John Culbert, The Well and the Web: Phantoms of
Community and the Mediatic Public Sphere

Louis Kaplan, Unknowing Susan Sontag's Regarding:
Recutting with Georges Bataille

Ulrik Ekman, Irreducible Vagueness: Mixed Worlding
in Diller & Scofidio's Blur Building

Brian Lennon, New Media Critical Homologies

Neil Larsen, A Brief Reply to Kalindi Vora's
"Others' Organs: South Asian Domestic Labor and the
Kidney Trade"


Reviews
 
Phillip Novak, Performing Politics. A review of Jennifer
Fay, _Theaters of Occupation: Hollywood and the Reeducation
of Postwar Germany_.  UP of Minnesota, 2008.

Bernard Duyfhuizen, "God Knows, Few of Us Are Strangers
to Moral Ambiguity": Thomas Pynchon's Inherent Vice. A
review of Thomas Pynchon, _Inherent Vice_.  New York:
Penguin Press, 2009.

Stephanie Boluk, Anthological and Archaeological Approaches:
A Review of Electronic Literature and Prehistoric Digital
Poetry. A review of Katherine Hayles's _Electronic
Literature: New Horizons for the Literary_.  Notre Dame,
IN: University of Notre Dame, 2008, and C.T. Funkhouser's
_Prehistoric Digital Poetry: An Archaeology of Forms,
1959-1995_. Tuscaloosa: U of Alabama P, 2007.

Richard Rushton, Cinema After Deleuze After 9/11.
A review of David Martin-Jones, _Deleuze, Cinema and
National Identity: Narrative Time in National Contexts_.
Edinburgh UP, 2008.
  
Peter Schwenger, The Dream of Writing.
A review of Herschel Farbman, _The Other Night: Dream,
Writing, and Restlessness in Twentieth-Century
Literature_.  New York: Fordham UP, 2008.

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                  Notes on Contributors


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                         Abstracts

John Culbert, The Well and the Web: Phantoms
of Community and the Mediatic Public Sphere

* Abstract: "The Well and the Web" examines a number of
media watershed events in which the sense of community in
crisis, threatened by new technologies of communication,
is expressed in sensationalistic dramas of young lives in
mortal danger. From the advent of live TV news to the rise
of web-based interactivity, the figure insistently invoked
in such scenes of crisis is that of a girl fallen into a
well. This theme is echoed in the recent films Ringu and
The Ring, whose horror premise makes explicit the
necropolitics (Mbembe) underpinning the conventional
discourse of community and televisual spectatorship. Drawing
on The Phantom Public Sphere (Robbins) and new media
theory (Doane, Latham, Poster), I argue that the discourse
of community and morality betrays a haunted logic that must
engage with contemporary theories of virtuality and
spectrality (Derrida). The horror genre's tropes of the
viral and the ghost provide the means to articulate a
postmodern ethics of spectatorship that, attuned to trauma
and the duplicity of discourse, can challenge necropolitics
and extend hospitality to the phantoms that haunt the
mediatic public sphere.--jc

Ulrik Ekman, Irreducible Vagueness: Mixed Worlding
in Diller & Scofidio's Blur Building

* Abstract: This article argues that Blur Building, Diller
& Scofidio's architectural project for the Swiss Expo 2002,
demonstrated performatively and interactively how
contemporary worldmaking involves cultural and
technological invention and construction both, implying our
cultural co-evolution with ubiquitous computing and media
such that "worlding" must today be approached and
approximated as a question of realities that mix virtuality
and actuality.  This article not only touches upon the
actual inventions produced in this project--with its
atmospheric architecture of tensegrity structures, its
vast artifactual mist-cloud, its bio-genetic pumping
system, its smart weather system, and its complex
systems for ubicomp surveillance and wearable computing --
but also goes on to problematize the implications of mixed
realities for existing notions of practical contextuality
or the "life world." Specifically, it is argued that mixed
worlding in an epoch of calm ubiquitous computing
necessarily confronts us with a lived experience (Erlebnis)
of embodiment whose irreducible vagueness stems from a
transduction of the imperceptible and the unimaginable,
i.e., from a being-among in originary tactility as that
which affects and animates us and remains structurally
earlier than or ahead of any commonsensical hermeneutic
horizon of conscious, linguistic, or discursive meaning.
--ue

Louis Kaplan, Unknowing Susan Sontag's Regarding:
Recutting with Georges Bataille

* Abstract: This essay reviews and challenges Susan Sontag's
use and abuse of Georges Bataille in her last book, Regarding
the Pain of Others.  Sontag takes up Bataille's understanding
of and fascination with a group of Chinese torture (or lingchi)
photographs from the beginning of the twentieth century.  Her
somber reading glosses over Bataille's "anguished gaiety" in
the face of these images and his post-Nietzschean tendency to
laugh in the face of the impossible.  Sontag overlooks Bataille's
atheological and iconoclastic approach to these images steeped
in transgression and non-knowledge in an attempt to frame his
thinking as somehow full of religious meaning and allied to the
Christian transmutation of suffering into sacrifice.  Bound to
a restricted (or Hegeilian) economy that remains servile to
knowledge, Sontag's encounter with these images misses the
opportunity to acknowledge the sovereign (and comic) operation
as "absolute rending" inscribed in an excessive economy without
reserve.  Unlike Sontag in Regarding, Bataille looks to these
deathly images in terms of an ethics of the impossible and
risks bringing together non-knowledge, laughter, and tears.
The essay concludes with a look at the limits of Sontag's
analysis of Jeff Wall's Dead Troops Talk to underscore the
profound practical joke that non-knowledge plays on those who
would seek to turn death into a pedagogical exercise.  The
essay also suggests the relevance of Jean-Luc Nancy's thinking
about such images (and photography in general) beyond the
logic of representation and in terms of exposure (or of being
posed in exteriority). --lk

Brian Lennon, New Media Critical Homologies

* Abstract: New media studies, we might say, has discovered
temporality. After fifteen years in which its cultural
dominant was presentist prognostication, even a kind of
bullying, the field has folded on itself with such new guiding
concepts as the "residuality," the "deep time" or "prehistory,"
and the "forensic imagination" of a new media now understood
as after all always already new. This essay rereads the legacy
of hyperfiction pioneer and demiurge Michael Joyce through
Fredric Jameson's call, twenty years ago, for a "deeper
comparison" than new media studies is yet ready to make, even
today. It argues that new media studies, as a disturbance in
both the practices and production regimes of humanistic
discipline, is and always has been best thought less as an
emergent field than as a site of such double vision. If we
still want to consider Joyce's work a founding moment in new
media literary studies in the U.S., we will have to recognize
the radical untimeliness of, and at, that foundation: the
extent to which the negativity of Joyce's secession from this
emergent field must be understood not as the end of his
influence in it, but in antinomian fashion, as its beginning
again. --bl