In his piece "Trying to Understand Endgame," Theodor Adorno comments that in the work of Samuel B... more In his piece "Trying to Understand Endgame," Theodor Adorno comments that in the work of Samuel Beckett "poetic procedure surrenders…without intention." 1 This is a remarkable claim, not about Beckett's work, but the effect it has on the way we experience intimacy with narrative and how we can consider how literature thinks. In Adorno's sense, Endgame's poetic procedure establishes a confined and constitutive dwelling from which the language users cannot escape-this dwelling is expressed through the sparse 1 Theodor Adorno, "Trying to Understand Endgame," trans. Michael T.
We have the books, and those books are really dreams, and every time we reread a book that book i... more We have the books, and those books are really dreams, and every time we reread a book that book is slightly different and we are slightly different also. Jorge Luis Borges 1 This water, this movement keep people's minds open.. .. high tide bring[s] the space, the temptation, the consolation of possibility. Alain Robbe-Grillet 2 F innegans Wake is an ambient, ubiquitous text. 3 It surrounds tradition, genre, and history, encompasses non-linear logic, fable, and eschatology, defies a conceptual geometry that the reader can grasp to pin down its narrative structure, and is seemingly everywhere at all times in all imaginable directions. It is, in other words, remarkably chaotic in the strictest sense. In the past couple of decades, the Wake has inspired readings through the lens of chaos theory, quantum physics, and the new sciences. 4 And yet it is the same text that inspired Clive Hart's 1967 essay "James Joyce's Sentimentality" for which, in a 2003 reprinted version, Robert Scholes wrote an introduction where Scholes notes that "there are things about modernism that are not visible clearly without a proper appreciation of the sentimental." 5 Thus, it is with Hart's essay first that a meaningful discussion of Joyce's sentimentalism may properly begin. This critical leap from chaos theory, continental philosophy, and the new sciences to a revisiting of reader complicity in overwrought emotional artifice is appropriate for a work like the Wake. The text also invites readers to make unusual connections not simply in the work itself but between seemingly unrelated commentaries. As Tim Conley writes, "within this possible world. .. moments of disorder are not only possible; they are entirely probable"; 6 in the Wake, the possibilities are seemingly endless. As a result, the sentimentalism of the Wake's "Nuvoletta" episode (FW 157.08-159.18) offers the insight that heightened emotional artifice can operate as a window into ways of considering the exciting non-referential and non-signifying possibilities of the work as endlessly fecund information. Ultimately, I wish
is a musician and academic. He teaches in the Department of English and Writing Studies at the Un... more is a musician and academic. He teaches in the Department of English and Writing Studies at the University of Western Ontario. He is examining the intersections where literature and film meet algorithmic and automated culture.
Journal of the fantastic in the arts, Mar 22, 2012
CONTEMPORARY BRITISH NOVELIST AND PLAYWRIGHT JEFF NOON IS CELEBRATED for his startlingly original... more CONTEMPORARY BRITISH NOVELIST AND PLAYWRIGHT JEFF NOON IS CELEBRATED for his startlingly original debut novel, Vurt (1993). Noon's stylistically masterful work of slipstream fiction reads like an explosive hybrid of Lewis Carroll, William Gibson, Elizabeth Smart, and a Warp Records release. Since Vurt, Noon has published six novels, a collection of short stories, stage and radio plays, an avant-garde/avant texte fiction, a hypertext writing game in collaboration with Steve Beard, and a hypertext fiction in partnership with Susanna Jones, Alison MacLeod, and William Shaw. Another collaboration resulted in Noon's 2010 story "Artwork 2058: Probability Cloud," published "at the request," he writes, "of Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster, to accompany her exhibition in the Tate Modern's Turbine Hall" (Noon, "Unilever"). More recently, Noon is posting atmospheric microstories on Twitter "set in Sparkletown, two years after the crash of the Digital Age" ("Aerials"). These experiments in form and intertexuality culminate in Noon's most recent full-length novel, Falling out of Cars (2002), likely his most eloquent piece of writing though arguably also his most difficult piece. Falling out of Cars is characterized by a series of textual samples--many from the literary canon--mutated almost beyond recognition. The result is an intense sense of textual haunting and the uncanny. Reviews of the novel by Thomas L. Martin, John Berlyne, Claude Lalumiere, and others were largely enthusiastic, yet it did not generate the same explosive effect as Noon's Vurt quartet. Despite the praise from reviewers, academic critics such as Noon aficionado Andrew Butler remain silent regarding this novel. Val Gough's "A Crossbreed Loneliness? Jeff Noon's Feminist Cyberpunk" (2000) examines in impressive depth an apparent "feminist cyberpunk sensibility" in Noon's first four novels--a trajectory that she argues remains underdeveloped: "Noon's work shows that cyberpunk can begin to pursue the radical possibilities of feminist thinking. However, as long as cyberpunk's post-humanism occurs within a heterosexual matrix, its critique of existing social structures will remain necessarily limited" (Gough 126). Appearing two years after the publication of Gough's essay, Falling out of Cars, with its complex and sympathetic female narrator, would seem to fulfill those demands. Noon's self-evaluation of the novel is telling. In his notes concerning the novel, he writes: "I like to call Falling out of Cars a transcendental road novel. A journey through a strangely transformed, diseased, England.... [T]he quest is not the governing force behind the novel; these people are, to all intents and purposes, lost" ("Roots"). By designating the piece as a transcendental road novel, Noon is effectively suggesting that the work resides somewhere beyond or outside traditional narrative pathways; much like the characters in the novel, recognizable parameters of genre are lost. As the novel progresses, the conflation of the quest and the theme of loss intensifies to the point of implosion. Indeed, the reader gets the sense that the journey is progressing through a diseased England and, at once, the stages of loss and mourning. The difficulty of Falling out of Cars is at once its appeal. The piece is, as Berlyne notes, "plotless"--at least in the traditional sense of plot. The intertextual references in the novel are abundant; the fragmented nature of the work evokes Carroll, Borges, Nabokov, Beckett, Woolf, Kerouac, Kafka, and others. Yet this intertextuality is dreamlike and constantly morphing. Evocative of the repetitive/cyclical narrative and growing distortion of Robbe-Grillet's Dans le labyrinthe/In the Labyrinth (1959), Noon's use of environmental noise as understood in information theory serves as a metaphor for the emotional state of loss. Yet, despite the turbulent subject matter, the narrative of Falling out of Cars is executed with tranquility and control. While much of Noon's earlier work balances melancholy and elegy with humor, Falling out of Cars almost exclusively expresses a sense of quietude, sadness, and meditation. …
In March 201 1, Science Fiction Studies published a special issue on slipstream fiction. In it, B... more In March 201 1, Science Fiction Studies published a special issue on slipstream fiction. In it, Bruce Sterling, who coined the term in his 1989 article "Slipstream," wrote a follow-up piece, "Slipstream 2," noting:One thing that is problematic for slipstream: being based in quote, Theory, unquote, it has a very hard time taking creative effort seriously. You can see this in certain pop-culture critics, like (say) Steve Beard or Mark Dery, who are pop music people, and culture studies people. Although you can see them straining to become fiction writers, and you can sense a potential literature behind the push there, they're just not ever going to become literateurs [...] They want to be analytical; they want to understand the structure of society on some higher, abstract level. (Sterling 10)Sterling's observation here is fascinating in that he views fiction based in "Theory" as inherently inferior. Certainly, this kind of fiction can be, at worst, unbearably contrived. Why Sterling chooses two authors who have written successful and pleasurable literary experiments is unclear. Perhaps he simply wishes to prohibit Beard and Dery from entering a possible slipstream canon. If this is part of the motivation, it may be well founded in the case of Steve Beard. Consider Sterling's criteria for the genre in question: slipstream "is a kind of writing which simply makes you feel very strange; the way that living in the late twentieth century makes you feel, if you are a person of a certain sensibility" ("Slipstream"). Sterling's conceit regarding sensibility may be what excludes Beard's fiction from being considered works of slipstream writing. That is, slipstream makes the reader "feel very strange," while with Beard's fiction, though unusual, the reader is made to experience the horror of unknowing. Beard writes fiction that is characterized by a constant fleeting away of narrative referent; a cohesive narrative is intimated, oddly enough, through its absence. The effect is not equal to feeling strange; it is, however, both consistent with, and an intervention into, a trajectory of Lovecraftian weird fiction.That Beard's novel is relatively recent situates his work among those other innovators in the genre that has come to be called "New Weird Fiction." Jeff VanderMeer suggests that the New Weird began to materialize in the 1980s and 1990s in the work of Jeffrey Thomas, Thomas Ligotti, Michael Cisco, Kathe Koja, Richard Calder, Jeffery Ford, K.J. Bishop, Alastair Reynolds, as well as in his own writings; however, the genre finds its first commercial success with China Mieville's Perdido Street Station (2000) (VanderMeer xixii). VanderMeer writes that "Mieville had created just the right balance between pulp writing, visionary, surreal images, and literary influences to attract a wider audience" (xii). Beard's work, on the other hand, is difficult, and proceeds with an experimental aesthetic with little regard for accessibility. VanderMeer identifies two impulses that distinguish the New Weird from traditional Weird Fiction: first, the postmodern sensibility and genre blending of New Wave writers of the 1960s; secondly, a move away from the Lovecraftian "coyness" that characteristically refuses to reveal the horror (ixx); that is, part of the narrative momentum of the New Weird relies on transgressive horror. While Beard engages with both these impulses, there is a marked emphasis on the first. Digital Leatherette shares much more in common with the formal experimentation of J.G. Ballard's The Atrocity Exhibition (1970) than with the work of Clive Barker. While there are certainly unsettling scenes of violence in Beard's work, his fiction intersects with H.P. Lovecraft's insistence on emphasizing philosophical horror through processes of negation; Lovecraft achieves this by making horrors unknowable, Beard does so through formal narrative experimentation.Preeminent critic of weird fiction S.T. Joshi notes a crucial paradox at the heart of horror in literature: "horror fiction is not meant to horrify" The Modern Weird Tale 2). …
Among the sacred objects belonging to a sultan of Menangcabow named Gaggar Allum was the cloth sa... more Among the sacred objects belonging to a sultan of Menangcabow named Gaggar Allum was the cloth sansistah Kallah, which weaves itself, and adds one thread yearly of fine pearls, and when that cloth shall be finished the world will be no more.-W. W. Skeat 1 This disturbing, full-length portrait of a Dorian Gray will haunt me, as writing, having become the book itself.-Stéphane Mallarmé 2
Preliminaries of Repair. Laurence A. Rickels. Germany: A Science Fiction. Fort Wayne: Anti-Oedipu... more Preliminaries of Repair. Laurence A. Rickels. Germany: A Science Fiction. Fort Wayne: Anti-Oedipus Press, 2015. 269 pp. ISBN 9780989239189. $28.45 he.Reviewed by Andrew WenausIn Germany: A Science Fiction (2015), noted theorist and psychoanalyst Laurence A. Rickels continues his ongoing examination of German science fiction, its genealogy, disappearance, doublings, and re-emergence. Rickels inspects the texts of a historical period (World War II, the years preceding and following) devastated by psychopathic violence. But Germany is not necessarily a work of consolation so much as an attempt to experimentally establish ways of thinking about the preliminaries of repair. Rickels formulates a methodology that constitutes and is constituted by a paradox of absence and loss. Dizzyingly frustrating and, at the same time, a galvanizing critique, Germany is haunted by trajectories of doppelgangers that comprise "the continuity shot of German science fiction" (22)-from vampires and robots to the V-2 rocket, from Romanticism to modernity, from Germany to California.At the paradoxical core of the study is what Rickels identifies as a psychic experience of loss that stretches back to World War I and "projected a new standard of survival of the fittest: the fit with technologization, a psychic fit now thought best secured through the unbalancing acts of dissociation, the new internal frontier of doubling" (22). He identifies this process, both psychic and textual, as "psy-fi." The interplay between sf as a genre and psy-fi as a kind of "endopsychic genealogy" (18) is complex and never fully subjected to an extended close reading, yet the two operate in a supplementary manner: sf and psy-fi are doubles that make manifest a plastic way of approaching the relationship between technology and dissociation. Germany: A Science Fiction, Rickels notes, "makes the corpus a point of context-of onset and of return- for my endopsychic genealogy of the post-WWII containment and integration of psychopathy" (19). He thus focuses on the Cold War era of sf not because it is emblematic of the genre's mainstreaming but because this is the moment of German sf's disappearance. The hauntings and doublings at play during this absence become "the draw of fiction" (20) and are at the center of understanding "the metabolization of traumatic histories whereby the heirs to psychopathic violence approach the onset of the ability to mourn" (244). A challenging work that deals with difficult subject matter, Germany, kaleidoscopic and labyrinthine as it is, proceeds and unfolds under Rickels's exceptional thoughtfulness.In the preface, Rickels identifies a logical structure that becomes constitutive of the work's analytical apparatus. This has to do with the relationship between technology and loss. To read Rickels's analysis, we need to recognize the psychoanalytic premise that all technology is prosthesis-an addendum to the physical body but at the cost of narcosis and experiential auto-amputation. Gleichschaltung (the term used by the Nazis to designate coordination or bringing into line all aspects of society) is an "engineering term for wiring AC electric motors to turn at the same speed" and "designates one of modernism's neutral structures, one that is as content-dependent as the double for its ethical tendency. It is doubling's mass-psychological counterpart" (17). Constantly at play in Germany is the relationship between technologization, melancholia, and mourning. However, consolation and repair may be hovering around the book's margins. This formulation (and its theoretical/critical lineage) also pervades Germany. In the third chapter, "Identification with Lost Causes," Rickels writes that "from the phantasmagoria of the Axis to the extensive psycho-technical research and training that made the German pilot into an 'auto-pilot' ever in the ready position to merge with the machine in flight, the investment in air power as the ultimate war front was all along, without knowing it, building up to the crypto-fetish of rocket flight" (72). …
In his piece "Trying to Understand Endgame," Theodor Adorno comments that in the work of Samuel B... more In his piece "Trying to Understand Endgame," Theodor Adorno comments that in the work of Samuel Beckett "poetic procedure surrenders…without intention." 1 This is a remarkable claim, not about Beckett's work, but the effect it has on the way we experience intimacy with narrative and how we can consider how literature thinks. In Adorno's sense, Endgame's poetic procedure establishes a confined and constitutive dwelling from which the language users cannot escape-this dwelling is expressed through the sparse 1 Theodor Adorno, "Trying to Understand Endgame," trans. Michael T.
We have the books, and those books are really dreams, and every time we reread a book that book i... more We have the books, and those books are really dreams, and every time we reread a book that book is slightly different and we are slightly different also. Jorge Luis Borges 1 This water, this movement keep people's minds open.. .. high tide bring[s] the space, the temptation, the consolation of possibility. Alain Robbe-Grillet 2 F innegans Wake is an ambient, ubiquitous text. 3 It surrounds tradition, genre, and history, encompasses non-linear logic, fable, and eschatology, defies a conceptual geometry that the reader can grasp to pin down its narrative structure, and is seemingly everywhere at all times in all imaginable directions. It is, in other words, remarkably chaotic in the strictest sense. In the past couple of decades, the Wake has inspired readings through the lens of chaos theory, quantum physics, and the new sciences. 4 And yet it is the same text that inspired Clive Hart's 1967 essay "James Joyce's Sentimentality" for which, in a 2003 reprinted version, Robert Scholes wrote an introduction where Scholes notes that "there are things about modernism that are not visible clearly without a proper appreciation of the sentimental." 5 Thus, it is with Hart's essay first that a meaningful discussion of Joyce's sentimentalism may properly begin. This critical leap from chaos theory, continental philosophy, and the new sciences to a revisiting of reader complicity in overwrought emotional artifice is appropriate for a work like the Wake. The text also invites readers to make unusual connections not simply in the work itself but between seemingly unrelated commentaries. As Tim Conley writes, "within this possible world. .. moments of disorder are not only possible; they are entirely probable"; 6 in the Wake, the possibilities are seemingly endless. As a result, the sentimentalism of the Wake's "Nuvoletta" episode (FW 157.08-159.18) offers the insight that heightened emotional artifice can operate as a window into ways of considering the exciting non-referential and non-signifying possibilities of the work as endlessly fecund information. Ultimately, I wish
is a musician and academic. He teaches in the Department of English and Writing Studies at the Un... more is a musician and academic. He teaches in the Department of English and Writing Studies at the University of Western Ontario. He is examining the intersections where literature and film meet algorithmic and automated culture.
Journal of the fantastic in the arts, Mar 22, 2012
CONTEMPORARY BRITISH NOVELIST AND PLAYWRIGHT JEFF NOON IS CELEBRATED for his startlingly original... more CONTEMPORARY BRITISH NOVELIST AND PLAYWRIGHT JEFF NOON IS CELEBRATED for his startlingly original debut novel, Vurt (1993). Noon's stylistically masterful work of slipstream fiction reads like an explosive hybrid of Lewis Carroll, William Gibson, Elizabeth Smart, and a Warp Records release. Since Vurt, Noon has published six novels, a collection of short stories, stage and radio plays, an avant-garde/avant texte fiction, a hypertext writing game in collaboration with Steve Beard, and a hypertext fiction in partnership with Susanna Jones, Alison MacLeod, and William Shaw. Another collaboration resulted in Noon's 2010 story "Artwork 2058: Probability Cloud," published "at the request," he writes, "of Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster, to accompany her exhibition in the Tate Modern's Turbine Hall" (Noon, "Unilever"). More recently, Noon is posting atmospheric microstories on Twitter "set in Sparkletown, two years after the crash of the Digital Age" ("Aerials"). These experiments in form and intertexuality culminate in Noon's most recent full-length novel, Falling out of Cars (2002), likely his most eloquent piece of writing though arguably also his most difficult piece. Falling out of Cars is characterized by a series of textual samples--many from the literary canon--mutated almost beyond recognition. The result is an intense sense of textual haunting and the uncanny. Reviews of the novel by Thomas L. Martin, John Berlyne, Claude Lalumiere, and others were largely enthusiastic, yet it did not generate the same explosive effect as Noon's Vurt quartet. Despite the praise from reviewers, academic critics such as Noon aficionado Andrew Butler remain silent regarding this novel. Val Gough's "A Crossbreed Loneliness? Jeff Noon's Feminist Cyberpunk" (2000) examines in impressive depth an apparent "feminist cyberpunk sensibility" in Noon's first four novels--a trajectory that she argues remains underdeveloped: "Noon's work shows that cyberpunk can begin to pursue the radical possibilities of feminist thinking. However, as long as cyberpunk's post-humanism occurs within a heterosexual matrix, its critique of existing social structures will remain necessarily limited" (Gough 126). Appearing two years after the publication of Gough's essay, Falling out of Cars, with its complex and sympathetic female narrator, would seem to fulfill those demands. Noon's self-evaluation of the novel is telling. In his notes concerning the novel, he writes: "I like to call Falling out of Cars a transcendental road novel. A journey through a strangely transformed, diseased, England.... [T]he quest is not the governing force behind the novel; these people are, to all intents and purposes, lost" ("Roots"). By designating the piece as a transcendental road novel, Noon is effectively suggesting that the work resides somewhere beyond or outside traditional narrative pathways; much like the characters in the novel, recognizable parameters of genre are lost. As the novel progresses, the conflation of the quest and the theme of loss intensifies to the point of implosion. Indeed, the reader gets the sense that the journey is progressing through a diseased England and, at once, the stages of loss and mourning. The difficulty of Falling out of Cars is at once its appeal. The piece is, as Berlyne notes, "plotless"--at least in the traditional sense of plot. The intertextual references in the novel are abundant; the fragmented nature of the work evokes Carroll, Borges, Nabokov, Beckett, Woolf, Kerouac, Kafka, and others. Yet this intertextuality is dreamlike and constantly morphing. Evocative of the repetitive/cyclical narrative and growing distortion of Robbe-Grillet's Dans le labyrinthe/In the Labyrinth (1959), Noon's use of environmental noise as understood in information theory serves as a metaphor for the emotional state of loss. Yet, despite the turbulent subject matter, the narrative of Falling out of Cars is executed with tranquility and control. While much of Noon's earlier work balances melancholy and elegy with humor, Falling out of Cars almost exclusively expresses a sense of quietude, sadness, and meditation. …
In March 201 1, Science Fiction Studies published a special issue on slipstream fiction. In it, B... more In March 201 1, Science Fiction Studies published a special issue on slipstream fiction. In it, Bruce Sterling, who coined the term in his 1989 article "Slipstream," wrote a follow-up piece, "Slipstream 2," noting:One thing that is problematic for slipstream: being based in quote, Theory, unquote, it has a very hard time taking creative effort seriously. You can see this in certain pop-culture critics, like (say) Steve Beard or Mark Dery, who are pop music people, and culture studies people. Although you can see them straining to become fiction writers, and you can sense a potential literature behind the push there, they're just not ever going to become literateurs [...] They want to be analytical; they want to understand the structure of society on some higher, abstract level. (Sterling 10)Sterling's observation here is fascinating in that he views fiction based in "Theory" as inherently inferior. Certainly, this kind of fiction can be, at worst, unbearably contrived. Why Sterling chooses two authors who have written successful and pleasurable literary experiments is unclear. Perhaps he simply wishes to prohibit Beard and Dery from entering a possible slipstream canon. If this is part of the motivation, it may be well founded in the case of Steve Beard. Consider Sterling's criteria for the genre in question: slipstream "is a kind of writing which simply makes you feel very strange; the way that living in the late twentieth century makes you feel, if you are a person of a certain sensibility" ("Slipstream"). Sterling's conceit regarding sensibility may be what excludes Beard's fiction from being considered works of slipstream writing. That is, slipstream makes the reader "feel very strange," while with Beard's fiction, though unusual, the reader is made to experience the horror of unknowing. Beard writes fiction that is characterized by a constant fleeting away of narrative referent; a cohesive narrative is intimated, oddly enough, through its absence. The effect is not equal to feeling strange; it is, however, both consistent with, and an intervention into, a trajectory of Lovecraftian weird fiction.That Beard's novel is relatively recent situates his work among those other innovators in the genre that has come to be called "New Weird Fiction." Jeff VanderMeer suggests that the New Weird began to materialize in the 1980s and 1990s in the work of Jeffrey Thomas, Thomas Ligotti, Michael Cisco, Kathe Koja, Richard Calder, Jeffery Ford, K.J. Bishop, Alastair Reynolds, as well as in his own writings; however, the genre finds its first commercial success with China Mieville's Perdido Street Station (2000) (VanderMeer xixii). VanderMeer writes that "Mieville had created just the right balance between pulp writing, visionary, surreal images, and literary influences to attract a wider audience" (xii). Beard's work, on the other hand, is difficult, and proceeds with an experimental aesthetic with little regard for accessibility. VanderMeer identifies two impulses that distinguish the New Weird from traditional Weird Fiction: first, the postmodern sensibility and genre blending of New Wave writers of the 1960s; secondly, a move away from the Lovecraftian "coyness" that characteristically refuses to reveal the horror (ixx); that is, part of the narrative momentum of the New Weird relies on transgressive horror. While Beard engages with both these impulses, there is a marked emphasis on the first. Digital Leatherette shares much more in common with the formal experimentation of J.G. Ballard's The Atrocity Exhibition (1970) than with the work of Clive Barker. While there are certainly unsettling scenes of violence in Beard's work, his fiction intersects with H.P. Lovecraft's insistence on emphasizing philosophical horror through processes of negation; Lovecraft achieves this by making horrors unknowable, Beard does so through formal narrative experimentation.Preeminent critic of weird fiction S.T. Joshi notes a crucial paradox at the heart of horror in literature: "horror fiction is not meant to horrify" The Modern Weird Tale 2). …
Among the sacred objects belonging to a sultan of Menangcabow named Gaggar Allum was the cloth sa... more Among the sacred objects belonging to a sultan of Menangcabow named Gaggar Allum was the cloth sansistah Kallah, which weaves itself, and adds one thread yearly of fine pearls, and when that cloth shall be finished the world will be no more.-W. W. Skeat 1 This disturbing, full-length portrait of a Dorian Gray will haunt me, as writing, having become the book itself.-Stéphane Mallarmé 2
Preliminaries of Repair. Laurence A. Rickels. Germany: A Science Fiction. Fort Wayne: Anti-Oedipu... more Preliminaries of Repair. Laurence A. Rickels. Germany: A Science Fiction. Fort Wayne: Anti-Oedipus Press, 2015. 269 pp. ISBN 9780989239189. $28.45 he.Reviewed by Andrew WenausIn Germany: A Science Fiction (2015), noted theorist and psychoanalyst Laurence A. Rickels continues his ongoing examination of German science fiction, its genealogy, disappearance, doublings, and re-emergence. Rickels inspects the texts of a historical period (World War II, the years preceding and following) devastated by psychopathic violence. But Germany is not necessarily a work of consolation so much as an attempt to experimentally establish ways of thinking about the preliminaries of repair. Rickels formulates a methodology that constitutes and is constituted by a paradox of absence and loss. Dizzyingly frustrating and, at the same time, a galvanizing critique, Germany is haunted by trajectories of doppelgangers that comprise "the continuity shot of German science fiction" (22)-from vampires and robots to the V-2 rocket, from Romanticism to modernity, from Germany to California.At the paradoxical core of the study is what Rickels identifies as a psychic experience of loss that stretches back to World War I and "projected a new standard of survival of the fittest: the fit with technologization, a psychic fit now thought best secured through the unbalancing acts of dissociation, the new internal frontier of doubling" (22). He identifies this process, both psychic and textual, as "psy-fi." The interplay between sf as a genre and psy-fi as a kind of "endopsychic genealogy" (18) is complex and never fully subjected to an extended close reading, yet the two operate in a supplementary manner: sf and psy-fi are doubles that make manifest a plastic way of approaching the relationship between technology and dissociation. Germany: A Science Fiction, Rickels notes, "makes the corpus a point of context-of onset and of return- for my endopsychic genealogy of the post-WWII containment and integration of psychopathy" (19). He thus focuses on the Cold War era of sf not because it is emblematic of the genre's mainstreaming but because this is the moment of German sf's disappearance. The hauntings and doublings at play during this absence become "the draw of fiction" (20) and are at the center of understanding "the metabolization of traumatic histories whereby the heirs to psychopathic violence approach the onset of the ability to mourn" (244). A challenging work that deals with difficult subject matter, Germany, kaleidoscopic and labyrinthine as it is, proceeds and unfolds under Rickels's exceptional thoughtfulness.In the preface, Rickels identifies a logical structure that becomes constitutive of the work's analytical apparatus. This has to do with the relationship between technology and loss. To read Rickels's analysis, we need to recognize the psychoanalytic premise that all technology is prosthesis-an addendum to the physical body but at the cost of narcosis and experiential auto-amputation. Gleichschaltung (the term used by the Nazis to designate coordination or bringing into line all aspects of society) is an "engineering term for wiring AC electric motors to turn at the same speed" and "designates one of modernism's neutral structures, one that is as content-dependent as the double for its ethical tendency. It is doubling's mass-psychological counterpart" (17). Constantly at play in Germany is the relationship between technologization, melancholia, and mourning. However, consolation and repair may be hovering around the book's margins. This formulation (and its theoretical/critical lineage) also pervades Germany. In the third chapter, "Identification with Lost Causes," Rickels writes that "from the phantasmagoria of the Axis to the extensive psycho-technical research and training that made the German pilot into an 'auto-pilot' ever in the ready position to merge with the machine in flight, the investment in air power as the ultimate war front was all along, without knowing it, building up to the crypto-fetish of rocket flight" (72). …
Just over a hundred years ago, the avant-garde shifted from art for art’s sake to art as lived ex... more Just over a hundred years ago, the avant-garde shifted from art for art’s sake to art as lived experience and revolutionary gesture. The DADA movement was at the centre of all this. It was a movement motivated by disgust towards the bourgeoisie and its support of the Great War. The Dadaists in Zurich, Berlin, and New York wanted to disrupt and destroy every way of thinking that could lead to a hyper-rational technologized war. So, they waged a war on rationality and logic. DADA, Tristian Tzara wrote in his 1918 manifesto, signifies nothing and means “no thing.” A nihilistic stick-in-the-spokes for Enlightenment and Romantic ideals, DADA has a lasting legacy: from Surrealism, the advertising industry, the Situationist International, Yoko Ono, Andy Kaufman, Brother Theodore, and punks of London and New York. This is all good, apparently. But what do we make of the proliferation of Dank Memes and their simultaneous adoption by both progressives and the Alt-Right online? DADA has a presence as complex and pressing today as it was over a century ago. But at the core of it all is nihilism: DADA signifies nothing. Whereas Dada was the will to difference via destruction, alt-right dank memers adopted the same techniques but with a different ethos: the will to deception via destruction. What does this mean if we want to make sense out of being a subject in the early twenty-first century where meaning seems to be lost? How does signifying nothing work perfectly with algorithmic culture and this shift of the citizen to the consumer where leisure is labour and where capitalists no longer need to exploit the workers since they willingly exploit themselves in the name of optimization and accomplishment on Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, and so on. To what degree is nihilism a coping mechanism as capitalism belches its last burps? Or, to what degree is a collective “signifying nothing” a calculated and manufactured attitude that helps maximize the consumer as a pure function of algorithmic functionality? In short, are we good bro? Weird flex, but OK? Or, should we start lighting our torches and sharpening our pitchforks?
ELECTRONIC LITERATURE ORGANIZATION CONFERENCE AND MEDIA ARTS FESTIVAL, 2019
In a 2006 interview with Travis Elborough, J.G. Ballard suggests that he sees his role as a novel... more In a 2006 interview with Travis Elborough, J.G. Ballard suggests that he sees his role as a novelist as an investigator or a scout who is sent ahead to see whether or not the water is drinkable. Ballard is one of the most discerning English language authors of the 20th and 21st centuries. He came to prominence in the 1960s with his catastrophe novels that are, today, remarkably prescient with their extrapolations on the actuality of climate change. In the 1970s, Ballard’s formally experimental novels examined the psychopathologies of mass media by looking at the surreal combinations of eroticism, death, technology, and violence. His final novels consider the logical conclusion of closed communities and the coming of techno-feudalism and consumer fascism as that which may replace liberal democracy. As varied as these theses may seem, Ballard’s career as a writer and thinker is a kind of variations on a theme: that the protagonist is constituted by something that is at once internally latent yet outwardly constitutive and, in complicated ways, determinist. Ballard’s science fiction was one of inner space rather than outer space. Perhaps this is why the central thesis of Ballard’s work should lend itself seamlessly to online bots. Ballard’s fiction is characteristically set in car parks, hospital lobbies, suburbs, motorways and underpasses, shopping malls, business parks, airports, and luxury high-rises. Each of these settings exemplify anthropologist Marc Augé’s conception of “non-places”: supermodern deluges of meaning, contagiously viral, outside of time, and purely functional. Ballard’s concerns are physical, psychological, and civic. Ballard’s dedication to inner-space lends itself to Mike Bosnall’s investigation into the ultimate non-space: the internet. For Ballard, supermodern non-spaces signify the social architecture that can cope with zero to a million decimals; the internet only amplifies and accelerates this process. Bonsall’s Ballardian TwitterBots are an amusing and insightful extension of Ballard’s central thesis (that the psyche is both constitutive and constituted by the psychopathology of non-place environments) through automated means. Bosnall’s three Ballard TwitterBots are @JGB_Sentences, @Crash_Cutup, and @New_Ballard. The first, @JGB_Sentences, is the simplest and consists of a Twitter-length sentence, selected from forty thousand elements of Ballard text, and posted once every 12 hours. The second, @Crash_Cutup, is more complex. Bonsall took each sentence in Ballard’s infamous 1973 novel Crash and split each sentence into three parts (beginning, middle, and end) in an excel spreadsheet. The bot randomly organizes selections from the three columns resulting in a new Ballardian sentence. Bosnall suggests that Ballard is the original author but that he has acted as the collagist. Finally, @New_Ballard uses a simple Markov chain model that determines which word is most likely to come next in the order of text. A Markov chain is a relatively simple way of statistically modelling stochastic patterns based on what appeared before in a sequence. The results of these bots are remarkable as they demonstrate an incremental shift towards supermodern psychopathy: from didactic sentences, to a digitally generated sentence, to fully surreal automated syntax. Ballard’s prose is always highly calculated and articulate; Bonsall’s BallardBots achieve this proceduralism to a new inhuman degree. Indeed, Bonsall’s TwitterBots may act as the scouts sent ahead--not into shopping malls, airports, or luxury high-rises--but onto the internet to see how that future may unfold according to an inhuman psychopathology of algorithmic culture.
From branding and advertising logos to artificial intelligence and persuasive algorithmic process... more From branding and advertising logos to artificial intelligence and persuasive algorithmic processes, we dramatize the psychological by externalizing it and observing it play for us. This paper will focus on the work of the eccentric twentieth century painter and draughtsman Austin Osman Spare and his lifelong project of re-enchantment through sigil art and his " alphabet of desire. " Despite his early promise, Spare instead pursued an eccentric artistic path in ritual magic and the occult. Ritual magic assumes that the inmost desire of an individual can be made manifest in actuality through acts of evocation. Spare developed a highly idiosyncratic and personal system of magical evocation through a process of sigil magic: the rewriting of one's desire in the form of an aesthetic glyph. From this process, Spare developed an " alphabet of desire, " a series of sigils that can be used to make manifest thought as an external reality. This paper examines Spare's eccentric, unique, and ongoing influence on the way we consider the visual image as a willed, persuasive externalization of desire. From Raymond Williams' advertising as " The Magic System, " media theorist Douglas Rushkoff's critique of postwar advertising, to recent studies in the Journal of Consumer Research on the magical thinking behind advertising, there is an ongoing fascination with magical thinking and the externalizing desire. Rather than a supernatural process, Spare's alphabet of desire continues to fascinate because it seems to work on illogical, subconscious levels. This paper argues that—rather than simply a system of self-deception—Spare's project may also make manifest the processes that constitute and underlie the way we persuade and are persuaded and can ultimately be productive in the way we exercise agency in unusual ways.
Similar to Jacques Derrida's assertion that there is nothing outside the text, mathematical ficti... more Similar to Jacques Derrida's assertion that there is nothing outside the text, mathematical fictionalism suggests that mathematics is non-representational and more an historical construction and cultural artefact than an expression of a Platonic discovery of a transcendent and independent truth out there. This talk examines the status of autonomous production in the age of algorithmic self-replication and self-reproduction (i.e. self-evolving algorithmic texts that produce new narrative texts) and what that means for interpretive agents like us in the era of rapid developments in machine learning and artificial intelligence. While algorithmically generated narratives can sound science fictional, self-adapting algorithmic narratives are in fact a common function that both operates behind and sculpts many of our daily tasks: from self-adapting advertising algorithms to self-generating narratives. As its central example, this talk considers the short sf film Sunspring (2016) written by a recurrent neural network called a long short-term memory (LSTM); or, Benjamin, as the AI named itself. The script for Sunspring was rapidly generated by Benjamin after being introduced to a large number of sf screenplays. After the script was printed out, it was then put to film by a cast and crew directed by Oscar Sharp and was made for the Sci-Fi London film festival as part of a 48 hour film challenge. Sharp collaborated with AI researcher Ross Godwin (the developer of Benjamin). Benjamin produced the notably inhuman screenplay while the acting roles were chosen randomly by Sharp. What is striking about Sunspring is that it is very strange and, often, really funny. Is our laughter the result of the director's and actors' choices making light of the oddness; or, may our laughter be the consequence of discomfort as it makes manifest biases we hold about how stories are generated and whether they really are our own or the product of a rigid linguistic/code expression? Mathematical fictionalism implies that that algorithmic code may generate uncanny narratives because it is an extension of us. On the other hand, mathematical Platonism may suggest that algorithmically generated narratives express the inhuman whereby the uncanny is neutralized by an encounter with that which is exterior to human agency (i.e. it is not familiar). Sunspring raises certain questions about narrative and the way it expresses either language (or code) according to its constitutive logic or whether the incompatibility between meaning and algorithmic processes in Sunspring reveal a glimpse at essentially inhuman narrative. Ultimately, this talk asks whether we laugh at Sunspring because we realize we are only “halfway there” in our AI technology or whether AI generated narratives may be suggesting a rigid logic.
Early twentieth-century avant-garde art shifted from an ethos of art for art’s sake to art as liv... more Early twentieth-century avant-garde art shifted from an ethos of art for art’s sake to art as lived experience and revolutionary gesture. Dada, for example, was motivated by disgust and the quintessential Dadaist poem is that which is, rather than inspired by a spontaneous overflow of pathos, aleatorically assembled from small bits of text. Not only does this approach to poetry change a life, it also responds to changes in Modern life. Yet, this reimagining of the empirical self as an “automated self” proves to be a challenging consideration to artistic praxis to this day. From William S. Burroughs’ and Brion Gysin’s “cut-ups” in the 1950s and 1960s, to the cut-ups of Kathy Acker and Steward Home in the 1980s and 1990s, to Paul D. Miller’s and Jeff Noon’s remix fiction, the shift towards a paradoxical poetic identity that is both constituted from outside yet re-constructible through practice proves to be of long-lasting interest. These literary practices have their parallel in music. John Cage composed aleatoric music and Iannis Xenakis developed the complex process called granular synthesis whereby a recording is split into tiny clips (called grains) and reassembled in a complex algorithmic pattern determined by mathematical processes, not by culture or language. While Xenakis’ technique originated in analogue technology, digital audio makes this process accessible and seemingly unlimited. Just as the Dadaists captured the process of random reassembling as an act of political resistance, the digital era demands that we either, to borrow Douglas Rushkoff’s dictum, learn to program or be programmed. This talk will consider the process of granular synthesis as a way of confronting algorithmic automation; the unpredictable results of this process are descriptive of the way we experience the unpredictability of the present and, yet, a means by which we can discover surprising instances of poetic insight. We will present audio clips that demonstrate granular synthesis in the work of our own music project, Wormwood. Finally, we will discuss how granular synthesis can affect composition and lyricism through a paradoxical engagement with artistic autonomy and algorithmic automation.
In 1979, Ridley Scott’s groundbreaking horror film Alien was accompanied by the dramatic tagline ... more In 1979, Ridley Scott’s groundbreaking horror film Alien was accompanied by the dramatic tagline “In space no one can hear you scream.” A few decades earlier, many popular exotica musicians, turning their attention away from far off islands and smoldering volcanoes, became fascinated with a more distant other place: outer space. Space exotica came to represent an ambivalent sentiment: one of both familiar comfort and profound existential isolation. In his landmark book, Mondo Exotica (2008), Francesco Adinolfi writes that “space sound, like exotica, had a tendency to comfort listeners and suggest harmony and order” and that “musicians were asked to evoke an outer space that, though thick with presumably threatening noises and sonic perversions, would turn out to be innocuous, thanks to immediately recognizable melodies and musical themes” (Adinolfi 146). While Adinolfi privileges the comfort associated with this phase, the “threatening noises and sonic perversions” may prove less innocuous than assumed. The genre may serve to quell Cold War anxieties of spy satellites and intercontinental ballistic missiles, yet it also reveals a less physical and more philosophical menace: that outer space, unlike exotic islands, is radically inhuman. So, space exotica may ask: how might we know something outside of ourselves? A recent movement in philosophy which is neither typically analytical nor Continental in its gesture, Speculative Realism, may allow us to think about that which is not human: that which is “posited...as anterior to every form of human relation to the world” (Meillassoux 10). Thus space exotica draws attention to the Anthropocene Epoch: that brief moment in cosmic history that is marked by human activity. At once familiar and close to home, the quirky genre asks what is outside: a move away from the anthropocentric to a recognition of the imitations of the Anthropocene. From Les Baxter’s Music out of the Moon (1949) and Space Escapade (1957) to Arthur Ferrante and Louis Teicher’s more technologically experimental Soundproof (1956) and Blast Off! (1959) to NASA’s Golden Voyager Records (1977) and the NASA Soundcloud page, this paper considers how space exotica is as much about what we are and what we share as it is about the inhuman reality and cosmic indifference--devoid even of threatening noises and sonic perversions--that outer space signifies on its own terms: the most profound asemic silence.
In his 2012 book Weird Realism: Lovecraft and Philosophy, Graham Harman suggests that, just as Hö... more In his 2012 book Weird Realism: Lovecraft and Philosophy, Graham Harman suggests that, just as Hölderlin was to Heidegger and Mallarmé was to Derrida, H.P. Lovecraft is the literary muse of the Speculative Realist philosophers because “the greatness of Lovecraft even pertains to more than the literary world, since it brushes against several of the most crucial philosophical themes of our time” (Harman Weird Realism 10). Speculative Realism is not a unified school but it does operate as an umbrella term that unites four otherwise incompatible theorists: Harman’s object-oriented ontology, Quentin Meillassoux’s speculative materialism, Ray Brassier’s nihilism, and the cyber-vitalism of Ian Hamilton Grant. What connects these thinkers is that they unite realism and speculation. Realism, here, is a rejection of the Kantian legacy that turns philosophy inward rejecting the possibility of examining things in themselves. Speculation rejects the naïve realism that claims knowledge of the commonplace things outside the mind and instead attests to an inarticulate, ineffable “weird reality” that bares little resemblance to our everyday experience. The speculative realists express a particular interest in horror, sf, and fantastic literature because of the special quality of unknowing, awe, and terror these modes incite; this special quality is indicative of how we might respond to reality out there. In other words, these texts offer speculations on reality. Brassier, for example, wrote the foreword to Thomas Ligotti’s non-fiction book defending nihilism and anti-natalism The Conspiracy against the Human Race (2010) remarking that the very locale of knowledge, the living subject, is “malignantly useless” and that “Ligotti knows full well, if living is lying, then even telling the truth about life’s lie will be a sublimated lie” (Brassier 10). Meillassoux’s 2015 essay “Science Fiction and Extro-Science Fiction” is an extended reading of Asimov’s “The Billiard Ball” and introduces the concept of extro-science fiction suggesting that “the guiding question of extro-science fiction is: what should a world be, what should a world resemble, so that it is in principle inaccessible to a scientific knowledge, so that it cannot be established as the object of a natural science” (Meillassoux 5-6). In other words, in the context of literature, each thinker is concerned with the possibilities of representation that expresses phenomena and, possibly, the radically unusual non-human noumena of the world out there. This paper will consider the prospects and setbacks of this methodology as a lens through which to read sf and fantasy literature. How can, for example, the speculative realist thinkers offer productive points of entry into examinations of Reza Negarestani’s Cyclonopedia (2008), Samuel Delany’s Dhalgren (1975), and the work of Thomas Ligotti and Michel Houellebecq? Alternatively, texts like Toni Morrison’s Beloved (1987), Octavia Butler’s Kindred (1979), and the work of Samuel Beckett and Jeff Noon, for example, object to the very possibility of representing a thing-in-itself and thus offer instances of humility that directly challenge the claims of speculative realism. Ultimately, this paper will consider how speculative realism invigorates and interrogates the sense of awe and wonder in the very notion of representation in sf and fantastic literature.
With the popularization of stereo in the 1950s and 1960s, popular Western composers engaged with ... more With the popularization of stereo in the 1950s and 1960s, popular Western composers engaged with the potentialities of new recording media to experiment with aural depth and distance as a means of simulating other worlds. These experiments reflect the medium itself in their content: a desire for movement, speed, an obsession with the cultural other, with alternatives. The genre, retrospectively dubbed “exotica,” comes to dominate cocktail parties, tiki bars, bachelor pads, and suburban living rooms as the sounds of escape and sexual liberation. Certainly, the other evoked by this music—notably practiced by Martin Denny, Yma Sumac, Arthur Lyman, Korla Pandit, and Les Baxter—is anesthetized. The genre’s appeal is varied: the pleasurable commodification of leisure, a means of quelling the anxieties of nuclear annihilation, alternatives to Judeo-Christian sexual ethics, a desire for an imagined other that logically approximates the listener. Reflexively concerned with audio technology itself, exotica expanded its focus from the foreign destinations of an imagined Earth to alternate “Earths” altogether. With this shift, American composer Les Baxter released his strange and comical science fictional album Space Escapade (1958). Here, “we can close our eyes and dream of the future, wondering whether a starlit planet might soon replace a tropical island” (Baxter “Booklet” Space Escapade). Baxter’s music simultaneously intimates the outer space of the space race, spy satellites of the Cold War, the aural spatiality of stereo, and the inner space of inert tourism; that is a series of topological divisions approaching zero. The domestic armchair becomes, as Francesco Adinolfi writes, a “form of unusual spaceship from which to reach out and…grab hold of multicolored cocktails, seemingly alien but truly very close to home and reassuring” (Adinolfi 145). Like the anesthetization of the exotic other, Space Escapade demonstrates a topological compression.
In this sense, Baxter’s record expresses Paul Virilio’s concept of “polar inertia,” that “new form of sedentariness [that] is the active tendency in technology…It’s no longer a sedentariness of non-movement, it’s the opposite,” that of pure speed (Virilio Pure War 69). The catch, however, is that the non-movement of polar inertia is, in fact, a circular movement. A modern traveler goes around “the world as fast as possible without going anywhere;” an “empty voyage, a voyage without destination, a circular voyage” (69). Indeed, it is a voyage that psychically and physically scrutinizes immediacy; it is a “desire for inertia, desire for ubiquity, instantaneousness” (69). Ultimately, Baxter’s music operates as a proxy for this desire: the quest for instantaneousness. The humorous kinetics of Space Escapade serve the desire for immediate imperialism, relief from nuclear threat, and a delusional quest for both the singularity of motion and the compression of inner/outer space whereby the listener escapes the past, present, and future of modernity. Yet, in Virilio’s thinking, every technology—including the extension of the listener into sound vibrations—has embedded within itself a corresponding accident: an ambient self-destruct. In this case, the listener of Baxter’s music is ultimately blasted from inner space to non-space. Amusing as it is disquieting, Space Escapade proves complex: a work that is deeply compassionate as it unveils processes underlying the logic of lived modernity.
The work of Japanese novelist Kenji Siratori poses the reader with a contentious question: at wha... more The work of Japanese novelist Kenji Siratori poses the reader with a contentious question: at what point does literary experimentalism transcend the circumference of literacy? Siratori’s Blood Electric (2002), evokes “the coming to consciousness of an artificial intelligence” via “a devastating loop of language” (Blood Electric book jacket). Indeed, Blood Electric, is a conflation of computer code with anatomical, medical, and technological language. So, Siratori’s fiction is generically cyberpunk; yet, extreme in both form and content. Siratori’s writing evokes Joyce’s Finnegans Wake and the cut-up experiments of William S. Burroughs thus placing Siratori along an experimental trajectory. However, while the work of Joyce is semantically fecund and Burroughs wishes to reveal the underlying conspiracy of language, Siratori moves away from reconceptualizing meaning towards a disorienting, often violent, affect. The emotional experience of “reading” Blood Electric demonstrates literary meaninglessness as an analogue to the consumer’s relationship with information technology. Blood Electric considers the biases of information technology in an analogous manner that Joyce and Burroughs ask about the biases of language. Here, agency and literacy are conflated in an intense way: if we are unable to acknowledge the biases of information technology, we are incapable of possessing agency in late-capitalism. American media theorist Douglas Rushkoff recently suggested that “Facebook is set up to make us think of ourselves in terms of our ‘likes’ and an iPad is set up to make us start paying for media and stop producing it ourselves.” Amidst all the garbled nonsense of Blood Electric, Siratori’s metaphor is as lucid as it is timely: the anxiety of reading asemic cyberpunk is analogous to the consumer’s illiteracy regarding programming and information technology. As literary experimentation is pushed to absolute limits, new languages of code and programming suggest the dawn of new arts.
A reading of Ballard's final four novels as closed systems from within and without both mind and ... more A reading of Ballard's final four novels as closed systems from within and without both mind and time.
In a 2006 interview with Travis Elborough, J.G. Ballard suggests that he sees his role as a novel... more In a 2006 interview with Travis Elborough, J.G. Ballard suggests that he sees his role as a novelist as an investigator or a scout who is sent ahead to see whether or not the water is drinkable. Ballard is one of the most discerning English language authors of the 20th and 21st centuries. He came to prominence in the 1960s with his catastrophe novels that are, today, remarkably prescient with their extrapolations on the actuality of climate change. In the 1970s, Ballard’s formally experimental novels examined the psychopathologies of mass media by looking at the surreal combinations of eroticism, death, technology, and violence. His final novels consider the logical conclusion of closed communities and the coming of techno-feudalism and consumer fascism as that which may replace liberal democracy. As varied as these theses may seem, Ballard’s career as a writer and thinker is a kind of variations on a theme: that the protagonist is constituted by something that is at once internally latent yet outwardly constitutive and, in complicated ways, determinist. Ballard’s science fiction was one of inner space rather than outer space. Perhaps this is why the central thesis of Ballard’s work should lend itself seamlessly to online bots. Ballard’s fiction is characteristically set in car parks, hospital lobbies, suburbs, motorways and underpasses, shopping malls, business parks, airports, and luxury high-rises. Each of these settings exemplify anthropologist Marc Augé’s conception of “non-places”: supermodern deluges of meaning, contagiously viral, outside of time, and purely functional. Ballard’s concerns are physical, psychological, and civic. Ballard’s dedication to inner-space lends itself to Mike Bosnall’s investigation into the ultimate non-space: the internet. For Ballard, supermodern non-spaces signify the social architecture that can cope with zero to a million decimals; the internet only amplifies and accelerates this process. Bonsall’s Ballardian TwitterBots are an amusing and insightful extension of Ballard’s central thesis (that the psyche is both constitutive and constituted by the psychopathology of non-place environments) through automated means. Bosnall’s three Ballard TwitterBots are @JGB_Sentences, @Crash_Cutup, and @New_Ballard. The first, @JGB_Sentences, is the simplest and consists of a Twitter-length sentence, selected from forty thousand elements of Ballard text, and posted once every 12 hours. The second, @Crash_Cutup, is more complex. Bonsall took each sentence in Ballard’s infamous 1973 novel Crash and split each sentence into three parts (beginning, middle, and end) in an excel spreadsheet. The bot randomly organizes selections from the three columns resulting in a new Ballardian sentence. Bosnall suggests that Ballard is the original author but that he has acted as the collagist. Finally, @New_Ballard uses a simple Markov chain model that determines which word is most likely to come next in the order of text. A Markov chain is a relatively simple way of statistically modelling stochastic patterns based on what appeared before in a sequence. The results of these bots are remarkable as they demonstrate an incremental shift towards supermodern psychopathy: from didactic sentences, to a digitally generated sentence, to fully surreal automated syntax. Ballard’s prose is always highly calculated and articulate; Bonsall’s BallardBots achieve this proceduralism to a new inhuman degree. Indeed, Bonsall’s TwitterBots may act as the scouts sent ahead--not into shopping malls, airports, or luxury high-rises--but onto the internet to see how that future may unfold according to an inhuman psychopathology of algorithmic culture.
Review: Brian Willems' _Speculative Realism and Science Fiction_. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University... more Review: Brian Willems' _Speculative Realism and Science Fiction_. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2017. 240pp. ISBN 9781474422703.
In the early twentieth century, the Dadaists protested against art, nationalism, the individual s... more In the early twentieth century, the Dadaists protested against art, nationalism, the individual subject, and technologized war. With their automatic anti-art and cultural disruptiveness, Dadaists sought to “signify no thing.” Today, data also operates autonomously. However, rather than dismantling tradition, data organizes, selects, combines, quantifies, and simplifies the complexity of actuality. Like Dada, data also signifies nothing. While Dadaists protest with purpose, data proceeds without intention. The individual in the early twentieth century agonizes over the alienation from daily life and the fear of being converted into a cog in a machine. Today, however, the individual in twenty-first-century supermodernity merges, not with large industrial machinery, but with the processual and procedural logic of programming with innocuous ease. Both exclude human agency from self-narration but to differing degrees of abstraction. Examining the work of B.R. Yeager, Samuel Beckett, Jeff Noon, Kenji Siratori, Mike Bonsall, Allison Parrish, and narratives written by artificial intelligence, Wenaus considers the threshold of sensible narration and the effects that the shift from a culture of language to a culture of digital code has on lived experience. While data offers a closed system, Dadaist literature of exclusion, he suggests, promises a future of open, hyper-contingent, unprescribed alternatives for self-narration.
Andrew Wenaus’s ambitious monograph on avant-garde literature in the digital age explores algorithmic culture with remarkable scope and insight. Eclipsing the postmodern with the supermodern, Wenaus effectively uses a mosaic approach to study a range of canonical, fringe, and interstitial texts, theorizing how we are accelerating towards a thoroughly Ballardian future in which the technologies of Absurdity and Inevitability will have their way with us. Disarming, provocative, and edifying, The Literature of Exclusion breaks new ground and speaks the language of multiple scholarly disciplines.
— David H. Wilson, professor of English, Wright State University
This illuminating monograph captures the condition of hypermodern writing which takes narrative to the limits of aesthetic pleasure and traditional logic. Based on the study of analogue and digital experiments in algorithmic poetics—from gloomy absurdists such as Beckett to glitch visionaries such as Siratori—The Literature of Exclusion unravels the alienating potential of subject-less structures of the literary practice. Among many publications that challenge the notions around experimental writing, this book offers an affirmative insight into what the author calls “Dada Dataism” and its related sublime.
— Ania Malinowska, Professor in Cultural and Media Studies, University of Silesia
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In this sense, Baxter’s record expresses Paul Virilio’s concept of “polar inertia,” that “new form of sedentariness [that] is the active tendency in technology…It’s no longer a sedentariness of non-movement, it’s the opposite,” that of pure speed (Virilio Pure War 69). The catch, however, is that the non-movement of polar inertia is, in fact, a circular movement. A modern traveler goes around “the world as fast as possible without going anywhere;” an “empty voyage, a voyage without destination, a circular voyage” (69). Indeed, it is a voyage that psychically and physically scrutinizes immediacy; it is a “desire for inertia, desire for ubiquity, instantaneousness” (69). Ultimately, Baxter’s music operates as a proxy for this desire: the quest for instantaneousness. The humorous kinetics of Space Escapade serve the desire for immediate imperialism, relief from nuclear threat, and a delusional quest for both the singularity of motion and the compression of inner/outer space whereby the listener escapes the past, present, and future of modernity. Yet, in Virilio’s thinking, every technology—including the extension of the listener into sound vibrations—has embedded within itself a corresponding accident: an ambient self-destruct. In this case, the listener of Baxter’s music is ultimately blasted from inner space to non-space. Amusing as it is disquieting, Space Escapade proves complex: a work that is deeply compassionate as it unveils processes underlying the logic of lived modernity.
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Andrew Wenaus’s ambitious monograph on avant-garde literature in the digital age explores algorithmic culture with remarkable scope and insight. Eclipsing the postmodern with the supermodern, Wenaus effectively uses a mosaic approach to study a range of canonical, fringe, and interstitial texts, theorizing how we are accelerating towards a thoroughly Ballardian future in which the technologies of Absurdity and Inevitability will have their way with us. Disarming, provocative, and edifying, The Literature of Exclusion breaks new ground and speaks the language of multiple scholarly disciplines.
— David H. Wilson, professor of English, Wright State University
This illuminating monograph captures the condition of hypermodern writing which takes narrative to the limits of aesthetic pleasure and traditional logic. Based on the study of analogue and digital experiments in algorithmic poetics—from gloomy absurdists such as Beckett to glitch visionaries such as Siratori—The Literature of Exclusion unravels the alienating potential of subject-less structures of the literary practice. Among many publications that challenge the notions around experimental writing, this book offers an affirmative insight into what the author calls “Dada Dataism” and its related sublime.
— Ania Malinowska, Professor in Cultural and Media Studies, University of Silesia