CONTENTS 

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                         Articles

Bradley Butterfield, The Baudrillardian Symbolic, 9/11, 
and the War of Good and Evil 

David Rando, Reading Gravity's Rainbow After September 
Eleventh: An Anecdotal Approach 

Christopher Douglas, "You Have Unleashed a Horde of 
Barbarians!": Fighting Indians, Playing Games, Forming 
Disciplines

Janet Holtman, Documentary Prison Films and the 
Production of Disciplinary Institutional "Truth" 


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                       Review Essay

David Herman, Saussure and the Grounds of Interpretation. 
A review of Roy Harris, _Saussure and His Interpreters_. 
New York: New York UP, 2001.


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                         Reviews

Jason Camlot, The Victorian Postmodern. A review of John 
Kucich and Dianne F. Sadoff, eds., _Victorian Afterlife: 
Postmodern Culture Rewrites the Nineteenth Century_. 
tMinneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 2001. 

Amy J. Elias, Hip Librarians, Dweeb Chic: Romances of the Archive. 
A review of Suzanne Keen, _Romances of the Archive in Contemporary 
British Fiction_. Toronto: U of Toronto P, 2001. 

Jesse Cohn, What is Postanarchism "Post"? A review of Saul Newman,
_From Bakunin to Lacan: Anti-Authoritarianism and the Dislocation 
of Power_. Lanham, MD: Lexington, 2001. 

Andrew Kimbrough, Photo-Performance in Cyberspace: The CD-ROMs of
Hugo Glendinning and Tim Etchells with Forced Entertainment. A 
review of _Frozen Palaces_. CD-ROM by Hugo Glendinning and Tim 
Etchells with Forced Entertainment. Collected on artintact 5, 
produced by Zentrum für Kunst und Medientechnologie Karlsruhe 
(ZKM), 1999. Buchhandelsausgabe/Trade Edition;

and 

_Nightwalks_. CD-ROM by Hugo Glendinning and Tim Etchells with 
Forced Entertainment. Sheffield, UK: Forced Entertainment, 1998. 


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                          Letters

On Joseph Tate's "Radiohead's Antivideos: Works of Art in the 
Age of Electronic Reproduction," Postmodern Culture 12.3


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                  Notices (WWW Version Only)


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                  Notes on Contributors


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                         Abstracts

Bradley Butterfield, The Baudrillardian Symbolic,  9/11, and the 
War of Good and Evil 
       

    o Abstract: This essay compares Jean Baudrillard's notion of 
      theoretical terrorism, based on his theory of symbolic 
      exchange, to his remarks about real terrorism before and 
      after 9/11. Symbolic exchange plays on the principle of 
      "ineluctable demand," which Baudrillard derives mainly from 
      Marcel Mauss's theory of the gift in "primitive" societies. 
      The symbolic value of the gift is not its reducibility to 
      another value, but the singular challenge it poses, which 
      Baudrillard says still haunts the order of capital. In his 
      recent "L'Esprit du Terrorisme," Baudrillard claims that we 
      were all complicit in the spectacle of 9/11 and in the 
      terrorists' resentment towards the U.S. as the world's only 
      superpower. Counting also on our fascination with spectacles, 
      they were able to enlist "the system" against itself by 
      placing upon the media the demand that it report and thereby 
      spread their gift of death. But death is not valued 
      symbolically in the U.S., not in Baudrillard's terms, and so 
      the violence of the spectacle in the end only quickens the 
      numbness and indifference of the masses. The terrorists' 
      hope, nevertheless, was that the U.S. would lose face in its 
      retaliation in a way that the rest of the world would 
      recognize. I argue that Nietzsche's conception of "mercy" is 
      the only ethical response to the challenge of 9/11, if we 
      recognize our symbolic standing in the world. The U.S. can 
      only win its present war of Good vs. Evil by going beyond it, 
      by forgiving debt, thus giving a gift of life in excess of 
      what the terrorists gave in their gift of death. --bb 

David Rando, Reading _Gravity's Rainbow_ After September 
Eleventh: An Anecdotal Approach 


    o Abstract: This essay asks two primary questions: what and 
      how can _Gravity's Rainbow_ tell us about the world we live 
      in after 9/11? Do anecdotes gain currency in times of war? 
      Specifically, this essay seeks to read a sampling of the
      profuse post-9/11 anecdotes about children who break their 
      piggy-banks and donate money to relief funds alongside 
      Thomas Pynchon's graphic sexual depictions of children in 
      the setting of World War II. How do each of these kinds of 
      representation affect a state's ability to establish itself 
      as innocent and to prosecute war? Centering on the figure of 
      Zwölfkinder, a miniature of the state run by children in the 
      novel, the essay explores how the state launders its
      institutions and its finances through its children. This 
      state-in-miniature is akin to the diminutive form of the 
      anecdote, which functions similarly as a site of
      innocence creation. Gravity's Rainbow's refusal to 
      constitute children as either innocent or experienced blocks 
      the kind of innocence production that post-9/11 "piggy-bank" 
      anecdotes help to establish in the context of the 
      state-written innocence/experience narrative. Children in 
      such multiply mediated anecdotes become points of contact 
      for the diverse desires of the public, the media, and other 
      institutions, where the state takes its ultimate pleasure. 
      In fact, rather than a recent phenomenon related directly to 
      the 9/11 disaster, this specific form of piggy-bank anecdote 
      has a history and is tied to specific ideological responses 
      to war, as demonstrated in an early nineteenth-century 
      anecdote that is structured almost identically to these 
      newer ones. At the same time, however, the essay discusses 
      the delicate historicity of this form and asks how history 
      expresses itself in these and other anecdotes, questioning 
      generally how these anecdotes are poised at an important 
      nexus between event, narrative, and history. --dr 


Christopher Douglas, "You Have Unleashed a Horde of 
Barbarians!": Fighting Indians, Playing Games, Forming 
Disciplines


    o Abstract: We are about four or five years into the 
      formation of a new discipline, that of digital game studies. 
      At this  early stage, digital game studies is necessarily 
      and self-consciously concerned with its own formation, and 
      recent commentators have differed over whether digital games 
      should become part of an already existing discipline like 
      cinema, literary, new media, or cultural studies or whether 
      it needs to resist such "colonizing" attempts and develop 
      into a discipline of its own, with a coherent object of 
      study and institutional support. This essay agrees with the 
      warnings against the kind of methodological blindnesses 
      likely to result from such colonizations--that games will be 
      understood as just a more interactive kind of film or  
      narrative--but argues nonetheless that each of these 
      disciplines (and others) is likely to have valuable 
      conceptual tools that we need to carefully adapt for game 
      studies. Moreover, it's sometimes precisely the historical 
      baggage of the old disciplines that provides insight into 
      the structure of game use. This essay argues that the
      ideological content of one series of influential games, _Sid 
      Meier's Civilization_ series, comes to light when the 
      historical, disciplinary blindness to forms of American 
      imperialism in American literary studies are considered. The
      _Civilization_ games transform and display the symbolic Native 
      presence in the land whose accidental, terrestrial effects 
      in the games must be destroyed in order for the player to 
      win the game; however, and moving beyond the kind of 
      ideological representations found in film or narrative, in 
      these games the users must perform their logic, a logic 
      which is coded into the very rules of the game. Games like 
      _Civilization_ thus rehearse a series of lessons about 
      national destiny, race and colonization, and the moral 
      fitness of civilizations and individuals. --cd 


Janet Holtman, Documentary Prison Films and the 
Production of Disciplinary Institutional "Truth" 


    o Abstract: Drawing primarily upon Michel Foucault's theories 
      regarding knowledge and power, this essay examines the 
      discursive mode of the documentary prison film. Beginning 
      with Foucault's brief discussion of the role of newspapers 
      and crime novels in nineteenth-century France, the essay
      contemplates the similar ways in which humanist discourses 
      might be imbricated within today's popular and documentary 
      films and the particular ways in which social force is 
      disseminated by documentary prison films. Steven Shaviro's 
      conceptualization of the "double articulation" of the bodily 
      and the textual within filmic discourse is a pivotal 
      concept. The essay concludes with an examination of 
      Frederick Wiseman's provocative prison documentary 
      _Titicut Follies_, the only American film ever to be banned 
      for reasons other than national security or obscenity 
      (though the judge's original decision contained an argument 
      relating to the latter, which the essay attempts to take  
      into account). Foucault's discussion of the asignificatory 
      "monument" in _The Archaeology of Knowledge plays an
      important role in the essay's conclusions about Wiseman's 
      film and other documentaries. --jh