CONTENTS 

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                         Articles

Scott Michaelsen and Scott Cutler Shershow, "Practical 
Politics at the Limits of Community: The Cases of
Affirmative Action and Welfare"

Samir Dayal, Inhuman Love: Jane Campion's The Piano" 

Brian Donahue, "Marxism, Postmodernism, Zizek"

Jim Hicks, "'What's It Like There?': Desultory Notes on the 
Representation of Sarajevo"


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                       Collaborative Hypertext

Thomas Swiss and Seb Chevrel, "The Narrative You 
Anticipate You May Produce" 


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                           Review Essay

Matthew Hart, "Solvent Abuse: Irvine Welsh and Scotland." 
A review of Irvine Welsh, Glue. New York: Norton, 2001.

Lisa Hopkins, "Returning to the Mummy." A review of 
The Mummy Returns. Dir. Stephen Sommers. Perf. Brendan 
Fraser, Rachel Weisz, and Arnold Vosloo. MCA/Universal, 2001.
  

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                             Reviews

Christopher Pizzino, "A Legacy of Freaks." A review of 
Slavoj Zizek, The Fragile Absolute, or, Why is the Christian 
Legacy Worth Fighting For? New York: Verso, 2000. 

Alexander H. Pitofsky, "Profit and Stealth in the 
Prison-Industrial Complex." A review of Joseph T. 
Hallinan, Going Up the River: Travels in a Prison Nation. New 
York: Random House, 2001. 

Jason B. Jones, "Sexuality's Failure: The Birth of History." 
A review of Tim Dean, Beyond Sexuality. Chicago: U of 
Chicago P, 2000, and Charles Shepherdson, Vital Signs: Nature, 
Culture, Psychoanalysis. New York: Routledge, 2000.

Niran Abbas, "Trekking Time with Serres." A review 
of Maria Assad, Reading with Michel Serres: An Encounter with 
Time. SUNY Press, 1999. 

Andreas Kitzmann, "They're Here, They're Everywhere." A 
review of Jeffrey Sconce, Haunted Media: Electronic Presence 
from Telegraphy to Television. Durham, NC: Duke UP, 2000. 

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                     Related Readings
                    (WWW Version Only)

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                     Bibliography of
                      Postmodernism
                   and Critical Theory
                    (WWW Version Only)

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                         Notices
                    (WWW Version Only)

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                  Notes on Contributors

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                        Abstracts

Scott Michaelsen and Scott Cutler Shershow, "Practical 
Politics at the Limits of Community: The Cases of
Affirmative Action and Welfare"

    o Abstract: In the wake of a number of studies of the 
    relationship between post-structuralism and the "political," 
    this article demonstrates how a post-structuralist Marxism 
    can be applied to particular instances of politico-economic 
    decision-making.  Through an examination of U.S. court cases 
    that address affirmative action and welfare, the authors 
    reveal the limits of both "left" and "right" versions of these 
    policies and show how the entire spectrum of conventional 
    opinion unites around (and remains unable to escape) certain 
    founding assumptions.  In particular, the traditional 
    conceptualizations of affirmative action and welfare reach 
    their limit in the figures of mandated white supremacy and 
    enforced economic inequality.  The authors also suggest that e
    it is precisely at these limits that another form of politics 
    emerges--one influenced in particular by a broadly 
    Marxian/Derridean trajectory and Jean-Luc Nancy's work on 
    community.  This form of politics involves what the authors 
    call "calculation in order to end calculation," by which all 
    conventional notions of giving or sharing must be radically 
    reconfigured at the limit of identity itself.  Such a politics 
    would produce an "affirmative action" policy not strictly 
    affirmative of anything, not even "diversity," a policy 
    whose goal would be absolute deracialization; and a 
    "welfare" policy no longer founded in exclusion and the 
    preservation of scarcity, but re-conceived as an expenditure 
    without reserve: an offering or sharing of well-being to an 
    "all" that remains forever open.--sm and scs

Samir Dayal, Inhuman Love: Jane Campion's The Piano" 

    o Abstract: Jane Campion's The Piano has been 
    praised as a film about a woman's self-assertion against an 
    oppressive patriarchal and colonial economy which defines a 
    woman's place ultimately within the institution of bourgeois 
    marriage.  Ada McGrath, the protagonist, is championed for 
    her moving, if ironic, self-assertion: she chooses not to 
    speak, but lets her piano express her innermost feelings. And 
    yet, viewers have also felt disappointed and troubled because
    Ada appears to accede to a demeaning self-prostitution to win 
    back her piano, a "bargain" that Campion apparently "resolved" 
    by marrying her to the man who seduces her.  How then could 
    Ada be an exemplar of feminist resistance? This essay argues
    that this disappointment is not only unwarranted but obscures
    the film's power and insights into desire and psychic drive. 
    Ada's resistance must be understood in its colonial and 
    feminist dimensions. But the film's true richness lies in its 
    exploration of desire, its rendering of Ada's self-assertion 
    as a kind of inhuman love.  The film demonstrates an 
    extraordinary understanding of desire as crucial to 
    subjectivity and of jouissance as the subject's impossible 
    goal.  Ada's pursuit of desire and jouissance comes to a 
    crisis in her near self-annihilation. The essay develops some 
    insights of Lacanian psychoanalytic theory to show that the 
    film merits renewed and deeper theoretical analysis as a 
    representation of a kind of love that challenges the 
    categories of conventional love and highlights its 
    misfirings, but by the same token illuminates insights into 
    this most universal and defining human experience.--sd

Brian Donahue, "Marxism, Postmodernism, Zizek"

    o Abstract: This article addresses some of the challenges to 
    Marxism posed by the conditions of late capitalism and by 
    the theoretical discourses of postmodernism, and makes a 
    case for the continued relevance and value of Marxist theory 
    for an ostensibly post-Marxist, would-be post-ideological 
    period. The developments in the theory of ideology advanced 
    in Slavoj Zizek's work, focusing on the role of psychology 
    in the functioning of ideology under conditions of late 
    capitalism, are then taken as valuable criticisms and 
    revisions of the Marxist tradition that open useful avenues 
    for critically understanding American culture and society 
    in recent decades. Two of Zizek's key--and related--insights 
    are then examined in relation to two well-known American 
    films: the first, that the dominant subjective structure of 
    postmodern society is that of the "pathological narcissist," 
    is developed through a reading of Citizen Kane, particularly 
    in light of Zizek's assessment of the role of the "maternal 
    superego" in this subjective structure; and the second, that
    the breakdown between the simulacrum and the Real in 
    postmodern society must be understood in terms of the 
    attenuation of the Symbolic order, is developed through a 
    reading of Pulp Fiction, framed in terms of the often-
    repeated concern about "desensitization" toward violence in 
    a society in which the simulacrum is alleged to have usurped 
    the Real. The essay concludes with a claim that Zizek should 
    be understood not as a cynical, apolitical ironist, as some 
    have critically read him, but rather as a "late Marxist" in 
    the Jamesonian sense.--bd

Jim Hicks, "'What's It Like There?': Desultory Notes on the 
Representation of Sarajevo"

    o Abstract: In the prologue to his influential, now perhaps 
    infamous, Balkan Ghosts, Robert D. Kaplan asks, and answers, 
    the following question: "What does the earth look like in the 
    places where people commit atrocities?"  A similar inquiry 
    seems implicit in my own titular question and probably lurks 
    behind the readerly glance of almost anyone who chooses to 
    write, or peruse, an essay like mine.  Part autobiography, 
    part photographic essay, part critique, part anecdote, 
    parable, and comedy of errors, my text offers, more than 
    anything else, a note of caution.  What is it we see, if we 
    see? After the original, oral presentation of this essay, 
    one audience member described it as an attempt to walk the 
    line between a necessary silence and the obligation to 
    witness.  My own sense of it is that the essay wanders 
    around more than most and isn't all that certain of what it 
    finds.  Doing so is an attempt to do justice to the 
    Benjaminian sense of experience--events for which categories 
    are lacking--and thus to counteract, in some small fashion, 
    our all-too-common, post-Eliot sense of ourselves as born
    -again Tiresians (we've seen it all, and can do nothing).  
    If such an excursion can be said to have a purpose, it is 
    to induce at least a suspicion of something that, for 
    several years now, has been my own answer to the Kaplans of 
    this earth.  All appearances asides, what Sarajevo most 
    feels like is home.--jh

Thomas Swiss and Seb Chevrel, "The Narrative You 
Anticipate You May Produce" 

    o Abstract: This piece is a collaborative experiment in New 
    Media Poetry combining text, images, and sound.  Following 
    the artist Christo's work ("wrapped" objects like Running 
    Fence, Wrapped Pont Neuf, etc.), the collaborators on this 
    piece developed one answer to the question: what might 
    "wrapped" language look like in a digital environment?  It 
    is "interactive," requiring the reader/viewer to locate 
    and click on bits of language (phrases, lines) as they 
    appear on the screen.  Before the piece begins, the order 
    of the pages is randomly shuffled.  The resulting order is
    represented by the serial number (in red) at the top of the 
    screen. The backgrounds and animations on each page are 
    randomly drawn. Finally, the reader's interaction with the 
    screen is what sets the words in their final 
    states.--ts and sc