How not to write for Dissent
Morton, Brian
The following study (that is, etude) was originally submitted under the title "Strategies of Subversion: Discourse, Desire, and The Other in 'Gilligan's Island.' "—Ens. The hegemonic discourse...
...3 The key figure of "Gilligan" enacts a dialectic of absence and presence...
...A journal like Dissent, instead of exploring the question of whether socialism is really dead, would make a greater contribution to postmodern discourse by exploring the question of whether Elvis is really dead...
...The monologic and repressive dominance of traditional "texts" (i.e., books) has been decentered by a dialogic discourse in which the "texts" of popular culture have assumed their rightful place...
...5, May 16, 1966, p. 15...
...Also see Fredric Jameson's study of postmodemism, forthcoming from Duke University Press...
...q Notes I follow E. Ann Kaplan, who theorizes the postmodem as a cultural "break" in the sense of Foucault's "episteme...
...In his relations with the Skipper, the Millionaire, and the Professor, Gilligan is the repressed, the excluded, The Other: he is the Id to the Skipper's Ego, the proletariat to the Millionaire's bourgeoisie, Caliban to the Professor's Prospero...
...This has enormous implications for cultural and social theory...
...See Habennas, "Was Ieisst Universalpragmatik...
...Here Gilligan himself is the oppressor: under the male gaze of Gilligan, Ginger becomes the Feminine-as-Other, the interiorization of a "self" that is wholly constituted by the linguistic conventions of phallocratic desire (keeping in mind, of course, Saussure's langue/parole distinction...
...2 Gilligan himself represents the transgressive potentialities of the decentered ego...
...Why do the early episodes privilege a discourse of metonmy...
...cit., pp...
...And what of the title— "Gilligan's Island...
...SUMMER 1990 299...
...2 The "island" of the title is a pastoral dystopia, but a dystopia with a difference—or, rather, a dystopia with a differance (in, of course, the Derridean sense), for this is a dystopia characterized by the free play of signifier and signified...
...4 "Gilligan's Island" may be periodized into an early, Barthean phase, in which most episodes ended with n exhibition of Gilliganian jouissance, and a second phase vhose main inspiration is apparently that of Nietzsche, via ,yotard...
...The abence of any influence of Habermas is itself a testimony to the II-pervasiveness of Habermas's thought...
...6 The eclipse of linearity effectuated by postmodernity, then, necessitates a new approach to the creation of modes of liberatory/expressive praxis...
...See Thibault, op...
...in Vorstudien and Erganzungen ur Theorie des Kommunikativen Handelns, p. 4. The 1981 television movie Escape from Gilligan's Island epresents a reactionary attempt to totalize what had been the.rized in the series as an untotalizable heteroglossia, a bricove...
...The late 1970s influence of the Kristevan semiotic needs [0 further comment here...
...A paradigmatic text in this regard is the television series "Gilligan's Island," whose seventytwo episodes constitute a master-narrative of imprisonment, escape, and reimprisonment which eerily encodes a Lacanian construct of compulsive reenactment within a Foucaultian scenario of a panoptic social order in which resistance to power is merely one of the forms assumed by power itself...
...3 Ibid...
...The hegemonic discourse of postmodernity valorizes modes of expressive and "aesthetic" praxis which preclude any dialogic articulation (in, of course, the Bakhtinian sense) of the antinomies of consumer capitalism.' But some emergent forms of discourse inscribed in popular fictions contain, as a constitutive element, metanarratives wherein the characteristic tropes of consumer capitalism are subverted even as they are apparently affirmed...
...That Ginger is identified as a "movie star" even in the technologically barren confines of the desert island foreshadows Debord's concept of the "society of the spectacle," wherein events and "individuals" are reduced to simulacra...
...I do not have the space to pursue these luestions here, but I hope to do so in a forthcoming book...
...This I hope to demonstrate in a future study...
...4 But the binarism of this duality is deconstructed by Gilligan's relations with Ginger, the movie star...
...Cloud...
...Also see Michel Foucault, "Entretien avec M. Chapsal," La Quinzaine Litteraire, no...
...See Georges Thibault, Jouissance et Jalousie dans Lisle de Gilligan, unpublished thesis on file at the Ecole Normale Superieure (St...
...6-216, passim...
...In what sense the island "his...
...See Kaplan, ed., Postmodernism and Its Discontents, Verso, 1988...
...5 Indeed, we find a stunningly prescient example of what Baudrillard has called the "depthlessness" of America in the apparent "stupidity" of Gilligan and, indeed, of the entire series...
Vol. 37 • July 1990 • No. 3
