POSTMODERNCULTUREPOSTMODERNCULTURE
P RNCU REPO ODER E P O S T M O D E R N
P TMOD RNCU U EP S ODER ULTU E C U L T U R E
P RNCU UR OS ODER ULTURE
P TMODERNCU UREPOS ODER ULTU E an electronic journal
P TMODERNCU UREPOS ODER E of interdisciplinary
POSTMODERNCULTUREPOSTMODERNCULTURE criticism
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Volume 7, Number 3 (May, 1997) ISSN: 1053-1920
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Editors: Lisa Brawley
Stuart Moulthrop
Editors Emeritus: Eyal Amiran
John Unsworth
Review Editor: Paula Geyh
Managing Editor: Sarah Wells
List Manager: Jessamy Town
Research Assistants: Anne Sussman
Steve Wagner
Editorial Board: Sharon Bassett
Michael Berube
Nahum Chandler
Marc Chenetier
Greg Dawes
J. Yellowlees Douglas
Jim English
Graham Hammill
Phillip Brian Harper
David Herman
bell hooks
E. Ann Kaplan
Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett
Arthur Kroker
Neil Larsen
Tan Lin
Saree Makdisi
Jerome McGann
Uppinder Mehan
Jim Morrison
Larysa Mykyta
Phil Novak
Chimalum Nwankwo
Patrick O'Donnell
Elaine Orr
Marjorie Perloff
Fred Pfeil
Peggy Phelan
David Porush
Mark Poster
Carl Raschke
Avital Ronell
Susan Schultz
William Spanos
Tony Stewart
Allucquere Roseanne Stone
Gary Lee Stonum
Chris Straayer
Rei Terada
Paul Trembath
Greg Ulmer
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CONTENTS
TITLE FILENAME
Editor's Introduction ed-intro.597
HYPERTEXTS
Michael Joyce, "Twelve Blue" [WWW Version only]
Diana Reed Slattery, "Alphaweb" [WWW Version only]
John Cayley, "Book Unbound" [WWW Version only]
Andrew Herman & Co., "The Heimlich Home [WWW Version only]
Page of Cyberspace"
HYPERTEXTUAL ARTICLES
Matthew G. Kirschenbaum, "'Through Light kirschenbaum.597
and the Alphabet:' An Interview with
Johanna Drucker"
Loss Pequeno Glazier, "Jumping to [WWW Version only]
Occlusions"
ARTICLE
Craig Saper, "Intimate Bureaucracies & saper.597
Infrastructuralism: A Networked
Introduction to Assemblings"
REVIEWS
Francois Debrix, "Impassable Passages: review-1.597
Derrida, Aporia, and the Question of
Politics." Review of Richard Beardsworth,
Derrida & the Political. New York:
Routledge, 1996.
Paul Trembath, "Reactivating Deleuze: review-2.597
Critical Affects After Cultural Materialism."
Review of Paul Patton, ed., Deleuze: A
Critical Reader. Oxford: Blackwell
Publishers, 1996.
Arkady Plotnitsky, "Penrose's Triangles: review-3.597
The Large, The Small, and The Human Mind."
Review of Richard Penrose's The Large, The
Small, and The Human Mind. Cambridge:
Cambridge UP, 1997.
Michael Witmore, "Enter Virtuosi: Erudition review-4.597
Makes Its Return." Review of The New
Erudition Ed. Randolph Starn. Spec. issue
of Representations 56 (1996): 1-143.
Robert Elliot Fox, "Kerouac: Kicks Joy review-5.597
Darkness." Review of Kerouac: Kicks Joy
Darkness. Ryko RCD, 1997.
Bill Freind, "Play the Blues, Punk." Review review-6.597
of R.L. Burnside, A Ass Pocket Full of
Whiskey, Matador, 1996; and Jon Spenser Blues
Explosion, Now I Got Worry, Matador/Capitol,
1997.
Terry Harpold, "Dry Leatherette: Cronenberg's review-7.597
Crash." Review of David Cronenberg, Crash. Fine
Line Features, 1996.
RELATED READINGS: [WWW Version only]
LETTERS:
Selected Letters from Readers letters.597
NOTICES:
Announcements and Advertisements [WWW Version only]
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ABSTRACTS
Michael Joyce, "Twelve Blue"
Abstract: A drowning, a murder, a friendship,
three or four love affairs, a boy and a girl,
two girls and their mothers, two mothers and
their lovers, a daughter and her father, a
father and his lover, seven women, three men,
twelve months, twelve threads, eight hours,
eight waves, one river, a quilt, a song, twelve
interwoven stories, a thousand memories, Twelve
Blue explores the way our lives--like the web
itself or a year, a day, a memory, or a
river--form patterns of interlocking, multiple,
and recurrent surfaces.--mj
Diana Reed Slattery, "Alphaweb"
Abstract: Alphaweb is a hypertext consisting of
poetry and ruminations, graphics, and fragments
of the Coriolis Codex, suggesting (but hardly
conclusively) a special relationship between
angels and dragons. The work has at least three
interpenetrating structures, approximately 250
areas and three times that many doors and
passageways. The structure that is always
present for orientation is the alphabetical
structure; both the poems and the angels
progress from A to Z, a comfort for those who
like to proceed in an orderly fashion from A to
Z, or at least to B. The stability of this
structure is seriously compromised by built-in
folds in the alphabet; because you can link to
any letter from any area, the structure can be
used to demolish itself at the behest of the
traveler. A prolonged wander will reveal
interior structures, jointly created by author
and traveler, which are the work itself. The
author suggests a dark room for optimum viewing
of the graphics. --drs
John Cayley, "Book Unbound"
Abstract: "Book Unbound" is a "collocational
cybertext," a self-assembling poetic collage
that can be read in two ways: either
automatically in the "bound" mode, or in an
"unbound" mode that allows readers to extract
and recycle words from its recombinant text
stream. The present version is a HyperCard
stack (Apple only, HyperCard program not
required) available for downloading. --Editor
The Tribe of the Chalk (Andrew Herman & Co.), "The
Heimlich Home Page of Cyberspace"
Abstract: This collaborative document is a
hypertextual reflection upon the politics of of
sovereignty, self-hood, and community as they
are embodied in three distinctive moments and
formations of the social imaginary in Western
capitalism: the emergence of linear perspective
and the specular visual ordering of the social
senses in Renaissance mercantile capitalism;
the formation of imperial identity that was
manifested in the rhetorical and cartographic
construction and physical conquest of the "New
World"; and the simulacra of virtual selves and
communities of cyberspace. It explores the
performative emplotment and emplacement of
virtual "home pages" of identity in MOOspaces
and the World Wide Web, and argues that a
critical understanding of the "new frontier" of
cyberspace must take into account the ways in
which it uncannily restages the imperial drama
of sovereignty which animated the conquest of
the old frontier of America as "New World."--ah
Matthew G. Kirschenbaum, "'Through Light and the
Alphabet:' An Interview with Johanna Drucker"
Abstract: Johanna Drucker's cumulative work as
a writer, printer, book artist, and scholar of
visible language in all its forms has
accumulated in a critical and creative corpus
which is, as one observer has put it, nothing
less than "a conceptual framework for the
relationship between the visual arts and the
written arts." Nowhere is such a conceptual
framework currently more needed than in the
post-alphabetic writing spaces of electronic
media--an area to which Drucker has, in fact,
lately turned her attention.
In this interview (conducted entirely via
electronic mail) I have attempted to frame my
questions so as to provide as complete an
overview as possible of Drucker's career, with
particular emphasis on her recent interest in
matters of the virtual. The text of the
interview is accompanied by forty digital
images of Drucker's artistic work, as well as
her brief catalogue essay entitled "The Corona
Palimpsest: Present Tensions of the Book."--mgk
Loss Pequeno Glazier, "Jumping to Occlusions"
Abstract: "Jumping to Occlusions" is perhaps
the first thorough statement of a poetics of
online space. In the present hypertextual
trickster edition, a lively investigative
language of the link is employed helping to
develop this essay's written argument through
its own hypertextuality--its jumps, sidebars,
graphics, embedded sound files, misleadings,
and other features. This essay explores
electronic technology's opportunities for the
production, archiving, distribution, and
promotion of poetic texts but most importantly,
argues that electronic space is a space of
writing. For previous excursions into this a
written terrain of links and jumps one need
only look to the language experiments of
certain poets writing in this century. Such
poets include Gertrude Stein, Charles Olson,
Robert Creeley, and Language-related
experimentalists such as Charles Bernstein, Ron
Silliman, and Susan Howe. Electronic writing,
like previous instances of writing, engages the
double "mission" of writing evident in some of
this experimental poetry: to varying degrees,
writing is about a subject, but also about the
medium through which it is transmitted. If
relevant previous poetic experiments involved
the exploration of language as physical, what
are the physical parameters of webbed online
space? Texts move not only within themselves
but into socially-charged externalities, "a
webbed interference of junk mail, 'frets' of
information, systemic failures, ephemera,
disunion. There is no resting place--only the
incessantly reconstituted links dissolving each
time the reading is entered." The physical
features most up for grabs? These include
online hypertext itself, a mass of fits and
starts. Links are at the center of an
electronic hypertextual writing and links
introduce disjunction. This post-typographic
and non-linear disunion is no news to poetics.
It is through a poetics of experimental
poetries that a framework is sketched and
progress is made towards the building of an
electronic poetics, one where experiments that
changed poetic language may inform the
electronic air we breathe.--lpg
Craig Saper, "Intimate Bureaucracies &
Infrastructuralism: A Networked Introduction to Assemblings"
Abstract: Since the 1960s, artists' assemblings
and mail-art networks functioned to avoid the
gallery system and to reach an audience for
works difficult to exhibit. Now they offer a
model for understanding electronic web-sites.
The connections between assemblings and
electronic publication are often literal as
many of those involved in mail-art and
alternative periodicals have begun to publish
e-zines and web-sites. There is little
secondary literature on these assemblings, and
this essay seeks to introduce these works as
well as explain how assemblings change the way
one reads texts. These types of texts encourage
reading the links among many works and many
networking artists and poets; reading these
webs of connections demands an alternative to
formalist and structuralist analyses of
electronic media: infra-structuralism. The
alternative examines the socio-poetics of texts
that appear as part of networks of other texts
and among many producers. The specific
socio-poetics of these works includes an
attempt at democratizing production and
distribution. The other aspects of the
socio-poetics include various elements usually
read only as impasses to understanding. These
markers of a new type of reading include:
circumstantiality, on-sendings, the fan's
logic, network coverage, unreadability, and
craft as conceptual art. In examining these
factors, this essay also presents important
historical evidence and theoretical
interpretations on the work of Ray Johnson and
others involved in mail-art networks and
assemblings. What began as a marginal art
movement may now offer a model for reading and
writing networked-art. --cs
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