CONTENTS 

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                         Articles

Michael Truscello, The Architecture of 
Information: Open Source Software and Tactical 
Poststructuralist Anarchism

Temenuga Trifonova, Is There a Subject in Hyperreality?

Julie Hayes, The Body of the Letter: Epistolary Acts 
of Simon Hantaï, Jean-Luc Nancy, and Jacques Derrida 

Philip Metres,  Barrett Watten's Bad History: A 
Counter-Epic of the Gulf War

Krister Friday, "A Generation of Men Without 
History": Fight Club, Masculinity, and the Historical 
Symptom"


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                  Collaborative Hypertext

Thomas Swiss and George Shaw, The Language of New Media. 
(HTML version only)


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                      Review Essays
 

Matthew Hart, The Measure of All That Has Been Lost:  
Hitchens, Orwell, and the Price of Political 
Relevance. A review of Christopher Hitchens, _Why 
Orwell Matters_. New York: Basic, 2002. 

Kevin Marzahl, Poetry and the Paleolithic, or, The 
Artful Forager. A review of Jed Rasula, _This Compost: 
Ecological Imperatives in American Poetry_. Athens: 
U of Georgia P, 2002.


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                      Review Essays

Martin Wallace, A Disconcerting Brevity: Pierre 
Bourdieu's Masculine Domination. A review of Pierre 
Bourdieu, _Masculine Domination_. Trans. Richard Nice. 
Stanford: Stanford UP, 2001.

Mimi Yiu, Virtually Transparent Structures. A review of 
Jean Baudrillard and Jean Nouvel, _The Singular Objects 
of Architecture_. Trans. Robert Bononno. Minneapolis: 
U of Minnesota P, 2002.


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                  Notices (HTML Version Only)


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                  Notes on Contributors


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                         Abstracts

Krister Paul Friday, "A Generation of Men Without 
History": Fight Club, Masculinity, and the Historical 
Symptom
       
    o Abstract: This article uses a reading of Chuck 
Palahiuk's novel, Fight Club, as an opportunity to 
construct a Lacanian framework for understanding 
historical self-consciousness. I argue that Fight 
Club's historical imagination dramatizes the way the 
impossibility of defining the postmodern "present" is 
conflated with the interminability of identifying with 
one's symptom, revealing how both are governed by the 
same tautological performativity. Fight Club's narrator 
couches his wounded masculinity in conspicuously 
historical terms, seeking recognition from the Other 
qua History as a means of interpellating an identity for 
both period and self. I argue that this dynamic, a 
dynamic of historical interpellation, is one way texts 
"think historically," to borrow Jameson's phrase, in 
postmodernity. In other words, maybe texts do not 
reflect or reveal their time so much as they assert--
performatively, imaginatively--what their time ought 
to be. --kpf 


Julie Candler Hayes, "The Body of the Letter": 
Epistolary Acts of Jean-Luc Nancy, Simon Hantaï, and 
Jacques Derrida 

    o Abstract: Between June 1999 and April 2000, 
philosopher Jean-Luc Nancy and painter Simon Hantaï 
exchanged a series of letters relating to a group of 
artworks that Hantaï was producing to accompany the 
forthcoming book on Nancy by their mutual friend, 
Jacques Derrida (Le Toucher, Jean-Luc Nancy [2000]). 
Hantaï's works consist of "unreadable manuscripts": 
passages by Nancy and Derrida meticulously copied and 
recopied on stiffened crumpled batiste. Ultimately, the 
letters were published as La Connaissance des textes: 
Lecture d'un manuscrit illisible (Correspondances), 
including the text of the correspondence, color plates 
of Hantaï's "travaux de lecture," photographic 
reproductions of all the letters, and a final letter by 
Derrida addressed to both correspondents. This reading 
of the correspondence takes into account its epistolary 
dynamics--its logic of sending and receiving, its 
"message strategy"--which are analyzed in terms of a 
Deleuzian "desiring machine." Other important aspects 
of the published correspondence include its complex 
negotiation of visual and discursive modes and its 
relationship to a set of significant pre-texts: the 
passages from Nancy's Etre singulier pluriel and 
Derrida's Donner le temps that Hantaï renders 
"unreadable" as he copies and recopies them; and, of 
course, Le Toucher. It is important to look at 
Connaissance not only as a "text," but also as a 
"book": a physical object, manifesting production 
constraints and editorial choices that subtly interact 
with the dialogue of the correspondents. This analysis 
is shaped by the reflections of Derrida, Nancy, and 
other scholars and theoreticians on the vicissitudes 
of "the letter" and its emblematic relation to 
questions of textual materiality, production, and 
reproduction. --jch 


Philip Metres,  Barrett Watten's Bad History: A 
Counter-Epic of the Gulf War


    o Abstract: This essay situates Barrett Watten's 
book-length poem Bad History against the debate between 
Jean Baudrillard and Christopher Norris regarding the 
proper position of the intellectual during the Persian 
Gulf War. Bad History provides a provisional third way, 
mobilizing both the paranoiac postmodernity of 
Baudrillard and the hyperrationality of Norris, in a 
poetry that refuses to extract itself from its own 
subjective position, a resistance that speaks beyond 
the limits of its own political group. Watten's poem 
is the most sophisticated attempt to grapple with the 
Gulf War in part because it situates itself in the 
cultural milieu that enabled the war itself to take 
place: what Paul Virilio calls "Pure War"--that state 
of society whereby the real war is the constant 
preparation for war. By invoking and countering the 
epic mode through a poetics of interference, a 
subjectivity vacillating between complicity and 
resistance, and formal innovations (including use of 
footers, newspaper-like columns, and a hefty appendix), 
Bad History stands out as perhaps the most important 
poetry to emerge out of the Persian Gulf War. --pm 


Temenuga Trifonova, Is There a Subject in Hyperreality?


    o Abstract: The article discusses a dominant trend 
in postmodernism toward the dissolution of subjectivity 
into something vague, unstable, fragmented, amorphic, 
and always impersonal. In line with the ethical appeal 
of Lyotard's idea of the inhuman as a resistance to the 
tyranny of subjectivity, Baudrillard defines the fatal 
or the inhuman as an expression of the enigma of the 
world, its resistance to metaphysics. What makes 
Baudrillard's theory of the hyperreal problematic is 
the possibility for confusing the hyperreal with the 
pure or the impersonal (i.e., with the fatal) since 
both are defined as the collapse of the subject/object 
distinction. On one hand, the impersonal is the 
elimination of human perception as an external, 
privileged point of view. However, the hyperreal is 
also defined as the elimination of the subjective 
point of view, the suppression of the look, the fact 
that the object of perception is always already there, 
already seen, thus preventing the act of seeing. 
Obscenity then has two mutually exclusive meanings: it 
signifies either the absolute triumph of subjectivity 
(the world has been preempted by consciousness, objects 
are merely extensions or reflections of the subject) or 
the complete objectivization of the world (everything 
becomes objective because what is already seen is, for 
that very reason, no longer accessible: it cannot be 
manipulated by the subject). The de-realization of 
reality is the destruction of subjectivity but, as 
Baudrillard notes, the crime is never perfect. If the 
real is still preserved--as the trace of what has been 
murdered--the subject also survives its annihilation or 
dispersal; its destiny passes into the object. By 
subjectivizing or de-realizing the world, the subject 
has revealed its ability to appear and disappear--to 
lose itself in multiplicity--which is, in fact, the 
strongest proof that there is still a subject since 
Baudrillard himself defines the constitutive illusion 
of the world as the possibility of things to appear 
and disappear. Subjectivity includes its own 
annihilation, its pseudo-sacrificial self-reduction to 
objective (fatal) reality. --tt 


Michael Truscello, The Architecture of Information: 
Open Source Software and Tactical Poststructuralist 
Anarchism


    o Abstract: Open Source Software refers to a 
software development model in which the source code is 
open for modification and redistribution, unlike 
proprietary software such as Microsoft Windows, which 
denies access to the source. The OSS model, in 
particular the Linux operating system, has garnered 
much attention from disciplines as diverse as computer 
science, sociology, economics, law, and political 
science; however, cultural theory and media studies, 
especially theories influenced by poststructuralist 
thought, have yet to address the social impact of Open 
Source and its potential as a political philosophy in 
the network society. This paper examines the 
convergence of poststructuralist anarchism (using works 
by Michel Foucault, Gilles Deleuze, Lebbeus Woods, and 
Hakim Bey) and Open Source Software via a discursive 
analysis of Eric Raymond's Open Source manifesto and 
ethnographic survey, "The Cathedral and the 
Bazaar." --mt