It’s been twenty years of Postmodern Culture. The journal published its first issue in September, 1990, and was then the lone peer-reviewed electronic journal in the humanities.
 
PMC was first edited by John Unsworth and myself, then by Stuart Moulthrop and Lisa Brawley, Jim English, and by myself again. The editors chose PMC as the handle for the journal because we didn’t want it to suggest a focus on the personal computer: PMC has always relied on digital technologies, and was shaped by the emerging internets, but its mission was to produce work that was not necessarily about computers or the internet, as much computer-mediated publishing was expected to be at the time. On the other hand, being electronic allowed PMC to publish work not possible for print journals, such as audio, video, and hypertext, and to develop models of distribution and collaboration that were new to the academy. This new model of communal work was from the start a political project based in new technologies. For example, the journal, which was first published by the editors through a listserv at North Carolina State University and then by Oxford University Journals, was free to subscribers, who could download issues and articles from us. With the advent of the World Wide Web in 1994, PMC moved to Johns Hopkins Journals (on their Muse project, which at the start was publishing only Hopkins journals); in that new environment the current issue remained free, and the journal maintained a free text-only archive of back issues. Another example of the politics of the medium is the journal’s decision to publish in unformatted ASCII to begin with, rather than in more specialized formats, so readers across platforms and in different countries could read the journal. This was no longer necessary when we moved from listserv-based delivery to the Web.
 
PMC’s mission has been, and continues to be, to cultivate theoretical and critical cultural studies of the contemporary period. The word “postmodern” was meant to locate the epistemic focus of the journal; postmodernism cannot be understood as a set of stylistic or formal features or attitudes, but as a cultural and intellectual time in the broad sense for which Fredric Jameson argues. The journal has been interested in critical engagements with cultural and theoretical questions rather than in period arguments; has promoted theory as a topic in itself; has engaged work on its own merits, rather than by arrangement, leading us to publish, through the anonymous review process, less known scholars, and to return work by scholars who are justifiably well regarded; and has published experimental work, like the hypertext issue shepherded by Stuart Moulthrop in 1997 and the meditative philosophy by Alexander Garcia Düttmann in this issue, that does not fall into familiar categories. The journal has argued by doing for a material and secular culture of difference—a postmodern culture—because, as Arkady Plotnitsky suggests in his essay here, no other culture does or can exist.
 
This project is important today because while culture is made of difference, it can certainly turn against difference. While critical cultures in the Western academy have been open to repeated challenge and experiment in many ways (sometimes—as Düttmann argues in his essay here—as superficial deflections), they continue to look for ways of safeguarding the same. I am thinking of the rise of the culture of presence in new media studies; the trend for new pragmatism in American studies, which sometimes has little interest in the historical grounding of aesthetics; the popularity of that version of object theory where objects are supposed to speak for us—not to mention that objects have other significance, as commodities for example; the arguments against symptomatic readings of culture, and against “the hermeneutics of suspicion,” which want things in themselves to be what they appear to be; the resurrection of religion, often in the name of materialism; and the conversion to new metaphysical ontologies that can lead, in the extreme, to reified sociological and ethnic categories, and to categorical statements about them. These trends suggest that we ask whether radical or innovative thought has a continuing present, let alone a past, in the academy: untimely meditations are by definition out of place. The potential for a future revaluation of values, as Jan Mieszkowski’s essay suggests, is always a part of the architectural relics of the past. There have been many other trends in cultural studies, of course, including the rise and continuing development of animal studies, environmental studies, queer studies, urban studies, work on the economics of gloalization, and the political study of media, to name a few. It is also the case that deconstructive and textual methodologies continue to be important in these fields, and help make them important and strong. PMC continues to support such projects, as reflected in the works we publish here and that will appear in the forthcoming companion issue.
 
The work in this issue comes from a conference organized at UC Irvine in October 2010 by the journal to celebrate two decades of publishing. A second issue based on the conference is in the works. The conference, “Culture After Postmodern Culture,” asked what postmodern culture means today: we are still postmodern, but the idea that we are postmodern is now, as Arkady Plotnitsky writes in his essay, a given. We are after postmodernism as some new trend in cultural criticism; now postmodernism is a state we’re in, without scare quotes. What it means to be contemporary it is hard to say, as Alex Düttmann shows in his meditation on time and contemporeneity: we entrust the memory of the dead to the dead, and live now by giving the moment the (now often digital) slip. So while Plotnitsky, reading through Jean-François Lyotard, connects a postmodern epistemology of justice (the “irreducibly uncertain and inconstant, multiple justice” of Nietzsche) with an epistemology of post-Einsteinian physics, Düttmann thinks through Derrida about social time, for any sense of time, though it may not be able to know itself, already includes a conversation. Our relation to space and time unfurls, Janus-faced, the banner of difference. Hong-An Truong and Dwayne Dixon also view postmodern culture as the performance of sliding differences, a world where intimate interiority and the voice (Japanese, Vietnamese) are mediated commodities just as impersonal, or personal, as public spaces (Tokyo, Saigon) that, as mere architecture, mask public tragedy that is registered by these double losses. As Mieszkowski notes Benjamin notes, emergent urban spaces have no outside, like dreams. The affect that is present under globalization is a function of global displacement, alienation, and removal. The signs of defacement, war, and destruction, as in Jan Mieszkowski’s essay on graffiti and architecture—writing and building—make up cultural legacies. They are culture after culture, the writing on the wall that is itself the new building, the new wall. This is all the more true in the so-called age of information. We are only beginning to understand the implications of the larger postmodern episteme which will last, like the future, for a long time.
 
Some of the transformations for which PMC stood since 1990 have come to pass. New and flexible forms of publication are available, such as blogs and open access journals, and the mere fact of electronic scholarly publishing is not a subject for comment. Digital media, now in their infancy, increasingly transform the intellectual landscape, giving rise to new configurations that may well eclipse or make obsolete cutlural structures whose contingency has remained invisible—structures such as journals, books, and universities. It is possible to interpret the current attack on public education in the humanities in the US and in Europe as a sign of the success of critical cultural studies—as an effort to preserve traditional cultural structures against critical theories of difference. The cultural shift to deconstruct and revolutionize the production and dissemination of thinking is making visible the heirarchical, linear, and inert paradigms on which modern institutions have depended. To understand what and how we think today we need to read what and how we do; we need theoretical cultural studies, we need a rigorous and ongoing conversation, we need to read the cultural logic of postmodern culture. The writing is on the wall.