotiating it. Her "feminist theory of the novel" is based on the assumption that the rigid definition of "masculinity" and "femininity" as complementary and mutually exclusive categories, and of gender as a natural and immutable part of every person\u27s identity, which gradually became the dominant view from about 1650 onwards as a result of economical development, philosophical discourse, and anatomical research, caused "the trauma of gender." Individuals, Moglen argues, originally in possession of all possible traits, felt the need to conform to the prescribed gender roles and to suppress all those aspects of their personality that did not fit in. This resulted in strain, fear, and a feeling of loss. Moglen\u27s theory of the novel is feminist in the sense that she intends to contribute to the uncovering and understanding of the psychic costs of this sex-gender system and its influence on the Western world until today, thus aiming at social and psychological change
