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1. The Politics of Web Materiality: Making Electronic Literature in the Capitalocene

   We are on the brink of planetary catastrophe. Environmental, political, health and humanitarian crises have infused the zeitgeist of the Anthropocene with a sense of urgency (Crutzen and Stoermer 2000). Human activity has been placed in opposition (or as an add-on) to Nature, participating in a dialectical discourse that, like the binaries of sexism, racism, or even Eurocentrism, points directly to the violence, inequality and oppression of the modern world (Moore 2016). As these relate to climate and political change, the Anthropocene argument presents the exploitation and accumulation of capital as conterminous to human nature and progress.

   Accumulation, however, is not only productive, but necrotic (McBrien 2016), in the sense that it unfolds a slow violence sustained by reduction or, perhaps, extinction: the reduction of cultures, languages and peoples; as well as the extinction of the Earth through depletion of resources. If accumulation is natural to us, then so are reduction and extinction.

   Cecilie Klingenberg - 24.02.2021 - 14:40

2. Writing as collective assemblages in the age of (post)digital capitalism, or de-colonizing e-literature in the minor key.

   In my proposition, I would like to explore the notion of the minor (Deleuze and Guattari, 1986), employed here as a theoretical tool allowing for a critical inquiry into multifarious e-literary post-internet practices, popularly referred to as Third-Generation E-Literature (Flores, 2019), and accompanied by third-wave e-literature scholarship (Ensslin et al., 2020). However, I am going to build on this notion following its recent repurposing by Anne Sauvagnargues (as the minor style) (Sauvagnargues, 2016) and Erin Manning (as the minor gesture) (Manning, 2016). Kathi Inman Berens aptly remarks (Berens, 2020) that de-colonization of e-literature requires multiplicity of perspectives, as it entails not only cultural hegemonies operating along geographical, ethnic and racial axes and following the set of distinctions shaped by modernist aesthetics, but it also needs to address widespread domination of Big Tech companies shaping the popular internet platforms, programming solutions and users' practices.

   Cecilie Klingenberg - 24.02.2021 - 15:57

3. ‘Doing e-lit’ in print: Plus-Human Codes and the (re)Turn to the Bookbound

   “He may be a superdecoder or a superspy but he’s sort of neutral, though not quite like a machine, more like he’d, sort of, come and, reversed all our, traditional, oppositions, and questioned, all our, certainties”, or so Zab falteringly describes the Martian boulder-cum-supercomputer that has crash-landed in a disused Cornish mine.

   Christine Brooke-Rose’s 1986 novel, Xorandor, is remarkable as much for its eponymous radioactive-waste-guzzling, double-crossing rock, as for being partially narrated in the programming language, Poccom 3. Invented by siblings, Jip and Zab, first as a kind of idioglossia and then as a lingua franca for communicating with Xorandor, Poccom 3 is rather like the indeterminate rock: its presence in the text requires a supreme effort of decoding to begin with, becomes increasingly naturalized with exposure, but consistently questions all our certainties about the language of literature.

   Cecilie Klingenberg - 26.02.2021 - 14:11