Ideology and Inscription

"Cultural Studies" after Benjamin, de Man, and Bakhtin

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by Tom Cohen

Cambridge University Press

Due/Published September 1998, 250 pages, paper

ISBN 0521599679

Cohen questions the way history, ideology and politics are invoked in contemporary cultural studies. Enlisting the work of Walter Benjamin, Paul de Man, and M. Bakhtin, he argues for a new politics of memory that moves beyond what he viees as our current paralyzing preoccupation with the present, as wel as for a new approach to the reading and analysis of cultural texts that breaks with the mimetic premises of traditional criticism.

Table of Contents

Introduction: Webwork, or 'That spot is bewitched'

PART I. CIPHERS OR, COUNTER-GENEALOGIES FOR A CRITICAL 'PRESENT'
Reflections on post 'post-mortem de Man'
The ideology of dialogue: the de Man/Bakhtin connection
Mnemotechnics: time of the seance, or the Mimetic blind of 'cultural studies'

PART II. EXPROPRIATING 'CINEMA' OR, HITCHCOCK'S MIMETIC WAR
Beyond 'the Gaze': Hitchcock, Zizek, and the ideological sublime
Sabotaging the ocularist state

PART III. TOURINGS OR, THE MONADIC SWITCHBOARD
Echotourism: Nietzschean Cyborgs, Anthropophagy, and the rhetoric of science in cultural studies
Altered states: stoned in Marseilles, or the addiction to reference
Contretemps: notes, on contemporary 'travel'

Series: Literature, Culture, Theory

Review

If you were choosing up side on the playground of critical theory, Benjamin, De Man, and Bakhtin would be a mighty trio to have on your team. That is essentially what Tom Cohen has done in this assured and brilliant critique of the current state of affairs in "Cultural Studies." More specifically, Cohen questions how history, politics, and ideology are invoked by contemporary theorists. Drawing upon the works of Benjamin, De Man and Bakhtin, Cohen argues for a new politics of memory that moves away from what he feels in a paralyzing preoccupation. More than just a critique, however, Cohen also suggests a new way of reading that breaks away from a traditional mimetic premise and allows for a more genuinely "materialist" approach to a wide range of cultural texts. Cohen's original ideas are spread an equally dazzling breadth of subject matter, including the works of the above-mentioned critics, the films of Hitchcock, travel-writing, drugs, the rhetoric of science, and eco-politics. In a review of the book, Avital Ronell writes of Ideology and Inscription: "This book presents the most comprehensive and brilliant study of critical theory in our day. Thomas Cohen writes in lucid, unrelenting prose of the repressed traumas that pervade most forms of contemporary thought...the work investigates major foreclosures and the complacency of cultural studies in order to clear the way for a truly radical practice."