systems theory

Stephen Schryer reviews Mark Taylor and casts a critical eye on the unconditional celebration of complexity.

One of a series of eco-critical reviews, Stephen Dougherty explores the new ways that "matter is made to matter" in Ira Livingston's writing on science and literature. The payoff of an ecocriticism grounded in the materiality of language itself, can bee seen by the strong political positioning toward the end of Dougherty's essay.

In his introduction to the Cognitive Fictions cluster, Joseph Tabbi suggests that reflexive, non-narrative literature plays a critical role in the new media ecology. Postmodernist writing by Joseph McElroy and Italo Calvino, the posthumanist thought of Cary Wolfe, and the emerging forms of electronic literature each occupy a position between narrative modes of consciousness and "object-oriented" computer and cognitive science.

In this review-essay, James J. Pulizzi reads Joseph McElroy's 1977 novel, Plus, as a Bildungsroman for the posthuman: instead of tracing the development of a subject, the novel traces the development of processes that call the very idea of a subject into question. As a human brain adjusts to its new housing in an experimental satellite, the text unfolds in a series of re-entries and re-mappings, an unfolding that necessarily implicates the reader.

Carsten Schinko on Niklas Luhmann's Analogue Loyalty.

Linda Brigham works through Embodying Technesis by Mark Hansen.

Chris Messenger reviews Tom LeClair's first novel, Passing Off (1996).

Aaron Pease reviews Manual DeLanda's philosophy of the virtual.

Against the conflation of Islamic and economic fundamentalisms (William S. Wilson responds to Nick Spenser).

A personal account by novelist Joseph McElroy of the WTC crash (that is: a structure of some outside and inside project encompassing one individual).