CONTENTS 


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                         Articles


Timothy Donovan, A. Samuel Kimball, and Jilliam Smith, 
Fog of War: What Yet Remains

Ashley Dawson, "Love Music, Hate Racism": The Cultural 
Politics of the Rock Against Racism Campaigns, 1976-1981

Dalia Judovitz, Duchamp's "Luggage Physics": Art on 
the Move

Ben Roberts, Stiegler Reading Derrida: The Prosthesis of 
Deconstruction in Tehnics

Laura Hinton, To Write Within Situations of 
Contradiction: An Interview with Carla Harryman



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                      Reviews

Jeffrey Williams, The Ubiquity of Culture. A review 
essay considering Francis Mulhern, _Culture/Metaculture_ 
(London: Routledge, 2000) and Terry Eagleton, _The 
Idea of Culture_ (Oxford: Blackwell, 2000).

David Herman, Wittgenstein's Legacy: Metagrammar, Meaning, 
and Ordinary Language. 
A review of Walter Jost, _Rhetorical Investigations: 
Studies in Ordinary Language Criticism_ (Charlottesville: U 
of Virginia P, 2004).

Derek Nystrom, Fear of Falling Sideways: Alexander 
Payne's Rhetoric of Class. A review of _Sideways_. Dir. 
Alexander Payne. Perf. Paul Giamatti, Thomas Haden Church, 
Virginia Madsen, Sandra Oh. Fox Searchlight, 2004.

Lori Emerson, Demystifying the Digital, Re-animating the 
Book: A Digital Poetics. A review of Loss Glazier, 
_Anatman, Pumpkin Seed, Algorithm_ (Cambridge: Salt 
Press, 2003).

David Caplan, On Poetic Curiosity. A response to Lori 
Emerson, "Demystifying the Digital, Re-animating the 
Book: A Digital Poetics."

Andrew Saldino, Economy of Faith. A review of Mark C. 
Taylor, _Confidence Games_ (Chicago: U of Chicago P, 2004). 
 


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                  Notices (HTML Version Only)


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                  Notes on Contributors


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                         Abstracts

Ashley Dawson, "Love Music, Hate Racism": The Cultural 
Politics of the Rock Against Racism Campaigns, 1976-1981

    * Abstract: During the mid- to late 1970s, Britain 
endured an upsurge of neo-fascist organizing and racial 
attacks. In response, a strong anti-racist movement grew 
up among Britain's ethnic minority communities, leading to 
radical new forms of organizing. Nascent British youth 
subcultures of the period such as punk were sucked into the 
vortex of racism. This article examines the organization Rock 
Against Racism (RAR), which was formed to combat this trend. 
In its five-year history, RAR drew on the forms of mongrel 
culture developing among certain sectors of urban British 
youth to stage groundbreaking performances in which reggae 
and punk subcultures cross-pollinated. Despite its links to 
established organizations of the far Left, RAR succeeded in 
uniting aesthetics and politics in a radical new way by 
drawing on rather than preaching to youth subcultures of 
the day. As a result, it produced an important model of 
autonomous organizing that continues to resonate today. --ad 

Timothy Donovan, A. Samuel Kimball, and Jillian Smith, 
Fog of War: What Yet Remains

    * Abstract: In memory of Jacques Derrida, this 
collaborative project reads Errol Morris's documentary 
Fog of War deconstructively--that is, according to 
the internal contradictions that characterize the film's 
protagonist and his discourse. Although McNamara intuits 
the structural limits of the concepts that govern his 
discourse, he does not know how to thematize these limits 
formally. Consequently, he remains caught between insight 
and blindness in a number of contradictions the implications 
(social, political, military, psychological, and others) of 
which he glimpses and struggles to negotiate, but finally 
cannot name. These contradictions and unnameables require the 
intervention of Derrida's deconstructions--of a nuclear logic, 
of voice, of sight, of narrative and filmic framing--to 
register the lessons of McNamara's lessons. --td, sk, js 

Laura Hinton, To Write Within Situations of 
Contradiction: An Introduction to the Cross-Genre Writings 
of Carla Harryman

    * This interview took place in New York City in May 2003. 
It was revised via email exchanges between Carla Harryman 
and Laura Hinton from that time through 2005. --lh 

Dalia Judovitz, Duchamp's "Luggage Physics": Art on the 
Move

    * Abstract: During the period of the buildup and onset 
of World War II, Marcel Duchamp reassembled reproductions of 
his artistic works in The Box in a Valise (1935-41). This 
portable museum of miniaturized reproductions, presented in 
limited edition as signed originals, raises seminal questions 
about his supposed abandonment of art. Does his gesture of 
taking refuge from war imply a retreat into art? Is this 
compilation of reproductions in a valise merely a self-referential 
artistic exercise? Or does it represent a reflection on the 
vulnerability of art in the face of war, since according to 
Duchamp, "art never saved the world"? An examination of his 
correspondence regarding his first migration to the U.S. 
during World War II along with his experiments with portable 
art during this period suggests that the trauma of war 
exacerbated his growing disenchantment with art. This essay 
shows that rather than attempting to reclaim past history as 
an object of nostalgia or autobiographical self-reference, 
The Box in a Valise delineates a postmodern horizon for new 
forms of making through appropriation that are no longer 
reducible to art and to the institution of the museum. --dj 

Ben Roberts, Stiegler Reading Derrida: The Prosthesis of 
Deconstruction in Technics

    * Abstract: This essay examines the relationship between 
Derrida's work and that of Bernard Stiegler. Stiegler's 
thinking can be seen as a radicalization of the idea of the 
supplement in Derrida. Stiegler differentiates his thinking about 
technics from Derrida's thinking around the supplement by arguing 
that, whereas Derrida is interested in a logic of supplementarity, 
he is interested in the historical differentiations of the 
technical supplement. Having established the basic terrain of 
Stiegler's argument in the first volume of Technics and Time, 
the essay discusses the relationship of that argument to Derrida's 
work. It exposes various problems with Stiegler's use of what he 
seems fairly determined to regard as the concept of differance. 
Stiegler himself sees a problem in the relation between his analysis 
of technics and Derrida's thinking in that the latter doesn't have 
an account of the emergence of the human as the point at which the 
"living articulates itself upon the non-living." Here the essay 
elucidates this difference with reference to Derrida's own responses 
to Stiegler in the interviews between the two published as 
Echographies of Television. --br