CONTENTS 

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                         Articles

Eugene Thacker, Bioinformatics and Bio-logics

Saul Newman, Stirner and Foucault: Toward a Post-Kantian 
Freedom

Zafer Aracagök, Whatever Image

Meyda Yegenoglu, Liberal Multiculturalism and the Ethics 
of Hospitality in the Age of Globalization



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                       Essay

Darren Tofts, "The World Will Be Tlon": Mapping the 
Fantastic onto the Virtual


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                         Reviews

Piotr Gwiazda, Modernism Old or New? A review of Marjorie 
Perloff, _21st-Century Modernism: The "New" Poetics_. 
Malden: Blackwell, 2002.

Sandy Baldwin, A Poem Is a Machine to Think With: Digital 
Poetry and the Paradox of Innovation. A review of Loss 
Pequeno Glazier, _Digital Poetics: The Making of 
E-Poetries_. Tuscaloosa: U of Alabama P, 2002.

Char Roone Miller, Zizek's Second Coming. A review of 
Slavoj Zizek, _On Belief_. London and New York: Routledge, 
2001.

Rekha Rosha, Accelerating Beyond the Horizon. A review of 
Paul Virilio, _A Landscape of Events_. Trans. Julie Rose. 
Cambridge: MIT P, 2000.

Susan Laxton, Good Place and No Place. A review of 
Catherine de Zegher and Mark Wigley, eds., _The Activist 
Drawing: Retracing Situationist Architectures from 
Constant's New Babylon to Beyond_. New York: The Drawing 
Center, and Cambridge, Mass.: MIT P, 2001.
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                  Notices (WWW Version Only)


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                  Notes on Contributors


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                         Abstracts

Zafer Aracagok, Whatever Image
       

    o Abstract: This essay can be seen as an attempt to 
foreground a new approach to representation with an outcome 
of a new concept, "whatever image." This is undertaken by 
going through Benjamin's handling of image via Leibniz in 
the prologoue of "German Tragic Drama" where he problematizes 
epistomolgy's claim to truth by introducing his idea of 
constellations and thus opens up the question of a rigid, 
bounded image of the world to an immanence; Adorno's 
theories in "Negative Dialectics", concerning the image as 
the third term, as a screen, between subject and object, by 
way of which he introduces the question of "the resurrection 
of flesh" as far as the perception of the world in the form 
of images is concerned; and Giorgio Agamben's concept of 
"whatever" in "The Coming Community" by means of which I 
attempt to introduce a "whateverness" to the concept of 
image which aims to open the question of image to 
"experience through flesh."--za 


Saul Newman, Stirner and Foucault: Towards a 
Post-Kantian Freedom

    o Abstract: The purpose of this paper is to explore and 
to develop a post-Kantian concept of freedom--that is, a 
notion of freedom that is not circumscribed by the 
categorical imperative or determined by pre-ordained 
rational and moral coordinates. The paper attempts this 
through an exploration of Max Stirner's and Michel Foucault's 
reflections on freedom. Both thinkers, while not usually 
discussed together, share a similar critique of essentialist 
identities and universal rational and moral structures, and 
the relations of domination and exclusion that flow from 
them. Broadly speaking, both thinkers see the classical 
Kantian idea of freedom as redundant, as it is dependent 
upon fixed rational and moral postulates that restrict 
individual autonomy. They reconceptualize freedom in ways 
that increase the power the individual exercises over him 
or herself. Moreover, they recognize that, rather than 
freedom being an abstract, metaphysical ideal removed from 
the world of power, it is in fact situated in relations of 
power and must be understood in these terms. Stirner, as we 
shall see, dispenses with the classical notion of freedom 
altogether and develops a theory of ownness to describe this 
radical individual autonomy. I suggest that such a theory of 
ownness can provide a more positive grounding for Foucault's 
own idea of freedom as involving a critical ethos and an 
aesthetics of the self. By examining the subtle connections 
between these thinkers on the question of freedom, it is 
possible to arrive at a "postmodern" understanding of 
freedom that goes beyond the Kantian parameters laid down 
for it. --sm 


Eugene Thacker, Bioinformatics and Bio-logics


    o Abstract: Combining approaches from media studies and 
science studies, this essay explores the relationship 
between genetic and computer "codes" through a consideration 
of the burgeoning field of "bioinformatics"--the development 
and application of computer technologies to life science 
research. Bioinformatics ranges in its use from online 
genomic and proteomic databases to the use of software for 
gene discovery and protein folding analysis. It is linked to 
the software industry, governmental-corporate life science 
research, and application in "in silico biology," medical 
genetic diagnostics, and database management. As a direct 
intersection of computer science and molecular biology, 
bioinformatics promises to transform the study of biological 
life into computation, where particular gene-protein 
interactions and even entire cells can be informatically 
understood through the use of computer technology. This 
essay provides a critical analysis of several bioinformatics 
systems, such as BLAST (a standard genome analysis tool). 
Focusing on the ways in which bioinformatics software 
contextualizes biological materiality, the essay argues that 
bioinformatics is a practice of "biomedia," or the informatic 
recontextualization of biological components and processes. 
Bioinformatics thus privileges an informatic approach to the 
body, while evincing a deep investment in the ways in which 
biological materiality can be technically enhanced; the body 
becomes a technology, but a technology geared towards the 
production of a biotechnical body.--et 


Darren Tofts, "The World Will Be Tlön": Mapping 
the Fantastic on to the Virtual

    o Abstract: This essay revisits one of the key texts of 
the fantastic, Jorge Luis Borges's classic 1940 short 
fiction, "Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius." Borges's short 
parable of an entirely simulated, fictitious world has 
become one of the key texts of postmodernism, a touchstone 
in our understanding of the blurry lines of demarcation 
between reality and its copies. But it also has much to 
teach us about our current preoccupation with the creation 
of virtual worlds in the digital age. To this end, the paper 
will discuss the capacity of the digital to create virtual 
worlds that, like the fabulatory world of Tlö'n, are 
excessive, "too real." In our contemporary virtual culture, 
the troubling question at the heart of Borges' fiction is 
still as urgent--do we need reality any more? The essay also 
examines the uncanny cultural fallout of the virtual in 
terms of the publication of a literary hoax by Australian 
journalist Guy Rundle. Rundle's piece, ostensibly a homage 
to the power of Borges' writing to convince us of the 
reality of the unreal, concerned a purported but little 
known journey Borges took to Melbourne in 1938. In pursuing 
Borges's imaginary footsteps, a peculiar and unsettling 
reality starts to emerge. --dt 

Meyda Yegenoglu, Liberal Multiculturalism and the Ethics 
of Hospitality in the Age of Globalization

    o Abstract: This article problematizes the liberal 
imperative to tolerate and respect cultural difference 
under globalization and suggests that it is far from 
displacing the sovereignty of the host society in question. 
By making a detour through Derrida's reading of the aporias 
of conditional hospitality, it suggests that codified 
multiculturalist tolerance (a form of conditional 
hospitality) enables the subject to appropriate a universal 
and sovereign place from which the other is welcomed. 
Regulating the destabilizing force of the political by 
enabling a disavowed and inverted self-referentiality of 
racist hospitality, conditional hospitality entails the 
repudiation, limitation, or foreclosure of politics proper. 
To reformulate the problematic of multiculturalism in 
ethical terms, it follows Derrida's reading of unconditional 
hospitality which involves an intentional attention to the 
other which entails an "interruption of the self by the self 
as other." To rethink the relationship between conditional 
and unconditional hospitality in political terms, it 
examines the limitations and congealments conditional 
hospitality imposes on politics proper. By articulating 
Antonio Negri's concepts of constituent and constitutive  
power it establishes parallelism between constituted power 
and conditional hospitality. Locating the possibility for a 
democratic politics in the ethical opening unconditional 
hospitality will bring about, it suggests that such an 
opening can function to uphold the creative force of 
constituent power. Further, in resisting 
constitutionalization, unconditional hospitality can open up 
the irreducible nature of the political as well as the 
possibility of an ethical being where the otherness of the 
foreigner is recognized. This can be seen as the opposite of 
the foreclosure of the "right to have rights" or democratic 
politics that is managed by conditional hospitality. --my