1 Monster Culture (Seven Theses)
Jeffrey Jerome Cohen
What I will propose here by way of a first foray, as entrance into this book of monstrous content, is a sketch of a new modus legendi: a method of reading cultures from the monsters they engender. In doing so, I will partially violate two of the sacred dicta of recent cultural studies: the compulsion to historical specificity and the insistence that all knowledge (and hence all cartographies of that knowledge) is local. Of the first I will say only that in cultural studies today history (disguised perhaps as “culture”) tends to be fetishized as a telos, as a final determinant of meaning; post de Man, post Foucault, post Hayden White, one must bear in mind that history is just another text in a procession of texts, and not a guarantor of any singular signification. A movement away from the longue duree and toward microeconomics (of capital or of gender) is as- sociated most often with Foucauldian criticism; yet recent critics have found that where Foucault went wrong was mainly in his details, in his minute specifics. Nonetheless, his methodologyhis archaeology of ideas, his histories of unthoughtremains with good reason the chosen route of inquiry for most cultural critics today, whether they work in postmodern cyberculture or in the Middle Ages.
And so I would like to make some grand gestures. We live in an age that has rightly given up on Unified Theory, an age when we realize that history (like “individuality,” “subjectivity,” “gender,” and “culture”) is composed of a multitude of fragments, rather than of smooth episte- mological wholes. Some fragments will be collected here and bound temporarily together to form a loosely integrated netor, better, an unassimilated hybrid, a monstrous body. Rather than argue a “theory of
3 Monster Theory : Reading Culture, edited by Jeffrey Jerome Cohen, University of Minnesota Press, 1996. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/gwu/detail.action?docID=310376. Created from gwu on 2017-08-27 11:17:46.
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4 Jeffrey Jerome Cohen
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