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.
Author(s): Andrew C. Wenaus
Edition: 1
Publisher: Lexington Books | The Rowman & Littlefield Publishing
Year: 2021
Language: English
Commentary: TruePDF
Pages: 325
Tags: Literature And The Internet; Hypertext Literature: History And Criticism; Literature, Experimental: 21st Century: History And Criticism
Cover
Half Title
Title Page
Copyright Page
Dedication
Contents
Acknowledgments
Introduction: The Literature of Exclusion
Where Word Breaks Off: Language, Finance, and Automated Signification
Digital Modernism
Digital Supermodernism: Dataism, Psychopolitics, and Neuro-totalitarianism
The Voice of the Unknown: Dada and the Superidiot
Power Is All about Making Things Easy: Neuro-totalitarianism and Poiesis
The Apparatus Turned Human: AI and Self-Narration
The Chapters
Notes
Chapter 1: Metaphor and Metanoia: Linguistic Transfer, Cognitive Transformation, and Exclusion
The Flower’s Coleridge: Platonism and Cognitive Linguistics
Coleridge’s Flower: Phenomenological Engagement
Psycho-ecology
Notes
Chapter 2: The Radical Poetics of Impersonality: The Posthuman, the Inhuman, and Dada
Dada and the Radical Poetics of Impersonality
Notes
Chapter 3: The Divine Neutrality of the Apparatus: The Self-Reflexive Conceptual Horror of B. R. Yeager
Notes
Chapter 4: “Something Is Taking Its Course”: Zero-Player Games, Proceduralism, and Samuel Beckett’s Endgame
Procedure without Intention
Actants and Pataphysics: Imagining Exclusion
Endgame, Experimentation, and Scientific Narrative: Experiment without Experimenter
Zero-Player Games and Proceduralism: Endgame as Automaton
Simulation Fever: Endgame as Zero-Player Simulation
Thinking Exclusion: Endgame, Flusser, and Information Illiteracy
Notes
Chapter 5: Blossoming Ghost: Memetic Engineering, Hauntology, and Metamorphiction in Jeff Noon’s Falling Out of Cars
Impersonal Memetic Engineering and Metamorphiction
Hauntology and the Specter of the Novel
The Spectrality of Epistolary Writing and the Chaotics of Memory
Characters as Metasignals and Writing Pattern from Randomness
The Chaotics of Memory, Narcosis, and Contingent Consolation
Notes
Chapter 6: Swarm Annihilation and Supermodern Transcendence: Chaotics, Granular Synthesis, and the Glitch Poetics of Kenji Siratori
Glitching the English Language
Mavo in Japan
Cyberpunk in extremis and the Japanese Avant-Garde
Electronic Music, Granular Synthesis, and Digital Cut-Ups
Siratori, Antinationalism, and the Western Avant-Garde
Glitching the Nervous System
Swarm Annihilation
Notes
Chapter 7: The Electronic Literature of Exclusion and Autopoiesis: Obsession and Fictionalism
Coping with Zero to a Million Decimals: Mike Bonsall’s J. G. Ballard Twitter Bots, Autopoiesis, and Functionalist Psychopathology
Nothing Is Going to Be a Thing: Benjamin’s Sunspring, Mathematical Fictionalism, and AI Narrative
Notes
Chapter 8: The Electronic Literature of Exclusion and Allopoiesis: Asemic Word Processing, Technical Images, and Allison Parrish’s Ahe Thd Yearidy Ti Isa
Notes
Conclusion: Extro-Science Fiction, Hyper-Contingent Literatures of Exclusion, and Unthinkable Thought
Narrating Contingency with Noise
Factiality, Probability, and Hyper-Chaos: Extro-Science Fiction and Hyper-contingent Literatures of Exclusion
Notes
Bibliography
Index
About the Author
