Representations

THE POLYGRAPH FOR LIE DETECTION is a ''placebo'' technology whose ability to sort truth from falsehood depends essentially on the subject's belief in the efficacy of the instrument (as opposed to any ''real'' efficacy). In this sense, the lie detector is a technology that belongs to the realm of the social imaginary. As such, it offers an ideal probe into the shifting grounds of trust and mistrust in twentieth-century America. Originally designed to rein in corrupt municipal police forces—by substituting scientific interrogation for brute force beatings—the lie detector by midcentury was being used two million times each year to interrogate criminal suspects, corporate employees, and the denizens of the national-security state. Yet all the while polygraph evidence was formally banned from the courtroom. This article demonstrates that the historical process that led to this curious state of affairs was the outcome of two interdependent strategies for marketing and validating expert knowledge. Polygraph inventors and operators thrived by passing themselves off as the purveyors of an objective method of ferreting out the truth, transforming their subjects' bodies into a piece of counterfeit-proof circumstantial evidence. This appealed to the American public's preference for mechanical rules as the most certain guarantee of just and equal treatment. In fact, the inventors and operators succeeded in attracting clients among police, prosecutors, corporate managers, and the chieftains of the national-security state largely by virtue of the vast discretion that undergirded their methods of interrogation, and the confessions they could wring in the process. These methods (logically akin to judicial torture) document the degree to which American justice actually operates according to informal rules that favor the already powerful. This dual history illuminates the shifting grounds of the laity's trust in expert science, the blurred line between the rule of law and the informal procedures of American justice, and the evolving demands of loyalty within the institutions of corporate capitalism and the national-security state. Given the renewed attention to national security in the past few years—and the renewed assurances that the lie detector will help uncover spies, traitors, and terrorists—this history has new urgency.

Ken Alder

A Social History of Untruth: Lie Detection and Trust in Twentieth-Century America

This article argues that determining whose agency is behind the instrument of the magic flute in Mozart's The Magic Flute is crucial to understanding the mode of representation at stake in the opera. This examination is expanded, using Plato's Symposium, to suggest that the role of the flute-player in the opera has a necessary relationship to the practice of interpretation and criticism.

Marianne Tettlebaum

Whose Magic Flute?

This essay traces Biblical resonances within Machiavelli's account of Cesare Borgia, or “Duke Valentino,” in The Prince. It challenges the idea that Machiavelli's goal is to detheologize politics (in fact, my reading suggests that the founding of all principalities must be consecrated in religious terms); it dispels the notion that the “armed prophet” is armed exclusively with a sword rather than with a book; and it raises questions concerning the ambiguous meaning of “success” in a practical “how-to” manual on political success. I demonstrate that Machiavelli's intentions are not necessarily so antireligious, or even so anti-Christian, as interpreters conventionally present the Florentine's views on religion. Most fundamentally, perhaps, my interpretation prompts readers to reimagine what, on Machiavelli's view, a genuinely political founder of a Christian polity might look like.

John P. Mccormick

Prophetic Statebuilding: Machiavelli and the Passion of the Duke

The brutal murder of Nancy in Oliver Twist was a theatrical favorite throughout the nineteenth century. The scene was realized in several media, not just in text and on stage, but also in public readings and silent film, as well as in the several plagiarized versions of the story; it thus provides a rich opportunity for assessing artistic violence between media. This essay argues that the multimedia history of Nancy's murder shows a culture in transition to technological modernity. This transition erodes the traditional affective register for melodramatic violence and leaves us with questions about the relationships between technological media, violence, and the allure of powerful momentary experiences.

Sue Zemka

The Death of Nancy "Sikes," 1838–1912

This article places the recent turn to affect into conversation with a parallel movement that took place in eighteenth-century music theory. Because theorists in that period struggled to explain how music functioned as a sign, they began to propose an alternative, materialist theory of vibrational attunement in order to account for music’s affective power. By refracting contemporary affect theory through this historical antecedent, the essay argues for renewed attention to the objects in the world that generate affects in subjects.

Roger Mathew Grant

Music Lessons on Affect and Its Objects

Noting recent indications of a renewed interest in philology, this essay provides accounts of both the flourishing of philology in the nineteenth century and the abandonment by scholars of philology on methodological and moral grounds in the twentieth century. It contends that while traditional philology cannot be considered a worthy model for contemporary scholarship, neither can it be simply repudiated or ignored, for it continues to exert a powerful if largely unacknowledged influence on scholarly practice.

Geoffrey Galt Harpham

Roots, Races, and the Return to Philology

THIS ESSAY IS ABOUT the opening and closing of a utopian space of comprehensive knowledge in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. It locates a geopolitical domain in which nineteenth-century British geographers situated the nerve center of all possible knowledge, the library of all libraries and the museum of all museums. It traverses an interval of time, between 1870 and 1940, during which institutions like the British Museum could not keep up with all the knowledge they were amassing, a period in history when it was no longer possible to imagine one person or one institution knowing everything, when the task of collecting and classifying knowledge increasingly fell to civil servants operating under state supervision. Victorian England was one of the first information societies in history, and it charged a variety of state facilities with the special task of presenting and representing the conditions and possibility of comprehensive knowledge. This operational field of projected total knowledge was the archive. The archive was not a building nor even a collection of texts but the collectively imagined junction of all that was known or knowable, a fantastic representation of an epistemological master pattern, a virtual focal point for the heterogeneous local knowledges of metropole and empire. Though in theory, as Michel Foucault has written, "the archive cannot be described in its totality," in nineteenth-century British practice the archive was often figured as a fixed place, as a discrete institution, even as a single person.' The ordering of the world and its knowledges into a unified field moved explicitly into the register of representation, where, most successfully of all, the archive often took the imagined form of an utopian state.

Thomas Richards

Archive and Utopia

<jats:p>Opening with a consideration of the role played by Richard Avedon's photograph of William Casby in Roland Barthes's Camera Lucida, this essay examines Sojourner Truth's precocious and knowing use of the technology of photography. Inscribed with the caption "I Sell the Shadow to Support the Substance," Truth's inexpensive cartes-de-visite functioned as a form of paper currency during the years immediately following the Civil War. As a chemical process, photography transformed precious metals into paper images; as an optical registration of light and shadow, photographic negatives turned white into black and black into white, a reversal noted by Oliver Wendell Holmes in an essay that suggests that racial difference informed understandings of the new medium.</jats:p>

Darcy Grimaldo Grigsby

Negative-Positive Truths

This article looks past the showy dramas of French Maoism in order to bring into focus its widespread and at times banal photographic practices in the late 1960s and 70s. Tremendous energy was devoted to taking and circulating photos of China within France. These photographs, whose close connection to the real seems at odds with the goals and means of the Cultural Revolution, were nonetheless essential to its enthusiastic reception in the West.

Catherine E. Clark

From Cameras to Slideshows

This article reads the contemporary monument conflicts connected to the Black Lives Matter movement in France alongside the erection and destruction of fictional monuments in a bestselling utopian novel from three centuries ago: Louis-Sébastien Mercier’s L’An deux mille quatre cent quarante: Rêve s’il en fût jamais (1771). The article throws light on how contemporary BLM interventions in the cityscape respond to still unresolved issues regarding the meaning of liberté, egalité, and fraternité in relation to colonialism, nationalism, and race; examines the discursive mechanisms behind the history of slavery becoming notoriously unremembered in France; and, in conclusion, considers the unrealized utopian potentiality of Mercier’s novel in relation to the most recent projects to memorialize slavery in Paris.

Anna Jörngården Galili

Black Lives Matter in Paris 1771 and 2021

If I lie and I say that I am lying, am I lying or telling the truth? This ancient riddle, the Liar’s Paradox, is at the heart of Thomas More’s Utopia (1516). Because the Liar’s Paradox refers to itself while also negating the truth of its own proposition, it generates an unresolvable logical contradiction. This essay recovers how scholastic logicians and modern mathematicians have grappled with the Liar Riddle, which provides a compact formula for capturing infinity. Drawing on these formalizations, I argue that Utopia uses the abstract techniques of logic and mathematics to inscribe an autonomous artificial system. This abstract formalization comprises utopia’s radical political potential: its ability to convert enclosure into a method of infinite expansion.

Jenny C. Mann

The Liar’s Paradox and the Form of Utopia

The nineteenth-century emergence of foreshadowing as a critical term and pedagogical subject tracks and reinforces the classic understanding of modernity-as-disenchantment, as the domain of foreshadowing moves from providential and historical phenomena to textual practices. However, reading for the foreshadowing in nineteenth-century realist novels such as Middlemarch reveals a more porous boundary between ontological and formal foreshadowing and troubles established views regarding readerly belief and disbelief and the supposed rift between meaning and life.

Daniel Hack

Reading for the Foreshadowing

In uncovering the hidden history of Sigmund Freud’s Mystic Writing-Pad, this essay seeks to illuminate not only why so many have assumed that it was “merely a child’s toy” (and how we might read it differently knowing that it was not) but also why Jacques Derrida devoted so much energy to deconstructing Freud’s fascination with it as an analogy for consciousness. We may even discover something—in ways that are perhaps more than mere analogy—about how our more contemporary devices generate modes of extended cognition as well.

R. John Williams

Surface Writing

This article reconstructs the relationship between figuration, cognitive mapping, and energy in the work of Fredric Jameson to show how the macroeconomics of oil overdetermines the transition into and out of postmodernity. It then critically reflects on what this might mean in an era defined by economic stagnation, climate catastrophe, high energy prices, and decarbonization, arguing that the crisis of carbon and capital once again makes figuration an urgent political task.

Harry Pitt Scott

Figures of Separation

This article advances an argument about two “imagined environments”—my term for the frameworks that human groups use to depict and dwell in more-than-human worlds. The first of these imagined environments arose around the US-Mexican Boundary Commission (1849–59): while failing to fulfill its official objective of building physical border monuments, this team of explorers and engineers still made media that helped two settler states conceptualize and control their borderlands. Against this increasingly efficient exploitation of both humans and nonhumans, a second imagined environment persisted in Mescalero Apache pictographs, Chihene Apache performances, and other Apache media. On our precarious planet, this imagined environment can teach us to stop defining ourselves around fixed places and to remain resilient while migrating through shifting spaces.

Carlos Alonso Nugent

Drawing and Disrupting Borders in the Wake of the US-Mexico War

This essay works to define, historicize, and probe the queer fairy tale subgenre. Recuperating Vladimir Propp’s syntagmatic formalism from a queer angle, I argue that fairy tales’ protean, fantastical qualities afford rapid and imaginative refashioning across languages by LGBTQ+ writers. In Belle Époque tales by Vernon Lee, Oscar Wilde, Laurence Housman, Jean Lorrain, and Renée Vivien, I locate a poignant vision of queer futurity.

Colton Valentine

The Belle Époque Queer Fairy Tale

This paper argues for the absenting presence of an embodied theoretical architecture of materialist harmonious dialectic in Hubert Damisch’s engagement with Chinese art and architecture around the cloud. This connects with recent media studies discourse where environment both conditions and is being with an alternative architecture that is different from a centralized elevated arche. At the same time, the essay positively explores the decolonizing structural potential for displacing Eurocentrism and idealism in the making of theory and art and architecture history by opening up to global collaborative knowledge formation and reconnecting theory with practice.

Ruo Jia

Cloud as an Alternative Architecture

Michel Foucault’s return to classical antiquity at the end of his career coincides with a turn away from institutional critique and a return to Kant. This is no coincidence. Foucault’s Introduction to Kant’s “Anthropology” (1961) completely anticipates his approach to ancient subject formations, which reflects Kant’s theory of the liberal, self-enterprising, and enlightened subject as this is outlined in Foucault’s “What Is Enlightenment?” (1984) and elsewhere. Foucault’s final studies surface isolated, private, and autonomous subjects who are at once premodern, proto-Christian, and uncannily modern. Fashioned by ascetic and aesthetic models of self-care, they testify to “a genealogy of the modern subject.”

短名	Representations. (Berkeley).
Journal Impact	0.98
国际分区	CULTURAL STUDIES(Q2)
期刊索引	SCI Q3中科院 4 区

ISSN	0734-6018, 1533-855X
h-index	39
国内分区	社会学(4区)社会学文化研究(4区)

涉及主题	历史哲学艺术政治学法学地理文学类社会学计算机科学物理语言学认识论心理学考古美学
出版信息	出版商: University of California Press，出版周期: ，期刊类型: journal，开源期刊: 非开源
基本数据	创刊年份: 1983，原创研究文献占比: 100.00%，自引率:11.10%， Gold OA占比: 1.23%

Representations

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