Status: RO X-VM-v5-Data: ([nil nil nil nil nil nil nil nil nil] [nil nil nil nil nil nil nil nil nil nil nil "Postmodern Culture 7.3 (May, 1997)" "^From:" nil nil nil nil "Postmodern Culture 7.3 (May, 1997)" nil nil] nil) Received: from jhuml2.hcf.jhu.edu by world.std.com (5.65c/Spike-2.0) id AA15572; Mon, 7 Jul 1997 19:28:14 -0400 Received: from chaos.press.jhu.edu by jhmail.hcf.jhu.edu (PMDF V5.1-7 #18666) id <01IKYSQMRI1C91VR8M@jhmail.hcf.jhu.edu>; Mon, 7 Jul 1997 19:25:55 EDT Received: from chaos.press.jhu.edu by jhmail.hcf.jhu.edu (PMDF V5.1-7 #18666) with SMTP id <01IKYRUYIOX291VR9K@jhmail.hcf.jhu.edu>; Mon, 07 Jul 1997 19:17:43 -0400 (EDT) Received: by chaos.press.jhu.edu (951211.SGI.8.6.12.PATCH1042/940406.SGI.AUTO) for pmc-outgoing id PAA25544; Mon, 07 Jul 1997 15:49:43 -0400 Received: from jefferson.village.Virginia.EDU by chaos.press.jhu.edu via ESMTP (951211.SGI.8.6.12.PATCH1042/940406.SGI.AUTO) for id PAA25540; Mon, 07 Jul 1997 15:49:36 -0400 Received: from localhost (pmc@localhost) by jefferson.village.Virginia.EDU (8.8.5/8.6.6) with SMTP id PAA18229 for ; Mon, 07 Jul 1997 15:49:34 -0400 Reply-To: pmc@chaos.press.jhu.edu Message-Id: Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: TEXT/PLAIN; charset=US-ASCII Precedence: bulk From: PMC Sender: owner-pmc@chaos.press.jhu.edu To: pmc-list Subject: Postmodern Culture 7.3 (May, 1997) Date: Mon, 07 Jul 1997 15:49:34 -0400 (EDT) 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 ----------------------------------------------------------------- Volume 7, Number 3 (May, 1997) ISSN: 1053-1920 ----------------------------------------------------------------- Editors: Lisa Brawley Stuart Moulthrop Editors Emeritus: Eyal Amiran John Unsworth Review Editor: Paula Geyh Managing Editor: Sarah Wells Research Assistant Anne Sussman Steve Wagner Editorial Board: Michael Berube Chimalum Nwankwo Nahum Chandler Patrick O'Donnell J. Yellowlees Douglas Elaine Orr Jim English Marjorie Perloff Graham Hammill Fred Pfeil Phillip Brian Harper Peggy Phelan David Herman David Porush E. Ann Kaplan Mark Poster Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett Susan Schultz Neil Larsen William Spanos Tan Lin Allucquere Roseanne Stone Saree Makdisi Gary Lee Stonum Jerome McGann Rei Terada Jim Morrison Paul Trembath Larysa Mykyta Greg Ulmer Phil Novak -------------------------------------------------------- CONTENTS Editor's Introduction ----------------- Hypertexts Michael Joyce, "Twelve Blue" Diana Reed Slattery, "Alphaweb" John Cayley, "Book Unbound" Andrew Herman & Co., "The Heimlich Home Page of Cyberspace" ----------------- Hypertextual Articles Matthew G. Kirschenbaum, "'Through Light and the Alphabet:' An Interview with Johanna Drucker" Loss Pequeno Glazier, "Jumping to Occlusions" ----------------- Article Craig Saper, "Intimate Bureaucracies & Infrastructuralism: A Networked Introduction to Assemblings" ----------------- Reviews Francois Debrix, "Impassable Passages: Derrida, Aporia, and the Question of Politics." Review of Richard Beardsworth, _Derrida & the Political_. New York: Routledge, 1996. Paul Trembath, "Reactivating Deleuze: Critical Affects After Cultural Materialism." Review of Paul Patton, ed., _Deleuze: A Critical Reader_. Oxford: Blackwell Publishers, 1996. Arkady Plotnitsky, "Penrose's Triangles: _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 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 Darkness." Review of _Kerouac: Kicks Joy Darkness_. Ryko RCD, 1997. Bill Freind, "Play the Blues, Punk." Review 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 _Crash_." Review of David Cronenberg, _Crash_. Fine Line Features, 1996. ----------------- Letters ----------------- Related Readings ----------------- Notices ----------------- Michael Joyce, "Twelve Blue" o 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" o 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" o 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 Andrew Herman & Co., "The Heimlich Home Page of Cyberspace" o 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" o 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" o 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" o 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 --------------------------------------------------------- CONTENTS OF THIS ISSUE ARE AVAILABLE FREE OF CHARGE UNTIL RELEASE OF THE NEXT ISSUE AT http://www.iath.virginia. edu/pmc/issue.597/contents.597.html. FOR ACCESS TO BACK ISSUES, SEARCH UTILITIES, AND OTHER VALUABLE FEATURES, YOU OR YOUR INSTITUTION MAY SUBSCRIBE TO PROJECT MUSE, (http://muse.jhu.edu) THE ON-LINE JOURNALS PROJECT OF THE JOHNS HOPKINS UNIVERSITY PRESS.