In an interview published nearly two decades ago, Michel Foucault announced that much of what he had written—what was part of a body of criticism already known as poststructuralism—would best be understood as putting an end to a certain tradition of thought rather than providing a way for thought to begin anew. It was an arresting comment. True, Foucault had treated an established tradition of thought, what he referred to as the modern western discourse of Man. But his writings, as well as those of the other so-called poststructuralists, had opened to consideration a number of assumptions that...

The title is meant to trick you.

It is meant to keep you,

perhaps to keep me too,

from being afraid of me

because I am drawn to the machine,

because I am drawn in by the machine

that draws me out,

that draws me apart.

I am afraid that you will see that it excites me

being drawn out,

being drawn apart,

being drawn out into parts.

It is an apparatus of display: the machine.

It holds me on display, holds me to the display.

It is made of tacking devices

that sometimes attack me without pity,

like projectiles,...

InArchive Fever¹Jacques Derrida returns to an earlier essay where he first traced Freud’s steps from treating unconscious memory in terms of neurology to when, in 1925, Freud finally treated the unconscious in the metaphor of a writing machine, a child’s toy that Freud referred to as the “mystic writing-pad.” In this earlier essay, “Freud and the Scene of Writing” (1978),² Derrida points to Freud’s failure to recognize the existence of archiving machines or technologies that are surely more sophisticated than the toy mystic writing-pad. Derrida goes on to argue that the metaphor of the mystic writing-pad, which Freud...

Jacques Lacan’s bookTelevision¹is not about television. It owes its title rather to the fact that the book contains an interview with Lacan that was aired on French television in 1973. Taking note of this fact, Richard Dienst begins his book about television suggesting that, although not intended to be, the opening remarks of Lacan’s interview turn out to be a good description of television, demonstrating television’s capacity to turn everything into the televisual.² This is what Lacan said in his opening remarks to his television audience: “I always speak the truth; not all of it, because there’s no...

Over the past three decades, feminist theorists have persistently questioned the “naturalization” of the woman’s body; they have argued that it is a masculinist strategy to authorize the privilege given to reason in the modern western discourse of Man. Yet feminist theorists also have been suspicious of postmodern strategies for “denaturalizing” the woman’s body; they have claimed that often these strategies are masculinist as well. For example, in her feminist treatment of bodies and technologies, Ann Balsamo¹ echoes Nancy Hartsock’s² often repeated complaint about postmodern theory—that is, that it put the subject under erasure just as women were attaining...

The early criticism of ethnographic writing drew on literary theory in order to analyze the way in which the ethnographic text constructed the scientific authority of western anthropology. The intended political aim, however, was to adjust anthropology’s ethnographic form to decolonization when the “west,” in James Clifford’s often repeated words, “no longer [could] present itself as the unique purveyor of anthropological knowledge about others.”¹ Although the criticism of ethnographic writing has led to a recognition of the interrelationship of colonialization and the production of western anthropology’s scientific authority, a more general cultural studies of science, of which the early criticism...