POSTFACE _Postmodern Culture_ v.1 n.3 (May, 1991) Eyal: Last year we expected that the essays we would publish --a good number of them anyway--would be affected by the electronic medium, but that has not happened much. Several of the essays do gain something from being in this medium--Ulmer's or Moulthrop's. In print they would lose at the very least the chance to exemplify some of their argument. But we have not seen too many essays that think the way they do or mean what they mean because they are in electronic form. John: In an odd way, though, that observation is very much like one of the early and persistent misconceptions we ran into when we explained the journal to people: they always seemed to expect that, because it was a journal published, distributed and read on computers, it must be a journal _about_ computers--about its medium. We had a number of submissions, at the beginning, that had something to do with computers but nothing to do with postmodern culture. That was what forced us to stipulate that we wouldn't consider essays on computer hardware/software unless they raised "significant aesthetic or theoretical issues." Eyal: True, though I was thinking about the effects of the medium and not about subject matter. We've also not received that many essays that took risks--I wonder how much of our success we must attribute to what might finally be the conventionality of our first three issues. A conventional journal that looks radical: like a modernist from Yale. I think that we would have published more radical work (not necessarily more radical politically) if we had more of it to review. We did get some unconventional work, but from what we've seen I'd have to guess that most people out there are writing recognizable, assimilable essays. John: Well, I wouldn't say that our first three issues have been _thoroughly_ conventional, but I know what you mean. Still, the authors of some of the submissions we rejected might argue that, to the extent that our first three issues _are_ conventional in their content, it's because we rejected risk-taking essays. But what kinds of risks are you talking about? Eyal: The unforseen: a new way of making things work. It seems that the essays we have published share certain structures of thinking, ways of being essays, however innovative and interesting their subject matter. Of course if they were saying something in an entirely new way they would be hard to follow, maybe in the way that Howe's essay is hard to follow at times. But because so many of these works argue for new ways of doing things, for a radical redefinition of personal context (Fraiberg) or a new kind of writing (Acker, Ulmer), it is especially noticeable that they think in such familiar ways. You were saying before we started writing that, in a way, much of this thinking does not seem to have absorbed poststructuralism. In fact we've noted in both previous Postfaces that many works we've published tend to organize around familiar oppositions, specifically those of classical and popular culture, utopian and dystopian postmodernism, etc.. John: Well, wherever you go, there you are. We've been standing pretty far back from the first three issues; what we've said about them could be said about all theory and criticism, including the most innovative. If twenty years of poststructuralism haven't changed our basic patterns of thinking, one year of electronic publishing certainly isn't going to. But if we ask whether we've been unhappy with what we've published so far, the answer is clearly "no": we've both been very pleased with the way these issues have come together. The essays themselves have covered a wide range of subjects in a variety of styles, and working with the authors and reviewers has been a lot of fun. Eyal: For a long time--editing the second issue--I used to go to bed late. I remember in particular editing Howe's essay. Three of the four reviewers had made pretty much the same suggestions, but with variations. The work makes so much of its argument subtly, in its form and organization, in its juxtapositions and development, that it was hard to see just what taking some parts out of it would do to other parts, and to the whole; if I were to ask Howe to take out part A here, then part B there would make less sense; if I asked her to leave part A in but take C that came before it out, then A would mean something else and then B would change too. Then again, that might have been what the readers had wanted when they suggested the changes. If Howe were to cut off B altogether, then that would not be what the readers had asked for, but now A and C would not evolve into B and so might not be objectionable after all. My mind kept weaving and unravelling the essay as I read and reread it, late into the night. I got more and more excited as I was reading the essay; I felt cold but decided that this was because I'd had dinner so long before--this made sense at the time. I got a blanket and kept reading. When I slept my mind kept going round and round, repeating bits and pieces of the essay feverishly. I woke up shivering, with a high temperature: the doctor thought it was influenza, but it felt like the influence of the text. John: A sort of out-of-body editorial experience. I take back what I said before--one year of electronic publishing has at least disordered _our_ minds from time to time. It's also radically altered my perception of the passage of time: when I try to place something that happened last June--like the time I accidentally distributed the entire list of subscribers _to_ the entire list of subscribers...twice--it seems that about three years have passed since then. Some good things have happened in that time, whatever time it was: being called "honey" by Kathy Acker ("Honey, the movers are here, so make it short"), pushing the button to mail out full text of the first issue at 5 a.m. on the last day of the month (and immediately crashing mailboxes around the world), the experience we've had with self-nominated reviewers in the editorial process, the early support from the library here at NCSU, and especially the response of subscribers and contributors to the journal. The one thing I would like to see develop further is PMC-Talk, which could become more closely related to the journal and more constructive in its own right. There's been some good stuff posted there, but there's also a lot of polemic, which is bad conversation. I think the Fraiberg-Porush exchange in this issue is an example of a good conversation--one that doesn't necessarily discard or disguise strong opinions, but still manages to get somewhere. Eyal: An exciting aspect of the journal so far has been that many of the works we have published do hold good conversations, explicitly or implicitly. That's the flip side of assimilability--that essays which share certain suppositions or ways of thinking can engage each other. John: Right: for instance, both Katz and Moulthrop start by trying out the supposition that the world really might behave according to our computer dreams--nightmares in Katz's "To a Computer File Named Alison," daydreams for Moulthrop, who doubts whether the media is really going to revolutionize what we exchange in it. Then for Fraiberg, this isn't a dream of the future at all: it's our present. Cyborgs are what we already are. Eyal: Katz and Moulthrop are both interested in the way that information systems (Moulthrop) and rhetorical constructions (Katz) affect the social text and our psychological economy, respectively. Likewise several writers identify antagonistic kinds of postmodernism (a classical and a popular for Wheeler, a reflective and an unreflective for Mikics). Terms mingle without reducing the conversation to cocktail party banter-- like Matibag's interest in cannibalism and Fraiberg's in exchange and the dissolution of borders. John: When Matibag talks about cannibalism in Caribbean literature, he's actually talking about the cannibalizing of cannibalism, or of the imagery of cannibalism--a situation in which the text consumes its context, not unlike what Maier describes in Bowles's "hybrid" (appropriated) texts. As in the last two issues, there are numerous unplanned connections among the essays in this one. These connections suggest either that we all say much the same thing--a fairly reductive conclusion, and one which overlooks the importance of the local context for all of these essays--or they suggest that, although our individual contexts may be very different, there are trade routes among them.