Michael Wutz
Editor's Preface


	With writing, so we say, we lose all that we owe to a Homer, 
	an Aristotle, a Goethe. Not to speak about the Holy 
	Scripture. Only, how do we happen to know that these great 
	authors (including the author of the Holy Scripture) would 
	not have preferred to speak on tape or to make a film?

	Vilém Flusser, Introduction to Die Schrift


In the tradition of Weber Studies, a journal dedicated to allowing 

maximum space for its contributors, I was faced with the challenge 

of delineating in two pages the major intersections of this 

special issue on science, technology, and the arts. Yet, in a 

sense, this challenge of informational compression is in part what 

this issue is about: many of its contributions, either implicitly 

or explicitly, raise the question how the institution of 

literature can sustain itself in a culture that has frequently 

been described as a post-print age. They query, what is the place 

of the printed word in a world equipped with (post)modern 

information processing technologies capable of recording their 

environment with a speed, complexity, and economy unmatched by the 

linear and single channel of written language?


Most of the contributions engaging this focus give a resounding-- 

albeit not unequivocal--answer: books will continue to have a 

legitimate existence in an age dominated by electronic media.

CD-ROMs and hypertext will not make them into quaint archaic 

artefacts--textual dinosaurs of interest only to cultural 

archeologists of the cyberage. Rather, while print has emerged 

from a different conceptual order, it has entered in a productive 

relationship with other media emphasizing its difference from 

electronic processing technologies. In the spirit of such media 

interactions, this issue is now online as a special supplement

to ebr, whose hypertextual design demonstrates the

limitations of print as it implements the possibilities of

electronic publishing. We may be living in an electronic

global hamlet, but that hamlet is not prepared

to leave the culture of print behind --at least not yet.


A second "line of force" unifying many of the texts featured in 

this issue is their investment in disciplinary interchange. 

And by dissolving the discreet boundaries thought to exist

between domains of knowledge and inquiry, they open up

suggestive ways of rethinking discursive relationships and

of producing cross-disciplinary insights: how do the laws

of thermodynamics inform late 19th century Victorian

narrative? What is the relationship between modern

painting and the emergent theories of the electron? How can

chaos theory be brought to bear on literary narrative?

What are the reciprocities between the languages and models

of science and those of poetry? These are some of the

interdisciplinary questions raised in this issue.


Historically, the critical and theoretical contributions span more 

than two hundred years of literary production, ranging from 

Laurence Sterne's Tristram Shandy (1759-67) to Nicholson Baker's 

The Fermata (1994), and they thus reproduce, in broad brush, the 

spectrum of responses toward the science & technology complex of 

modernity. While Sterne's narrative polemics and formal ruptures 

can easily be seen as an early literary critique of Newtonian 

mechanics and the emerging cultural authority of science and 

technology, Baker's novel-fantasy presupposes contemporary 

technologies as a condition of possibility: the story of a 

postmodern flaneur who can suspend time and indulge in the male 

gaze could only have been written in a society of the spectacle 

where fast-forward, pause, and play buttons afford instant 

(visual) gratification and the illusion of empowerment.

Vilém Flusser's posthumanist philosophy of communication

theorizes this cultural shift toward visual codes, a shift

visible as well in the book reviews concluding this issue.

Chronologically, a piece of cyberpunk fiction extrapolates many

of these postmodern concerns into the not too distant future,

when microelectronics and genetic engineering can construct

smooth insectile cyborgs and, along with them, unmatched public

surveillance and totalitarian control.


In their entirety, the critical essays gathered in this 

special issue are meant to give a sense of the current range of 

interests in the fields of science, technology, literature, and 

the arts. What underlies their work is a disciplinary fluidity 

grounded, fundamentally, in an elementary reciprocity: just as 

science is always already a rhetoric of science--a way of making 

presumed-to-be factual statements with the techniques of 

narrative, i.e., fiction--fiction and narrative are inevitably 

informed by the tropes and models of science and technology They 

are all embodiments of the human imagination.