| Danger and Desire tracks instrumental realism and its performative excesses in the history of the wanted poster. Understood as a double movement of capture, instrumental realism requires the individual's containment through representation, followed by the strategic circulation and display of said representation(s) with the goal of physically capturing the referent. In the wanted poster, instrumental realism literalizes the desire to recover the referent that motivates all realist modes.; Cultural critics have not studied the wanted poster, in part, because the text is assumed to be a blunt, self-evident instrument of the police, a tool for capture, and an empty vessel for communication. This project pays close attention to the cultural work that the wanted poster performs in excess of its instrumentality. By considering the wanted poster not only as a tool of capture but also as a cultural performance, one gains access to the symbolic charge of the text's cumulative history and the performative power of the form itself. In the case of the wanted poster, one could argue that form is content. Framed by the conventions of instrumental realism, the individual becomes an outlaw. |
