One reason, perhaps, to discontinue “speaking of a specifically American literary tradition uniquely suited to the critique of technology and modernity” might be to withdraw the license this provides, *even as a critical diagnosis,* for further inward-gazing appropriations of the sort this essay elsewhere so articulately resists. Is it really unthinkable that the entire intellectual tradition of U.S. exceptionalism, in all of its right, liberal, and leftish versions, will someday be decisively shadowed by imperial decline?

Again, while this is fine and correct praise for Kirschenbaum’s method and its achievements, in this book, it also reminds us, perhaps, of the ethico-critical problem posed by Foucault’s discursive histories, in their basically descriptive restriction to the *partial* world enclosed by Euro-Atlantic modernity. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak’s early analysis (in the widely cited essay “Can the Subaltern Speak?”) of the consequences of Foucault’s refusal of ideology critique remains apposite here, as does the engagement with technology and media studies throughout her work.

Regarding the demand for “close attention to what’s stable and continuous”: The point is a solid one, of course. But I wonder if this emphasis on progressive continuity doesn’t sit at some odds with a recent turn to figures of cyclic or folded temporality, in U.S.-based new media literary and cultural studies (Gitelman, *Always Already New;* Acland, *Residual Media;* Zielinski et al., *Deep Time of the Media;* Funkhouser, *Prehistoric Digital Poetry*…) — and with what one might read from that turn, perhaps, as a newly self-conscious and justly sensitive form of temporizing attention to the… continue

Melley’s term “agency panic,” presented in his 2008 and 2005 ebr contributions, is an alternative to Kathleen Fitzpatrick’s “anxiety of obsolescence” (as discussed by Anthony Enns).

Not to be confused with my interactive novel Portal (1986) from Activision.