CONTENTS 

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                         Articles

David Grandy, "The Otherness of Light"

Suzanne Bost, "'Be deceived if ya wanna be foolish': 
(Re)constructing Body, Genre, and Gender in Feminist Rap"

Frank Palmeri, "Other than Postmodern?--Foucault, Pynchon, 
Hybridity, Ethics"

Ashley Dawson, "Surveillance Sites: Digital Media and the Dual 
Society in Keith Piper's 'Relocating the Remains'"

Rita Raley, "Reveal Codes: Hypertext and Performance"

Dävd. Gulraliji, "Hiiilperlexlicoaorpara=][strophismagien:
Geo-grphammmatico-natiopostr/spgraphicalologism



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                       PMC Interview

Evans Chan, "Against Postmodernism, etcetera--A Conversation 
with Susan Sontag" 


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                          Reviews

Helen Grace, "As Radical as Reality Itself." A review of Susan 
Buck-Morss, Dreamworld and Catastrophe: The Passing of Mass 
Utopia in East and West.  Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2000. 

Srdjan Smajic, "The Ecstasy of Speed." A review of Paul Virilio, 
A Landscape of Events. Trans. Julie Rose. Cambridge, MA: MIT 
Press, 2000. 

Jerzy O. Jura, "Complicating Complexity: Reflections on Writing
about Pictures." A review of James Elkins, Why Are Our Pictures
Puzzles? On the Modern Origins of Pictorial Complexity. New York 
and London: Routledge, 1999. 

David Banash, "Intoxicating Class: Cocaine at the Multiplex." 
A review of Traffic.  Dir. Steven Soderbergh. Perf. Michael
Douglas, Benicio Del Toro, Catherine Zeta-Jones, Dennis Quaid. 
USA Films, 2000, and Blow. Dir. Ted Demme. Perf. Johnny Depp, 
Penelope Cruz, Paul Reubens, Ray Liotta. New Line Cinema, 2001. 

Piotr Gwiazda, "Utopia in the City." A review of "Utopia: The 
Search for the Ideal Society in the Western World." Special
Exhibition at the New York Public Library.  October 2000-
January 2001. 

Jeffrey Insko, Art After Ahab." A review of And God Created 
Great Whales.  Conceived and Composed by Rinde Eckert. Performed
by Rinde Eckert and Nora Cole.  Directed by David Schweizer. 
The Culture Project at 45 Bleecker, New York, NY. 
9 September 2000. 

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                          Related Readings
 			 [WWW Version Only]

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                          Bibliography of
                           Postmodernism
                        and Critical Theory
 			 [WWW Version Only]

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                              Notices
 			 [WWW Version Only]

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                        Notes on Contributors

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                             Abstracts


David Grandy, "The Otherness of Light"


    o Abstract: Otherness is an integral part of the human 
       experience, and yet the very coin of otherness 
       is strangeness and apartness. How then does otherness 
       bridge into experience? Here light is presented as a 
       bridging agency, albeit one that fosters and fashions 
       the ambiguities associated with otherness at the 
       experiential level. In Einsteinian physics, light breaks 
       into material reality in a "relationless" way: the speed 
       or motion of light cannot be scaled into the motion of 
       material bodies, into the spacetime metric of everyday 
       experience. Similarly, Emmanuel Levinas's otherness has 
       an integrity or metric of its own that cannot be 
       assimilated into Heideggerian Being. Inasmuch as light 
       enables apprehension of the other, one may propose a 
       single process: the irreducibility of light becomes the 
       irreducible otherness of the outside world.--dg 

Suzanne Bost, "'Be deceived if ya wanna be foolish': 
(Re)constructing Body, Genre, and Gender in Feminist Rap"

    o Abstract: Current media that love to demonize Black urban 
       culture focus much attention on "gangsta rap" because it 
       reinforces racist criteria of gender intelligibility that 
       date from slavery. In this framework, women are 
       objectified as "hos"--sexual commodities and exotic 
       spectacle--or vilified as gender-crossing "gangstas"--a 
       criminal threat to social order and "pure" womanhood. 
       This gender binary eclipses much of the work done by 
       women within hip hop culture. Chicago rap star Da Brat 
       has achieved tremendous success both inside and outside 
       of "the ghetto," but this prominence can be attributed, 
       in part, to her apparent concession to rap's famed 
       misogyny, "booty call," and other dominant media 
       images. Using the familiar criteria gains Da Brat a 
       much wider audience than her more clearly "feminist" 
       contemporaries, and the size of this audience makes her 
       a serious political force to be reckoned with. 
       Employing double-voiced strategies that are traditional 
       to African American culture--from slave songs and quilts 
       with hidden meanings to signifyin(g) linguistic games 
       and multi-tracked, parodic "sampling"--hip hop texts are 
       often about more than they seem to be. Yet critics miss 
       this complexity when they ignore the dissonance between 
       verbal, musical, and corporeal levels of performance. 
       This paper uses the overtly feminist raps of hip 
       hop-style spoken word artists--Ursula Rucker, Dana 
       Bryant, and Sarah Jones--to uncover potentially 
       empowering gender politics in the more ambivalent, but 
       also more publicly visible, raps of Da Brat. All four 
       artists begin by emphasizing the artificiality of 
       objectified images of Black women, undermine these 
       images with excessive imitation, and ultimately clear 
       spaces for reimagining hip hop gender. Together they 
       present powerful and accessible feminist theories of 
       the body.--sb 

Frank Palmeri, "Other than Postmodern?--Foucault, Pynchon, 
Hybridity, Ethics"

    o Abstract: This essay argues that the high postmodernism of 
       the 1960s through the 1980s has been succeeded by two 
       other modes of cultural expression. In the late 
       postmodernism which has been dominant in the last decade, 
       the tense equilibrium between paranoia and skepticism 
       typical of the earlier period has hardened into a darkly 
       paranoid vision of conspiracies that usually involve 
       threatening human hybrids. In such works as The X-Files 
       and The Matrix, an autonomous human subject emerges as a 
       hero whose efforts can save humans from becoming hybrids 
       with machines or aliens. What is other than postmodern, by 
       contrast, moves away from the representation of extreme 
       paranoia toward a vision of local ethical-political action 
       and a less anxious view of human hybrids. Levinas's 
       philosophy of ethical responsibility serves as a precursor 
       and component of this mode, as does Haraway's manifesto 
       for cyborgs, and Laclau and Mouffe's emphasis on subject 
       positions rather than essential identities. Foucault and 
       Pynchon, in their roughly parallel careers, turn away from 
       a high postmodern deterministic vision of the efficacy of 
       normalizing forces (Foucault) or the prominence of 
       inanimacy and death (Pynchon). Their later works resist 
       paranoid totalizing, and view humans less as automata 
       subject to forces of control, and more as creatures with 
       some capacity for effective ethical-political action, 
       based on their ability to form themselves. 
       Other-than-postmodern thinkers do not seek to establish 
       an essential, purely human subject, and are thus more open 
       to the possibilities for hybrids of humans and others, and 
       to an understanding of animals as moral subjects, as 
       exemplified in Pynchon's Mason & Dixon.--fp 


Ashley Dawson, "Surveillance Sites: Digital Media and the Dual 
Society in Keith Piper's 'Relocating the Remains'"

    o Abstract: This essay argues that postcolonial theory needs 
       to be brought to bear on digital media. In addition, the 
       essay dramatizes such an application through analysis of 
       Keith Piper's digital installation Relocating the Remains. 
       The declining value of technology stocks has certainly 
       deflated some of the hyperbolic utopian rhetoric that 
       attached to the internet in its early days. Yet even in 
       the heyday of the "New Economy," discussions of digital 
       technology were imbued with problematic assumptions and 
       studded with metaphors lifted blindly from colonial 
       discourse. As Keith Piper's work demonstrates through its 
       deft dissection of the role of the social sciences during 
       the colonial era, science and technology are not only 
       historically embedded, but have often been complicit with 
       the European project of colonial domination. However, 
       descriptions of contemporary technology are not simply 
       the product of historical amnesia. Digital media are 
       themselves central to the project of surveying and 
       containing populations that are perceived as a threat to 
       social stability in the increasingly polarized cities of 
       today. Such technologies therefore need to be carefully 
       scrutinized for their potential to curtail civil 
       liberties. In addition, the essay argues that we must be 
       attentive to possible changes in the code through which 
       technologies like the internet are structured, for it is 
       this code which enables or disables oppressive uses of 
       technology. As Piper's dystopian vision underlines, 
       there are no ironclad guarantees that digital media will 
       be used for egalitarian purposes.--ad 

Rita Raley, "Reveal Codes: Hypertext and Performance"

    o Abstract: A central problem for hypertext fiction, 
       criticism, and theory has been the delineation of a 
       strict ontological difference between the analog and the 
       digital, but this problem is irresolvable in these terms. 
       It is not possible to locate a fundamental difference in 
       the metaphysical sense, and yet it cannot be denied that 
       something different happens when one works with, or 
       performs, hypertext: the operative difference this makes 
       is the concern of this article. The author argues that 
       hypertext must be conceived in terms of performance and 
       that approaching the problem of a difference between the 
       analog and the digital must be done in a mode through 
       which digital textuality can emerge on its own terms. To 
       that end, the author proposes a new typology for hypertext 
       by emphasizing its function as performance, an interface 
       of user and system that becomes a mode that separates the 
       digital from the analog. The performance of hypertext 
       collapses processing and product, input and output, within 
       a system of "making" that is both complex and emergent. 
       Because it is its emergence in performance that 
       differentiates hypertext from text, its difference as such 
       is not ontologically discernible and it is locatable only 
       in effect. The article is constructed in four nodes--
       Charting, Combinatorial Writing, An-anamorphosis, and 
       Linking--which display and situate this new aspect of 
       performance in the digital terms of hypertext. The central 
       visual model for what the author identifies as the trace 
       performance of hypertext is Jasper Johns's anamorphic 
       painting Flags.--rr 

Dävd. Gulraliji, "Hiiilperlexlicoaorpara=][strophismagien:
Geo-grphammmatico-natiopostr/spgraphicalologism

    o Abstracht: He stirkens out alsto yon distante marke. Holo, 
       stripes yhis pare. Vaspusio, hehtoughtoutof this, as 
       sugg. yin _Loaws_ &yan _Crisias_.--= A canonization 
       intheDoneaanmode, &ya'reocgitintonoiof htehete-
       remoneorphousnature of languagagel...a 
       renunicatioantofyTErrror,yhweihach 
       aassseumsethattheyareisomorhpic &attemptsthomakeThem 
       so' (PMC 666),thenew-fdlandSited, yand into yong long 
       natureyearly history. Takeethis queyandgo forth. --dy 

Evans Chan, "Against Postmodernism, etcetera--A Conversation 
with Susan Sontag" 

    o Abstract: The interview explores Susan Sontag's ambivalent, 
       contradictory relationship with, and overt hostility to, 
       postmodernism, which she dismisses as "[non]-critical 
       ideas." As both a cultural critic/essayist and novelist, 
       she refuses to lend credence to postmodernism by 
       distancing her celebrated '60s writings on "camp" and 
       "the new sensibility," as well as her most recent novels, 
       from what has come to be known as the postmodern. While 
       acknowledging the interviewer's interpretation of "On 
       Photography" as a pioneering work about postmodernity, 
       she continues to characterize "postmodern" as a term both 
       imprecise and cheap, a way of facilitating consumerism. 
       Sontag makes provocative statements about Barthes and 
       Jameson and expresses a wholesale political dismissal of 
       Baudrillard. She talks about post-Cold War politics and 
       her disillusionment as a public intellectual. Also 
       intended as an introduction to a Chinese anthology of 
       Sontag's writings, the interview invites Sontag to 
       reminisce about her trip to China in the 60's, which she 
       has never written about directly.--ec