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.