Steven Shaviro’s gathering of dense, sometimes obtuse, occasionally electrifying essays should never have been published on paper. There is something awry (modernist; pre-modern even) about turning pages, submitting to the tyranny of left-to-right. We need a cerebral plug-in, intravenous disclosure; CD-ROM allows for Burroughsian cut-up (William Seward gets a chapter heading); or to at the very least restrict availability solely to the Internet. But chips like that are restricted to Jack Straw’s wet-dreams, and CD-ROM is never as good as (read Brian Eno - not a chapter heading, surprisingly). And besides, Serpent’s Tail have published it as a book, albeit after months of being available for just the price of a phone-call (and a service provider and a modem and your time) on Shaviro’s own web site.

Postmodernism: Let’s Go!

"To a postmodern sensibility, there’s no contradiction between cool and hot, irony and passion, playfulness and commitment, excitement and disgust, pleasure and anxiety, or camp distancing and involvement to the point of obsession." (from Chapter 1: Grant Morrison.)

"Sincerity is a postmodern malady." (from Chapter 2: Walt Disney.)

In his cover-shot, Shaviro - a teacher in literature and film at the University of Washington - faces away but wrests his gaze for a brief glimpse of us. He recognises what he has written: Doom Patrols is a treatise that defies this very review. If there is no difference between cool or hot, camp and obsession, then how are we to accuse anything here of simple right or wrong, stupidity or perception to an nth degree? A mass of his dialogue is most likely bollocks; certainly much is almost impenetrable, compacted thought; mind-fucking inadequacy. And yet ... and yet:

"It’s Bill Gates’s world; we just live in it ... God, like Gates, has exactly the aggressiveness, the competitive drive, and the sense of entitlement you’d expect in a talented straight boy from a privileged WASP background."

If he builds it, we will come. Shaviro is good at that, lighthousing this ocean of punctuation, a beacon to pilot us through. And to the end is where we go, for no matter how annoying Doom Patrols gets ("detached from referential meaning; the mechanical piling up of fragments takes the place of organic completion or symbolic translation"), it remains compulsively readable. We have to find out who did it.

For every irritation (Chapter 7: Cindy Sherman, "all feminine coquetry and affectation"), there is real juice like the dissection of Twin Peaks in terms of child abuse (Chapter 14: Truddi Chase). Or the last and quite brilliant chapter on the enigma that was Dean Martin ("If Elvis ... is the triumphant product of processes of natural selection, then Dino is the anomalous, ephemeral, and sterile expression of an illicit counter-movement"). Tremendous stuff.

In the end the greatest trick Doom Patrols (the author’s world dissected in relation to the comic, not the celebrated POV-game) pulls is the very sobriquet postmodern itself; it is auto-reviewed. All Shaviro leaves with us are his own quotes. Pop will eat itself. We surrender.