For several reasons, the allusion to two-faced Janus on the front cover seems an appropriate figure for this issue. For one, the issue was developed during the rise and fall of the Y2K frenzy. As the god of gates and doorways, beginnings and endings, Janus symbolizes change and transition, two themes inextricably associated with this "millenium issue."

Furthermore, like many projects characterized as post-something, there is an indebtedness to the past in the act of looking forward. To borrow a term from N. Katherine Hayles, Janus' two faces evoke the skeumorphic logic of our digital lives. Change comes so quickly, from where would we draw the rhetorical means to represent it? We have no recourse but to appropriate inherited images and rhetorical structures, like the file folders represented on the desktop of a computer, which are no less useful for being inappropriate. The technologized two-faced Janus at the gateway to this issue underscores the debt to the past owed of every forward-looking gesture.

Finally, Janus recalls a nonlinear cultural logic often repressed in our Western philosophical tradition, a logic which allows for eruptions and emergences. According to Ovid, Janus was known as Chaos when the four elements (air, fire, water, and earth) were still a formless mass. As the elements separated, Chaos took the form of Janus, but her two faces continue to represent the confusion of her original state.

Techno-Janus does not proceed by way of identification, non-contradiction, and the excluded middle. As Victor Vitanza argues in Negation, Subjectivity, and the History of Rhetoric, "There are a number of ways of thinking about identification. The one that I'm against is by way of the negative. You see, I, instead, identify with the third man/woman, or the excluded middles" (21). Vitanza cites Donna Haraway, from her "A Manifesto for Cyborgs":

Cyborg politics insist[s] on noise and advocate[s] pollution, rejoicing in the illegitimate fusions of animal and machine. These are the couplings that make Man and Woman so problematic, subverting the structure of desire, the force imagined to generate language and gender, and so subverting the structure and modes of reproduction of Western identity, of nature and culture, of mirror and eye, slave and master, body and mind.