CONTENTS 

                    ------------------
                         Articles

Anustup Basu, The Human and his Spectacular 
Autumn, or, Informatics after Philosophy

Jason B. Jones, The Time of Interpretation: 
Psychoanalysis and the Past

Pelagia Goulimari, "Myriad Little Connections": 
Minoritarian Movements in the Postmodernism Debate

Robert Payne, Virtually: The Refreshment of 
Interface Value


                    ------------------
                          Reviews

Gillian B. Pierce, Lyotard's Anti-Aesthetics. 
A review of Jean-François Lyotard, _Soundproof Room: 
Malraux's Anti-Aesthetics_, trans. David Harvey. 
Stanford: Stanford UP, 2001.

Stuart Kendall, Poet, Actor, Spectator. A review 
of Clayton Eshleman, _Juniper Fuse: Upper Paleolithic 
Imagination and the Construction of the Underworld_. 
Middleton, CT: Wesleyan UP, 2003.

Michael S. Martin, Aesthetic Primacy, Cultural Identity,
and Human Agency. A review of Emory Elliott et al, 
eds., _Aesthetics in a Multicultural Age_. New York: 
Oxford UP, 2002.

Andy Weaver, Supporting the Cage. A review of David 
W. Bernstein and Christopher Hatch, eds., _Writings 
through John Cage's Music, Poetry, and Art_. 
Chicago: U of Chicago P, 2001.

David Alvarez, Excursions into Everyday Life. A review
of Ben Highmore, ed., _The Everyday Life Reader_. 
London: Routledge, 2002.

                     -----------------     
                          Exchange


Caleb Smith, Solitude and Freedom. A response
to Saul Newman, "Stirner and Foucault: Toward a Post-
Kantian Freedom," _Postmodern Culture_ 13.2 (Jan. 2003) 

Saul Newman, Spectres of Freedom in Stirner 
and Foucault. A response to Caleb Smith.



                    -----------------     
                  Notices (WWW Version Only)


                    -----------------   
                  Notes on Contributors


                    -----------------   
                         Abstracts

Anustup Basu, The Human and his Spectacular Autumn, or,
Informatics after Philosophy

    o Abstract: This essay revisits a few core postulates 
of an idealistic modernity of the west that was based 
on the voluntarism of the human subject, the rational 
workings of the secular state, and a scientific episteme 
of power/knowledge that was to absolve a godless, 
historical universe of dogma and miracle. But perhaps, 
as it has been increasingly apparent, a new form of 
sovereign power is making itself immanent in our times. 
Instead of a historical agency of the conscientious 
human, or an isomorphic relationship between 
disciplinary knowledge and power, the global application 
of this form of sovereignty is based more on the 
temporal and spatial inseparability among moments of 
militarization, informatization, and financialization. 
As a result, categories and definitions of a classic 
liberal political imagination--like fascism for 
instance--can no longer be simply attached to human 
profiles or human tasks. This new, dogmatic, faith-based 
sovereignty of informatics and technology-in-and-of-
itself is diffuse and micro-punctual in its presence, 
unlike the world-historical spectacle of the mad Fuhrer. 
In the wake of specific molar technologies for producing 
social life itself, one has to be attentive to a 
transformed situation in which meritorious conversations 
between humans are increasingly overwritten by a great 
dictatorial monologue of power, by which money alone, 
along with its complex corporatist-statist interests, 
speaks to itself.

How does one re-think politics and resistance in such a
scenario, where inhuman assemblages and flows of finance
and interests--mega-forces of funding and facilitation--
override communicative presumptions about scientific 
truths and pieties of democratic representation? How do 
we start thinking in this moment of danger in a manner 
that is neither driven by paranoia nor enclosed in an 
ivory tower of angelic ironies?--ab


Pelagia Goulimari, "Myriad Little Connections": Minoritarian
Movements in the Postmodernism Debate

    o Abstract: The canonical phase of the postmodernism 
debate, in the work of Fredric Jameson and others, 
bequeathed to us a model of interaction between 
minoritarian movements which it is our challenge now to 
leave behind: minoritarian movements as non-communicating 
fragments in need of unification by a hegemonic force. 
In our post-hegemonic world, I return to Deleuze and 
Guattari's Anti-Oedipus for a "new" model of interaction: 
escaping the false dilemma of fragmentation versus 
unification, minoritarian movements are distinct, having 
nothing in common, as well as unceasingly interacting in 
myriad little encounters.



Jason B. Jones, The Time of Interpretation: Psychoanalysis 
and the Past

    o Abstract: Though "deferred action" has entered the
theoretical lexicon of the humanities, Lacan's theory of
causality is still poorly understood, as are its 
implications for interpretation. This essay argues that 
the return to Freud reveals psychoanalysis to be in the 
first instance a theory of temporality and history. 
Against conventional understandings of psychoanalysis as 
a recovery of the past--the view that the "cure" works 
because one remembers what "really happened"--Lacan proposes 
that interpretation works by depleting the analysand's 
putative knowledge of the past. Paradoxically, by draining 
the past of meaning, Lacanian analysis binds us to the work 
of history. The essay offers a systematic reading of Lacan's 
1950s works on technique, connecting these with later 
developments to clarify the anti-narrative emphasis in 
psychoanalytic theory. 


Robert Payne, Virtually: The Refreshment of Interface Value 


    o Abstract: This essay examines virtual representation 
as a source of anxiety--moral, cultural, and epistemological. 
By first analyzing two failed attempts by the U.S. Congress 
to apply legislative closure to the admitted epistemological 
uncertainty of virtual child pornography, the question of 
performativity is raised. The Congressional Acts' 
contradictory logic imagined a contagion of harm emanating 
from digital material and attacking actual, uninvolved 
children, but also a contagion of perpetration to "desensitize" 
potentially any viewer. The essay pivots on Margaret Morse's 
definition of the virtual as the "present subjunctive mode of 
a fictively shared present" and goes on to examine the 
equally uncertain performativity attributed to the virtual 
relationships between personal webcam subjects and their 
viewers. Charges of "virtual prostitution" against some 
female webcam subjects recall Congress's moralist fears of 
infectious "transmission." As a device of perceived 
telepresence and telepistemology, webcam representation is 
discussed as the reiteration of interface simulation, where 
the continuous, mechanical "refreshment" of this mediating 
device itself becomes an object of attention. The necessary 
imprecision and epistemological frustration of the virtual 
has become a compelling narrative of its own.