Lloyd-Smith: Abjection/abjectivism

[jbor at bigpond.com]

'Abjection/abjectivism'
by Allan Lloyd-Smith, _European Journal of American Culture_ 24.3, 
2005, pp. 191-203.

Abstract
"The article offers an account of the post-humanist uses of abjection 
in contemporary art and literature. The discussion ranges from Julia 
Kristeva to Brit Art to Don DeLillo, Bret Easton Ellis, Thomas Pynchon, 
Donald Barthelme and Jonathan Franzen. If the realm of the sign insists 
upon a cleaned-up, happy and healthy world of the 'real', in which all 
oppositions can be mediated or negotiated away, and in which the merely 
human is seen as powerless and determined from the outside by immense 
state and economic power as well as from the inside by the 
psychological imperatives of brand names, insistence on the designer 
body, and the manipulation of desire, the situation of the human is 
becoming increasingly that of 'abjection'. This concept is partly 
thought about by way of Kristeva's psychoanalytical formulation, but 
more than that in terms of what might be called a psycho-cultural 
appreciation of the way that patterns, usually seen in terms of 
individual acculturation based on Freudian and Lacanian understandings, 
seem also to operate in the wider field of society. Critical interest 
in this theory so far has been primarily located within the context of 
gothic and horror, but arguably the question of abjection is only fully 
to be understood in this wider framework of resistance to the 
colonization of the sign, and of meaning itself. In short, the artistic 
fascination with abjection represents the oppositional production of an 
antithesis to colonized and cleaned-up meaning structures, an 
'in-your-face' riposte to what me might call, rather than a brave new 
world, a 'clean' new world."

Some jargon, but some astute discussion of texts and contexts as well.

Pdf available offlist.

best