Postface: Positions on Postmodernism

The Editors

Eyal:     Last year we expected that the essays we would publish
          --a good number of them anyway--would be affected by
          the electronic medium, but that has not happened much.
          Several of the essays do gain something from being in
          this medium--Ulmer's or Moulthrop's.  In print they
          would lose at the very least the chance to exemplify
          some of their argument.  But we have not seen too many
          essays that think the way they do or mean what they
          mean because they are in electronic form.

John:     In an odd way, though, that observation is very much
          like one of the early and persistent misconceptions we
          ran into when we explained the journal to people: they
          always seemed to expect that, because it was a journal
          published, distributed and read on computers, it must
          be a journal _about_ computers--about its medium.  We
          had a number of submissions, at the beginning, that had
          something to do with computers but nothing to do with
          postmodern culture.  That was what forced us to
          stipulate that we wouldn't consider essays on computer
          hardware/software unless they raised "significant
          aesthetic or theoretical issues."

Eyal:     True, though I was thinking about the effects of the
          medium and not about subject matter.  We've also not
          received that many essays that took risks--I wonder how
          much of our success we must attribute to what might
          finally be the conventionality of our first three
          issues.  A conventional journal that looks radical:
          like a modernist from Yale.  I think that we would have
          published more radical work (not necessarily more
          radical politically) if we had more of it to review.
          We did get some unconventional work, but from what
          we've seen I'd have to guess that most people out there
          are writing recognizable, assimilable essays.

John:     Well, I wouldn't say that our first three issues have
          been _thoroughly_ conventional, but I know what you
          mean.  Still, the authors of some of the submissions we
          rejected might argue that, to the extent that our first
          three issues _are_ conventional in their content, it's
          because we rejected risk-taking essays.  But what kinds
          of risks are you talking about?

Eyal:     The unforseen: a new way of making things work.  It
          seems that the essays we have published share certain
          structures of thinking, ways of being essays, however
          innovative and interesting their subject matter.  Of
          course if they were saying something in an entirely new
          way they would be hard to follow, maybe in the way that
          Howe's essay is hard to follow at times.  But because
          so many of these works argue for new ways of doing
          things, for a radical redefinition of personal context
          (Fraiberg) or a new kind of writing (Acker, Ulmer), it
          is especially noticeable that they think in such
          familiar ways.  You were saying before we started
          writing that, in a way, much of this thinking does not
          seem to have absorbed poststructuralism.  In fact we've
          noted in both previous Postfaces that many works we've
          published tend to organize around familiar oppositions,
          specifically those of classical and popular culture,
          utopian and dystopian postmodernism, etc..

John:     Well, wherever you go, there you are.  We've been
          standing pretty far back from the first three issues;
          what we've said about them could be said about all
          theory and criticism, including the most innovative.
          If twenty years of poststructuralism haven't changed
          our basic patterns of thinking, one year of electronic
          publishing certainly isn't going to.  But if we ask
          whether we've been unhappy with what we've published so
          far, the answer is clearly "no": we've both been very
          pleased with the way these issues have come together.
          The essays themselves have covered a wide range of
          subjects in a variety of styles, and working with the
          authors and reviewers has been a lot of fun.

Eyal:     For a long time--editing the second issue--I used to go
          to bed late.  I remember in particular editing Howe's
          essay.  Three of the four reviewers had made pretty
          much the same suggestions, but with variations.  The
          work makes so much of its argument subtly, in its form
          and organization, in its juxtapositions and
          development, that it was hard to see just what taking
          some parts out of it would do to other parts, and to
          the whole; if I were to ask Howe to take out part A
          here, then part B there would make less sense; if I
          asked her to leave part A in but take C that came
          before it out, then A would mean something else and
          then B would change too.  Then again, that might have
          been what the readers had wanted when they suggested
          the changes.  If Howe were to cut off B altogether,
          then that would not be what the readers had asked for,
          but now A and C would not evolve into B and so might
          not be objectionable after all.  My mind kept weaving
          and unravelling the essay as I read and reread it, late
          into the night.  I got more and more excited as I was
          reading the essay; I felt cold but decided that this
          was because I'd had dinner so long before--this made
          sense at the time.  I got a blanket and kept reading.
          When I slept my mind kept going round and round,
          repeating bits and pieces of the essay feverishly.  I
          woke up shivering, with a high temperature: the doctor
          thought it was influenza, but it felt like the
          influence of the text.

John:     A sort of out-of-body editorial experience.  I take
          back what I said before--one year of electronic
          publishing has at least disordered _our_ minds from
          time to time.  It's also radically altered my
          perception of the passage of time: when I try to place
          something that happened last June--like the time I
          accidentally distributed the entire list of subscribers
          _to_ the entire list of subscribers...twice--it seems
          that about three years have passed since then.  Some
          good things have happened in that time, whatever time
          it was: being called "honey" by Kathy Acker ("Honey,
          the movers are here, so make it short"), pushing the
          button to mail out full text of the first issue at 5
          a.m. on the last day of the month (and immediately
          crashing mailboxes around the world), the experience
          we've had with self-nominated reviewers in the
          editorial process, the early support from the library
          here at NCSU, and especially the response of
          subscribers and contributors to the journal.  The one
          thing I would like to see develop further is PMC-Talk,
          which could become more closely related to the journal
          and more constructive in its own right.  There's been
          some good stuff posted there, but there's also a lot of
          polemic, which is bad conversation.  I think the
          Fraiberg-Porush exchange in this issue is an example of
          a good conversation--one that doesn't necessarily
          discard or disguise strong opinions, but still manages
          to get somewhere.

Eyal:     An exciting aspect of the journal so far has been that
          many of the works we have published do hold good
          conversations, explicitly or implicitly.  That's the
          flip side of assimilability--that essays which share
          certain suppositions or ways of thinking can engage
          each other.

John:     Right: for instance, both Katz and Moulthrop start by
          trying out the supposition that the world really might
          behave according to our computer dreams--nightmares in
          Katz's "To a Computer File Named Alison," daydreams for
          Moulthrop, who doubts whether the media is really going
          to revolutionize what we exchange in it.  Then for
          Fraiberg, this isn't a dream of the future at all: it's
          our present.  Cyborgs are what we already are.

Eyal:     Katz and Moulthrop are both interested in the way that
          information systems (Moulthrop) and rhetorical
          constructions (Katz) affect the social text and our
          psychological economy, respectively.  Likewise several
          writers identify antagonistic kinds of postmodernism (a
          classical and a popular for Wheeler, a reflective and
          an unreflective for Mikics).  Terms mingle without
          reducing the conversation to cocktail party banter--
          like Matibag's interest in cannibalism and Fraiberg's
          in exchange and the dissolution of borders.

John:     When Matibag talks about cannibalism in Caribbean
          literature, he's actually talking about the
          cannibalizing of cannibalism, or of the imagery of
          cannibalism--a situation in which the text consumes its
          context, not unlike what Maier describes in Bowles's
          "hybrid" (appropriated) texts.  As in the last two
          issues, there are numerous unplanned connections among
          the essays in this one.  These connections suggest
          either that we all say much the same thing--a fairly
          reductive conclusion, and one which overlooks the
          importance of the local context for all of these
          essays--or they suggest that, although our individual
          contexts may be very different, there are trade routes
          among them.