linda brigham

Linda Brigham offers a Deleuzean take on Independence Day.

Linda Brigham reviews the Spring and Fall 1995 issues of Cultural Critique.

Where is the real you? Behind the eyeballs, right; the center of a panoptical cinema, your virtual head spinning around like Linda Blair’s in The Exorcist. Watching the world go by.

Wrong. The address of the Enlightenment Subject has been vacant for a long time, and the front door now opens on a brick wall, or on the threshold of an abyss. So where do we send the mail? One answer to that question is the subject of two special issues of the journal Cultural Critique, subtitled “The Politics of Systems and Environments” (Spring and Fall, 1995). As William Rasch and Cary Wolfe explain in their introduction to the first number, the term “systems” stands in the place of the old subject, and “environments” replaces the old object. Like the old subject/object dichotomy, systems and environments are relative terms; each system becomes environment to another system. But systems and environments also manifest reciprocity: in complex self-referential systems (organism and societies for example), systems-as-observers (an ocular metaphor for perception in general) know they observe observers.

Linda Brigham hypercontextualizes contemporary philosophy.

Although a hard-copy book and a hypertext essay hardly present us with apples and oranges, this particular pair troubles the work of comparison. This trouble is not simply a matter of form. Content-wise as well, Arkady Plotnitsky’s interdisciplinary exploration of poststructural metaphysics (or “meta-physics”) and David Kolb’s meditation on the textuality of philosophy relate to each other in a fashion at once too intimate and divergent. Like Blake’s Clod and Pebble from the Songs of Experience, they are contraries, or, to pick up the theme, “complementary.” As Blake would insist, though, it is through such contraries that progress happens.