Operating at a Loss: Nominal Values and Mechanical Models

Both also, by his telling, offer well-bounded legibility while implicitly promising its opposite: an open-ended metonymic relationship to the universe yawning beyond their final (only not so final) pages. Because Turner warns against presentism, I will try to avoid the act of navel contemplation that would ask readers to decide if, by his account, the very journal they are holding is itself a serial (library catalogues say so), a miscellany (the open submission invitation hints so), or both. [...]perhaps more telling, the impending failure posed by the exhaustibility of natural resources, which forces fin de siecle thinkers to confront vitality as dependent upon the consumption of other organic material, not merely dead but also diminishing rapidly and near to vanishing. In Turner's account of the ways in which "compilation, arrangement, and encyclopaedism" (288) run alongside seriality and miscellaneity, we can see the same patient subtle willingness to abide with seeming contradictions that appears in Mershon's account of "living systems [exposed] to elemental processes that were automatic and unwilled" and of deathliness ensconced in the folds of vitality (275). [...]Ketabgian's fascinating turn towards the operational aesthetic explicitly troubles my understanding of science fiction's taxonomy.