Niklas Luhmann

Joseph Tabbi reviews the essay collection Simulacrum America.

About a year ago in a TLS review, the English novelist Lawrence Norfolk praised the emerging generation of U.S. writers for resisting the allure of the mediated culture and providing readers with “news of a rare and real America” (“Closing time in the fun-house”). Norfolk is thinking of William T. Vollmann’s red light districts (mostly cleaned up now and Hilton-ed over), Jonathan Franzen’s inner city (newly gentrified), Richard Powers’s intelligentsia (last seen working online), and David Foster Wallace’s mid-priced cruise ships, halfway houses, and rural state fairs (now mostly funded by corporations). Norfolk would probably oppose this America to the more globally familiar prospect of “total operationality, hyperreality, total control” and total interchangeability of sign and referent that Jean Baudrillard finds here, along with technology’s “mortal deconstruction of the body” (“Simulacra,” cited in Simulacrum America).

Stephen Schryer reviews Mark Taylor and casts a critical eye on the unconditional celebration of complexity.

Joseph Tabbi reviews the essay collection Simulacrum America.

About a year ago in a TLS review, the English novelist Lawrence Norfolk praised the emerging generation of U.S. writers for resisting the allure of the mediated culture and providing readers with “news of a rare and real America” (“Closing time in the fun-house”). Norfolk is thinking of William T. Vollmann’s red light districts (mostly cleaned up now and Hilton-ed over), Jonathan Franzen’s inner city (newly gentrified), Richard Powers’s intelligentsia (last seen working online), and David Foster Wallace’s mid-priced cruise ships, halfway houses, and rural state fairs (now mostly funded by corporations). Norfolk would probably oppose this America to the more globally familiar prospect of “total operationality, hyperreality, total control” and total interchangeability of sign and referent that Jean Baudrillard finds here, along with technology’s “mortal deconstruction of the body” (“Simulacra,” cited in Simulacrum America).

Linda Brigham reviews the Spring and Fall 1995 issues of Cultural Critique.

Where is the real you? Behind the eyeballs, right; the center of a panoptical cinema, your virtual head spinning around like Linda Blair’s in The Exorcist. Watching the world go by.

Wrong. The address of the Enlightenment Subject has been vacant for a long time, and the front door now opens on a brick wall, or on the threshold of an abyss. So where do we send the mail? One answer to that question is the subject of two special issues of the journal Cultural Critique, subtitled “The Politics of Systems and Environments” (Spring and Fall, 1995). As William Rasch and Cary Wolfe explain in their introduction to the first number, the term “systems” stands in the place of the old subject, and “environments” replaces the old object. Like the old subject/object dichotomy, systems and environments are relative terms; each system becomes environment to another system. But systems and environments also manifest reciprocity: in complex self-referential systems (organism and societies for example), systems-as-observers (an ocular metaphor for perception in general) know they observe observers.