CONTENTS 
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                     Editors' Notes

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                        Articles

Carol Loranger, "'This Book Spill Off the Page in All 
Directions': What Is the Text of _Naked Lunch_?" 

Krzysztof Ziarek, "Love and the Debasement of Being:
Irigaray's Revisions of Lacan and Heidegger"

Joe Amato, "Technical Ex-Communication: How a Former
Professional Engineer Becomes a Former English Professor"

Jim Finnegan, "Theoretical Tailspins: Reading 'Alternative'
Performance in _Spin_ Magazine"

Patrick McGee, "Terrible Beauties: Messianic Time and the
Image of Social Redemption in James Cameron's _Titanic_"

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                      Review Essay

Marcel O'Gorman, "Friedrich Kittler's Media Scenes--An
Instruction Manual." A review of Friedrich Kittler, _Literature,
Media, Information Systems: Essays_. Amsterdam: G+B Arts,
1997. 
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                        Reviews

Claudia Sadowski-Smith, "Contesting Globalisms: The
Transnationalization of U.S. Cultural Studies." A review of
Fredric Jameson and Masao Miyoshi, _The Cultures of
Globalization_. Durham, NC: Duke UP, 1998, and Lisa Lowe and
David Lloyd, _The Politics of Culture in the Shadow of Capital_.
Durham, NC: Duke UP, 1997. 

Mark Sanders, "Postcolonial Reading." A review of Gayatri
Chakravorty Spivak, _A Critique of Postcolonial Reason:
Toward a History of the Vanishing Present_. Cambridge, MA:
Harvard UP, 1999. 

H. Kassia Fleisher, "Of Tea Parties, Poverty Tours, and
Tammany Pow-wows; or, How Mr. Clinton Distanced Us All
from Pine Ridge." A review of Philip J. Deloria, _Playing 
Indian_. New Haven: Yale UP, 1998. 

Michael Alexander Chaney, "An Academic Exorcism." A review
of Cary Nelson and Stephen Watt, _Academic Keywords: A
Devil's Dictionary_. New York and London: Routledge, 1999. 

Donald F. Theall, "Memory, Orality, Literacy, Joyce, and the
Imaginary: A Virtual History of Cyberculture." A review of
Darren Tofts and Murray McKeich, _Memory Trade: A
Prehistory of Cyberculture_. North Ryde, NSW: A 21*C Book
published by Interface, 1998. 

David Banash, "The Blair Witch Project: Technology,
Repression, and the Evisceration of Mimesis." A review of _The
Blair Witch Project_. Dir. Daniel Myrick and Eduardo Sanchez.
Perf. Heather Donahue, Joshua Leonard, and Michael C.
Williams. Artisan Entertainment, 1999. 

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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

Joe Amato, "Technical Ex-Communication: How a Former
Professional Engineer Becomes a Former English Professor" 

         o Abstract: This piece is an autobiographical 
	   excursion detailing parallels between Fortune 500 
	   America and the increasingly privatized 
	   postsecondary institution. The author, an English 
	   professor and a former practicing engineer, 
	   narrates recent events on his campus---a growing 
	   budget deficit, his own precarious position as an 
	   instructor of technical writing---as these events 
	   correspond to his industrial experience. Some time 
	   is spent discussing a book, _The Idea of Ideas_, 
	   authored by former Motorola CEO Robert Galvin, a 
	   powerful Board member at the author's campus. This 
	   book was distributed to faculty, unsolicited, 
	   ostensibly to secure financial backing from Galvin, 
	   and perhaps to encourage adoption of CEO-management 
	   values and objectives. The upshot of the piece is 
	   that privatization is intimately bound up with views 
	   toward language--or, in the eyes and ears of the 
           corporation, communication.--ja 

Jim Finnegan, "Theoretical Tailspins: Reading "Alternative"
Performance in _Spin_ Magazine"

         o Abstract: "Theoretical Tailspins" maps the 
	   boundaries of Andreas Huyssen's concept of the 
	   post-avant-garde as the "hope" of postmodernism by 
	   reading _Spin_ magazine's reporting and 
	   dissemination of contemporary "alternative"/Gen X 
	   youth culture scenes in a Cultural Studies context. 
	   Working through Spin's coverage of Riot Grrrl 
	   subcultures in the 1990s, I seek to put into practice 
	   Michael Berube's claim that perhaps the single most 
	   important and difficult challenge for contemporary 
	   Cultural Studies practitioners is to think through 
	   the problematics that arise when academics theorize 
	   popular audiences and subcultures who may be 
	   already theorizing themselves (_Public Access_ 151). 
	   Reading across _Spin_'s layout, advertisements, 
	   and articles in the early 1990s, my article takes 
	   up the way _Spin_ more broadly theorizes and 
	   historicizes itself as a masscult mouthpiece of, for, 
	   by, about, and "from the perspective of" Generation 
	   X. For many people with personal investments in 
	   youth subculture scenes _Spin_ represents at best 
	   a laughable example of counterfeit "alternative" 
	   culture and at worst the very enemy of genuine 
	   subcultural resistance, the thing that threatens to 
	   rob a subculture scene of its essence of 
	   oppositionality. While these are valid concerns, 
	   a closer look at the constitutive role of mass 
	   media in constructing subcultural identity leads me 
	   to conclude that, sometimes by design and sometimes 
	   in spite of itself, _Spin_ does manage to articulate, 
	   in the vague name of Generation X, a popularized 
	   form of Cultural Studies criticism. The _Spin_ model 
	   offers a form that combines (sub)cultural opposition 
	   and mainstream fun, and it's a form that proved 
	   itself capable of keeping pace with the shifting 
	   forces of cultural Reaganism and the New Right in 
	   the late 80s and early 90s. The _Spin_ model might 
	   therefore function as a counter-balance to the 
	   infinite adaptability presumed to be the defining 
	   characteristic of so-called "late capitalism": its 
	   apparently endless capacity to appropriate 
	   any-and-all forms of subcultural resistance, 
	   oppositional meanings, or semiotic critique.--jf 

Carol Loranger, "'This Book Spill Off the Page in All Directions':
What Is the Text of Naked Lunch?"

         o Abstract: This essay seeks to initiate the 
	   adaptation of some methods of textual scholarship 
	   to postmodern studies by considering how 
	   approaching a literary text as a sequence of 
	   material events occurring over time affects 
	   understanding of that text and its multiple contexts. 
	   Because its purpose is to suggest, rather than limit, 
	   possibilities, the essay is limited to a single 
	   illustration--adapting the old-style practice of 
           publication history to what might be considered the
           grand-daddy of postmodern texts: William Burroughs's 
	   _Naked Lunch_. After itemizing and comparing the 
	   contents of versions of the novel published between 
	   1959 (the suppressed _Big Table_ excerpts and 
	   Olympia Press edition) and 1992 (Grove Weidenfeld 
	   trade paperback and the last edition released before 
	   Burroughs's death), each version of the text is 
	   read in terms of the implications of the 
	   rearrangement, addition and deletion of gross 
	   textual elements on the public and critical 
	   understanding of the novel--its aura, subject, 
	   narrative, and place in contemporary letters. 
	   Detailed tabulations of the contents of these 
	   editions and of Burroughs's revisions and 
	   reordering of the _Big Table_ version accompany 
	   the history. Additionally, the mythology of the 
	   creation of _Naked Lunch_ and the successive 
	   historical events which led the text to 
           metastasize are treated as part of the 
	   text-as-event. _Naked Lunch_ is then briefly 
	   compared to other aleatory texts in terms of 
	   their politics of authority and ownership as 
	   expressed within and enacted by the material 
	   texts. The comparison suggests--as Burroughs's 
	   novel graphically illustrates--that, while 
	   attention to surfaces and weakening of historicity 
	   are elements of the aesthetic of postmodern 
	   left-political utterance, inattention to these
	   elements by postmodern theory effectively strips 
	   the text of its force.--cl 

Patrick McGee, "Terrible Beauties: Messianic Time and the Image of
Social Redemption in James Cameron's _Titanic_"

         o Abstract: This essay employs Walter Benjamin's 
	   theory of the dialectical image and Jacques 
	   Lacan's refinement of the Freudian theory of 
	   wish-fulfillment to analyze a popular work of mass 
	   culture as a historical symptom. I argue that in 
           order to understand the social impact of James 
	   Cameron's _Titanic_, it is necessary to look 
	   beyond the dialogue and plot to the cinematic 
	   images. The fate of the Titanic is well-known and 
	   the story of forbidden love between a rich woman 
           and a poor man is a formula; but these conventions 
	   are combined with negative images of the class 
	   system that, on the one hand, lure the secret 
	   desire of spectators for social transformation and, 
	   on the other, affirm their fear that such 
	   transformation may bring about unwarranted 
	   destruction and death. The contemporary audience 
	   is captured by the dialectical relation between 
	   the image of the Titanic as it is today, an actual 
	   wreck beneath the sea which Cameron photographs as 
	   a piece of reality, and the image of what it was 
	   and what it represented, a dream ship, a totalizing 
	   commodity that answers the social demand for a 
	   reality that works. The dream ship articulates the 
	   class system as the fantasy of an order in which 
           everything and every person have their proper 
	   place and value without contradiction or conflict--
	   in other words, without the unsolicited intrusions 
	   of desire. The movie shows, however, that such 
	   unsolicited desires are the necessary by-product 
	   of the fantasy that tries to contain them. This 
	   collision between fantasy and desire is the dramatic 
           crux of the film that finds its image in the 
	   apocalyptic destruction of the Titanic. The 
	   pleasure spectators take fromn the movie suggests 
	   that images of terrible events can support 
	   socially affirmative desires for change.  These 
	   images also play a critical role in the "action" 
	   supergenre from which Cameron's _Titanic_ ultimately 
	   derives.--pm 

Krzysztof Ziarek, "Love and the Debasement of Being: Irigaray's
Revisions of Lacan and Heidegger"

         o Abstract: Recalling his own formulas of sexuation 
	   and his understanding of desire, Lacan points in 
	   _Encore_ toward a possibility, even a need, of 
	   rethinking love in connection with a certain 
	   jouissance and in terms of the revised notion of 
	   being as para-being. _Encore_ opens a path to 
	   thinking the ethics of love outside of the 
	   mirroring enclosures of narcissism and the 
	   effects of sameness associated with the idea of 
	   the One. This reformulation of ethics pivots on 
	   the distinction between two senses of possibility: 
	   on the one hand, possibility conceived as deferred 
	   presence or enacted as repeated lack; on the other, 
	   possibility taken as a temporal project of the 
	   relation to the other, which never becomes a 
	   matter of a substantive, an object, or a 
	   signified, and cannot be conceived as lack. 
	   Irigaray's _An Ethics of Sexual Difference_, 
           seen as a response to _Encore_, explores the 
	   collapse of these two possibilities in terms of 
	   the turn from wonder to the logic of lack, lack 
	   which desire keeps repeating and knowledge tries 
	   to supplement. To underscore the difference 
	   between desire and wonder, Irigaray reformulates 
	   the very notion of relation to the other into a 
	   new, non-appropriative mode of relationality which 
	   is not encompassed by desire, narcissistic or 
	   fusional love, or the labor of the negative. 
	   Considering Irigaray in the context of Heidegger's 
	   thought, I reformulate her redefinition of the 
	   relationality of love in terms of a rethinking of 
           Dasein into an ethical, non-appropriative event of 
	   being-two. Heidegger's understanding of logos as 
	   a saying prior to signification makes it possible 
	   to envision a notion of relationality alternative 
	   to both the Hegelian logic of desire and the 
	   Kantian positing of das Ding. The futural 
           relationality in terms of which Dasein 
	   understands itself as being-in-the-world breaks 
	   free of the dialectical labor of the negative, at 
	   the same time that it does not entail positing the 
	   real as unchangeable or inaccessible. Such a 
           futural-transformative modality of relatedness 
	   allows Irigaray to articulate the being-two of 
	   love as a relation in which difference marks 
	   itself neither in terms of negation nor separation 
	   but as the transformative interval, as the 
	   proximity that keeps reformulating the very 
	   parameters of relation and obligation to the 
	   other.--kz