All posts filed under: Issue 17

Introduction / Issue 17: Through the Looking Glass, and What We Found There: Ourselves

Erin Leary A Klee painting named “Angelus Novus” shows an angel looking as though he is about to move away from something he is fixedly contemplating. His eyes staring, his mouth is open, his wings are spread. This is how one pictures the angel of history. His face is turned toward the past. Where we perceive a chain of events, he sees one single catastrophe which keeps piling wreckage upon wreckage and hurls it in front of his feet. The angle would like to stay, awaken the dead, and make whole what has been smashed. But a storm is blowing from Paradise; it has got caught in his wings with such violence that the angel can no longer close them. This storm irresistibly propels him into the future to which his back is turned, while the pile of debris before him grows skyward. This storm is what we call progress. –Walter Benjamin, “Theses on the Philosophy of History,” 1940. 1 In 2002, in a now well-documented rebranding effort, the cable television network American Movie Classics …

Contributors / Issue 17: Through the Looking Glass, and What We Found There

Guest Editors Amanda Jane Graham is a Doctoral Candidate in the Visual and Cultural Studies program at the University of Rochester.  She has an M.A. in Communication and Culture from York University and a M.S. in Education from Brooklyn College.  A former New York City public school teacher and community organizer, Amanda is interested in the social life of art post 1960.  Her dissertation examines site-specific dances representative of Manhattan’s shifting economic, political, and architectural landscape of the 1970s. Amanda edited the IVC issue on Mad Men because she loves the show, and because she knows, as Don Draper does, that fiction is as meaningful as fact. Erin Leary is currently completing her PhD in Visual and Cultural Studies at the University of Rochester, where her dissertation focuses on women’s participation in the turn-of-the-twentieth-century’s nativist and eugenics movements in America prior to the vote. Previously, she completed an MA in the History of Decorative Arts and Design. She also serves as adjunct faculty in Art and Design History and Theory at Parsons, The New School …

“So Much Woman”: Female Objectification, Narrative Complexity, and Feminist Temporality in AMC’s Mad Men

Fiona E. Cox In February 2011, in anticipation of the release of the fourth season of US TV drama Mad Men on DVD, The New York Review of Books published a review by Daniel Mendelsohn.  In what is a predominantly scathing assessment, Mendelsohn decries AMC’s critically revered series—set in Manhattan in the early 1960s and centering on fictional advertising agency Sterling Cooper1—for what he argues is its hypocrisy in offering up “an alluring historical fantasy of a time before the present era’s seemingly endless prohibitions against pleasures once taken for granted.”2 The show’s hypocrisy, Mendelsohn feels, stems from its eroticization of that which it also seems to intend as shocking.  In his words: to invite an audience to feel superior to a less enlightened era even as it teases the regressive urges behind the behaviors associated with that era strikes me as the worst possible offense that can be committed in a creative work set in the past: it’s simultaneously contemptuous and pandering.3 I would like to unpick one of the areas Mendelsohn holds up …

Mourning Becomes the Mad Men: Notes on Nostalgia

Aviva Dove-Viebahn Modern nostalgia is a mourning for the impossibility of mythical return, for the loss of an enchanted world with clear borders and values; it could be a secular expression of a spiritual longing, a nostalgia for an absolute, a home that is both physical and spiritual, the edenic unity of time and space before entry into history. ~ Svetlana Boym1 I. “Don Draper’s Guide to Picking Up Women,” a 2008 Saturday Night Live skit featuring Jon Hamm, who plays Don on AMC’s critically acclaimed television show Mad Men (2007-present), succinctly identifies both the satisfaction and the absurdity of the series and its nostalgic appeal. In this satire, Don explains those who wish to emulate his success with women (as defined by quantity not quality of relationships) need only follow a few “simple” steps, the last of which articulates what is simultaneously seductive and disconcerting about the show’s unabashed nostalgia for the 1960s and Draper’s inexplicably charming misogyny: Finally, step four: look fantastic in a suit, look fantastic in casual wear, look fantastic in …

Serializing the Past: Re-Evaluating History in Mad Men

Written by Monique Miggelbrink In the midst of Mad Men’s first season, Sterling Cooper’s office manager Joan Holloway informs secretary Peggy Olson about her promotion to copy writer. At the end of their conversation, Joan refers to her position as messenger: “Well, you know what they say: the medium is the message.”1 Of course, the viewer can classify this as one of the show’s many anachronisms. We know that Marshall McLuhan’s slogan, which is one of media studies’ essential phrases, became popular in 1964 and not in 1960 as depicted by the show.2 But there is more to that. This famous sentence self-reflexively signifies that Mad Men’s form, its complex serial condition, is central to the way it represents the past. The medium, i.e. Mad Men as contemporary hybrid serial television drama, is the message as it signifies the show’s basic principle of investigating the past. We follow the characters of the fictional Madison Avenue advertising agency Sterling Cooper through their troubled public and private lives, and see them struggling, sometimes even capitulating, in the light …

The Affect Theory Reader

Reviewed By Brent Strang, SUNY Stony Brook Melissa Gregg & Gregory J. Seigworth, eds. The Affect Theory Reader. Durham, North Carolina: Duke University Press, 2010. 402 pages. Two decades after the affective turn, critical theory’s incorporation of emotion and the body’s materiality has become something of an imperative. Lawrence Grossberg, who is interviewed by Gregg and Seigworth for The Affect Theory Reader, laments how our frequent appeals to affect’s nature as ‘ineffable excess’ have too frequently let us off the hook from close empirical labor (315). The editors have answered his call by theorizing affect in all of its particularity and context. As such, the anthology might best be conceived as taking up a crucial second stage in this turn, organizing itself around a central premise summarized by way of Bruno Latour: “The body becomes less about its nature as bounded substance or eternal essence than the body ‘as an interface that becomes more and more describable when it learns to be affected by many more elements’” (11). The emphasis, then, shifts away from affect’s problematization of discourse—a …

How We Think: Digital Media and Contemporary Technogenesis

Reviewed by Christoph Raetzsch, Graduate School of North American Studies, Berlin Hayles, N. Katherine. How We Think: Digital Media and Contemporary Technogenesis. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2012. 280 pages. Since the 1970s, N. Katherine Hayles has been exploring the zones of contact between the cultural formations of technology and the technological basis of culture, working between what C. P. Snow called “the two cultures” of humanists and scientists.1 Hayles’ previous works include How We Became Posthuman: Virtual Bodies in Cybernetics, Literature and Informatics (1999), and Coding the Signifier: Rethinking Semiosis from the Telegraph to the Computer (2002), where she productively joined computer science, communication history and interpretations of classic and avantgarde literature. The common ground between these fields lies in the patterns, temporalities and structures that cultural forms exhibit to understand the neurological, psychological, and cultural impact of new technologies. How We Think is organized around the term technogenesis, by which Hayles means “the idea that humans and technics have coevolved together” (10). Putting an accent on the social dimension of developing and using …

The Right to Look

Reviewed by Sara Blaylock, University of California, Santa Cruz Nicholas Mirzoeff. The Right to Look. A Counterhistory of Visuality. Durham & London: Duke University Press, 2011. 386 pp. Passionate and vigorous, Nicholas Mirzoeff’s The Right to Look proposes a novel critique of modernity. Linking the plantation to imperialism to today’s military-industrial complex, the author examines the role of “visuality” in modern history. As opposed to a perceptual definition, Mirzoeff’s use of the term relates to how authority self-authorizes by envisioning itself within a particular historical perspective. Authority’s visuality is a worldview––what Mirzoeff calls a “complex of visuality”––that seeks to naturalize and aestheticize its perspective in the classification and organization of the social order. The Right to Look describes the inherent instability of dominant visuality through a historical exploration of countervisualities. These alternatives position Mirzoeff’s “right to look” as a “right to the real.” This is to say, countervisualities confront authority’s narrow construction of reality by imagining and then asserting its alternative. The Right to Look is an exceptionally interdisciplinary text of impressive geographic and temporal …

Touching Photographs

Reviewed by River J. Bullock, University of Wisconsin-Madison Olin, Margaret. Touching Photographs. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2012. 288 pages. Moving beyond visual analysis and materiality of photographic objects, Margaret Olin crafts a series of essays that traverse the intersubjectivities and interactivity of the tactile looking they spur.  Composed in six chapters, Touching Photographs contributes to theory of photography, visual studies, and art historical understandings of canonical projects, including Walker Evans and James Agee’s Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, James VanDerZee’s Harlem funeral portraits, Roland Barthes’s Camera Lucida, and W. G. Sebald’s texts. She also constructs fresh analysis of recent 9/11 memorialization practices, the collective historicization efforts of Susan Meiselas’ akaKurdistan interactive web project, and Abu Ghraib prison photographs. Olin situates this provocative collection of material amidst concerns of the agential relationship to the photographers, subjects, collectors, and institutions through which they circulate, and is persistently reflexive on the possibility of empowerment, imaginative community, and poignant identification they can inspire. Touching Photographs insistently rejects a “systematic understanding of photographic or photo-historical methodology” that might shape …