PO Box 440140 Aurora CO 80014-0140
Title:
The Topographical Imagination of Jameson, Baudrillard, and Foucault
Author: Michael James Rizza
Series: Emergence
Imprint: Noesis Press (The Davies Group, Publishers)
212 pp.
soft cover
USD 26.00
ISBN 978-1934542514
April 2015
This in-depth discussion of several canonical theorists — Fredric Jameson, Jean Baudrillard, and Michel Foucault — traces the trajectory of their ideas
from one text to the next. It focuses on how these theorists attempt to avoid the problem of representation, as well as humanist subjectivity, even as they imagine the external
situations that shape individual identity.
Although the author offers in-depth overviews, he does not simply rehearse the theories, such as many introductions to theory do. Instead, he excavates the topographical
imagination that results from seeking to constitute the subject from without, from its external situation. He draws forth the organizing figure of each theorist’s spatial
thinking—Jameson’s Marxist dialectical levels, Baudrillard’s double spiral of the symbolic and the semiotic, and Foucault’s dual bar of exclusion—which provides readers an
innovative way to approach complex ideas.
Contents
Preface
Acknowledgements
List of Abbreviations
Chapter 1
Introduction: Postmodern Alienation
Chapter 2
Fredric Jameson’s Dialectical Levels, or, Strolling Towards Postmodernism
Strolling through War
Strolling through a Hotel
A Digression in Terminology
The Level of Lived Experience
Yoking/Measuring Difference
Postmodern Space
A Cultural Product
A Whole System of Parts
Levels or Ghostlier Demarcations
Horizons
Chapter 3
Baudrillard’s Hostile Worlds, or, Double-Spiraling Pataphysically
The Primitive Order, or, the Always Already Past
The Counterfeit and Production
From Symbolic Exchange to Seduction, or, the Always Already Present
Hyperreal, or, the Always Already Reproduced
From Seduction to the Fatal
Chapter 4
Michel Foucault’s System of Thought, or, Totalities and their Exclusions
The Concept of Madness
Internal Rules: Episteme and Discourse
The Power/Knowledge Regime
Conclusion
Notes
Bibliography
Index
“The
Topographical
Imagination
of
Jameson,
Baudrillard,
and
Foucault
is
indeed,
as
Michael
James
Rizza
argues,
a
collection
of
several
tapestries:
a
study
of
three
of
the
most
important
theorists
of
the
postmodern
period,
whose
individual
trajectories
are
traced
over
the
course
of
their
careers;
an
exploration
of
the
subject
as
it
evolves
from
an
original
Enlightenment
model;
a
consideration
of
the
various
organizing
figures—system
of
levels,
double-spiral,
dual
caesura—by
which
today’s
projected
worlds
are
imagined.
In
the
end,
readers
are
provided
with
an
intellectual
history
that
is
as
wide-ranging—from
Spinoza
and
Kant
to
Debord
and
Lefebvre—as
it
is
Incisive
.
.
.
the
theoretical
is
always
informed
by
a
command
of
literature
that
is
breathtaking
in
its
scope—from
Cervantes
to
Milosz
to
Borges
to
Pynchon
.
.
.
.
Integrating
all
of
this
into
a
seamless whole is not the easiest of tasks, and it is to the book’s great credit that it does so and in such a way as to join clarity with acuity beautifully.”
—Stacey Olster
Professor of English, Stony Brook University
The Author
Michael
James
Rizza
(PhD,
American
Literature)
is
the
author
of
the
award-winning
novel
Cartilage
and
Skin,
short
fiction,
and
various
academic
articles.
He
teaches
at
Kean
University in New Jersey.