ideology and inscription
Cohen, Tom. Ideology and Inscription: "cultural Studies" After Benjamin, De Man, and Bakhtin. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998. Print.
Contents:
Introduction: Webwork, or 'That spot is bewitched'
Part I. Ciphers - Or Counter-Genealogies for a Critical 'Present':
1. Reflections on post 'post-mortem de Man'
2. The ideology of dialogue: the de Man/Bakhtin connection
3. Mnemotechnics: time of the seance, or the Mimetic blind of 'cultural studies'
Part II. Expropriating 'Cinema' - Or, Hitchcock's Mimetic War:
4. Beyond 'the Gaze': Hitchcock, Zizek, and the ideological sublime
5. Sabotaging the ocularist state
Part III. Tourings - Or, the Monadic Switchboard:
6. Echotourism: Nietzschean Cyborgs, Anthropophagy, and the rhetoric of science in cultural studies
7. Altered states: stoned in Marseilles, or the addiction to reference
8. Contretemps: notes, on contemporary 'travel'.
Author:
Tom Cohen’s work began in literary theory and cultural politics and traverses a number of disciplines—including critical theory, cinema studies, digital media, American studies, and more recently the contemporary shift of 21st century studies in the era of climate change.
Context:
late 90s attempt to retrieve the legacy of De Man after the accusations of apolitical solipsism on Derrida and deconstruction
Thesis:
"The argument of these essays is that, rather than being surpassed by the intervening "returns" to history, mimesis, humanism, and identity politics, the materiality of language lingers as a repressed trauma" (1)
Methodology:
each chapter pairs De Manian thinking with thinkers such as Bakhtin, Benjamin, Zizek, and Neitzsche
Key Terms:
"materiality" , the De Man equivalent of the real
mimetico-historicist reading of history
inscription as opposed to ideology
Related Texts and Ideas:
De Man "The Use of Theory"
Criticisms and Questions:
dense language, does not apply exactly how a use of materiality could lead to political readings, engaged more with theory than with an application on texts
Keywords:
theory, ideology, language
Notes:
Benjamin explicitly questions how an alternate practice of writing-reading to current epistemo-critical models — largely mimetico-historicist— is required to rupture the fixed and inherited narratives of a foreclosed notion of "history" (3)
De Man- movement beyond metaphor or mimesis raises issue of "materiality" (Adorno) irrecuperable to an overtly referential (Marxian) model of mimetic politics.
-a la Derrida, a critique of a hermeneutically or "ideological" invested positions is not only derivable but seems impossible to arrest.
-language is not interiority and so not apolitical
-what is overlooked is that politics within signifying practices is always also a politics of memory, of "inscriptions" and how they are managed, guarded, purged, restored, protected.
Althusser - ideology has no outside, but at the same time is nothing but outside.
De Man's project - at attempt to use the model of reading to situate epistemology as the site of the political. Since representation at all times involves the ritualized backloop of memory, the prerecorded inscription, of the ritual apparatuses of ideologies, chiasmically dissimulating the incursion they represent.
Undecidability is not a moral paralysis or apolitical, but a technos of historical intervention — habitual chains of reaction or logic formed in circumstances no longer historically applicable. Things, after all, are only "decidable" due to a long installed habit of language. "Undecidability" is where a preinscribed historical value - narrative has been deprived of momentum open to renegotiation.
-opening up unprescribed futures- not mere close reading - is what De Man is all about