If you do not yet have Realplayer on your computer, you can download the free version from here. 

Any feedback would be greatly appreciated!  To send a comment, or to join the listserve on which we are discussing and planning this series, please send an e-mail to  emiller@sas.upenn.edu

Thanks!
 

***

> Penn Folklore Graduate-Student Sponsored
> Videoconference Series 2000-1:
> Pre-series special event
>
>  Friday, Nov. 3, 3-4pm.
>
> All are invited!
> Please attend in-the-flesh at Penn, in Towne 317, and speak;
> or watch-listen to the live webcast and participate via e-mail;
> or participate via e-mail alone.
>
> This event will be a conversation with Stephen
> Paul Miller, a tenured Literature professor at St.
> John's University (Staten island, NY campus),
> and author of _The Seventies Now_ (this was his American
> Studies dissertation at NYU).  In this book, Miller
> considers various types of texts from the seventies
> (mostly in the USA), including those derived from
> social-political events and artistic events, and argues
> that there is a "fluid epistemological building code,
> a DNA underlying the construction of much of an epoch's
> most significant cultural phenomena" (25).
>
> The format will be: Prof. Miller will speak for 20-30
> minutes, summarizing his book and applying the
> intellectual methodology to the current social-political
> scene, including the presidential election which will
> occur four days afterward.  From the Penn end, and 
> via e-mail, students will respond and comment.

> Please see http://ccat.sas.upenn.edu/videoconference/series
> or e-mail emiller@sas.upenn.edu or call 215-417-4134 
> for further info.

***

In _The Seventies Now_ (Duke U. Press, 1999), Stephen Paul Miller identifies surveillance (of others) and self-consciousness (of self) as major tropes, or motifs, of seventies culture.  These tropes emerged in the course of processing the rupture that was the sixties.  He finds these tropes in three representative areas, one political and two artistic: 1) the Nixon presidency; 2) John Ashberry's poem, "Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror"; and 3) Jasper Johns' crosshatching designs in paintings.

Issues that may be explored in the course of the 11/3 event include: In what ways can we fruitfully compare authored and unauthored events? What is the intellectual history of this sort of synaesthetic and inter-disciplinary analysis of culture?  What, if any, are the dominant tropes of present-day mainstream USA culture?
 

Following are some quotes from _The Seventies Now_ --
 

"The political unconscious, according to Fredric Jameson, is the ideological limitation embedded in a society's cultural mind-set" (21).

"The affairs of the city can be defined as everything within a wall" (21).

Althusser claims that "every function that it is possible for culture to fulfill, such as education and entertainment, is an 'ideological state apparatus' because cultural phenomena serve the limits of conceivable reality so this reality does not threaten the existing social order.  This order is deeply entrenched, protecting the most essential workings of social division, inequity, and repression" (22).

"An Ashberry poem is effective as a poem and as a cultural product because it clarifies the workings of that poem's historical period and our present understanding of that period.  Jameson observes that 'history is inaccessible to us except in textual form.'  Historical events themselves are rewritings, or, we might just as easily say, repicturings" (23).

"It is the critic's job to bring the political unconscious to consciousness" (23).

"According to Jameson, history is text.  Yet history is not a text until it is made so by those who interpret it, who draw it out" (24).

"Foucault maintains that through the 'basis of a political reality' we 'fiction' history.  One might colloquially liken this basis to a fluid epistemological building code, a DNA underlying the construction of much of an epoch's most significant cultural phenomena.  When I say, 'DNA,' I mean to suggest a kind of fictive other life of an era that determines the ontological horizons of that era, that is, what cannot, even in the imagination, be escaped.  What 'works' as an evocative cultural articulation does so because it accounts for, reconciles, and manifests the era's predominant and constituative means of semiotic production and distribution" (25).

"In other words, a 'thing' cannot be understood without a condition, context, or system, that makes its understanding possible" (25).

"For Foucault, a historical study seeks to comprehend the 'conditions of historical appearance,' that is, to understand how certain phenomena have entered the historical discourse within an epistemlogical system that is constituative of our understanding of an epoch.  All forms are constituents of the epistemological systems (or, in effect, enabling rules of discourse) that are at work in a given period.  A basis is thus established for synchronic cultural studies and periodization" (26).

"The seventies surveys and catalogs the influence of the sixties... During the seventies, prior periods begin, in a sense, to be syndicated like television reruns" (30).