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“Cause Timing is Money and Money is Time”. Six Theses on Monetary Post Humanism in the Digital Age
In his essay ‘Ego’ (2013), Frank Schirrmacher describes how, by means of a digitalized global marketing strategy, a virtual double of the human subject is installed: the subject as agent or player in the market, represented in data collections and rendered predictable in game-theoretical data analysis. Game theory has failed to predict the behavior of real-world people; yet, in their virtual second existence, the subject is forced into a game-theoretical predictability. In recent big data technology, the subject’s double (or “number two”, as Schirrmacher calls it) is becoming more and more powerful, with nearly every action of a person immediately becoming an action embedded in the big game of the virtual market – a market that in turn becomes more and more game-theoretical in its ways of functioning.
Alvaro Seica - 03.02.2015 - 15:53
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Posthumanism and Electronic Literature
Posthumanism, according to Cary Wolfe, "names a historical moment in which the decentering of the human by its imbrication in technical, medical, informatic, and economic networks is increasingly impossible to ignore" (xv-xvi). This conference paper brings the framework of posthumanist philosophy to bear on the field of electronic literature, at a critical moment in time wherein our conception of the human, and of literature, are fundamentally questioned through digital technology. I argue that humanist philosophy is explicitly tied to the rise of print literature, via Elizabeth Eisenstein (1979), while posthumanism is linked with digital media (Wolfe 2010) and, by extension, electronic literature. Furthermore, posthumanism interrogates assumptions of autonomy and subjectivity inherited from humanism, and via cybernetics articulates an image of the human as another information-processing machine. Electronic literature's reliance and amalgamation of natural and artificial languages (most noticeable in “codework”) reflects the posthumanist critique of the supposed binaries between human and machine.
Thor Baukhol Madsen - 17.02.2015 - 16:02
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Modes of production and reception of electronic literature in Latin America. An analysis of “Tierra de extracción” from Doménico Chiappe and Andreas Meier
The question of what are the aesthetic- politics of electronic literature in Latin America, constitutes the point of departure of this research. In this paper I aim to discuss about this issue regarding the electronic novel “Tierra de extracción” from Doménico Chiappe and Andreas Meier. Using macromedia director, this polyphonic novel was presented to the public for the first time in 2000 and it is available on internet since 2007. It was included in the 2010 second volume of electronic literature presented by the Electronic Literature Organization, in the category of multilingual or non-English narratives. The analysis considers two dimensions, the modes of production of electronic texts and its forms of reception. The first dimension — production— is related to the decisions of the authors about aesthetics, levels of interaction/participation of the readers and technologies used to produce the texts. The second dimension — reception — refers to two “sub-dimensions”. The first one is the creation of alternative ways of distribution/circulation of the texts (mainly internet).
Hannah Ackermans - 11.02.2016 - 17:36
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Cling-Clang-Cornelius: Digital Sound Poetry as Embodied Posthumanism
Starting from the problematic gap between the unicity of the human voice and the socio-cultural variables that are unavoidably attached to her expressions, this presentation proposes the phenomenon of ‘sound poetry’ as paradigmatic bridge between a biological reality and its posthuman condition. The underlying reasoning harks back to media artist and philosopher Norie Neumark’s remark that sound poetry like no other mode of artistic expression “stimulates reflection on the uncanny and complicated relation between embodiment, alterity, and signification” (2010). Most notably the appropriation and – literal – embodiment of electronic technologies in digital sound poetry has recently yielded a new dynamic to the performativity of poetic composition. With today’s technical possibility to sample and mediate minimal acoustic nuances in the here-and-now we are allowed a glimpse into the supplement of meaning generated by the meeting between text/script and voice/sound. Such post-human amplification of an intrinsically arch-human act accordingly finds its broader relevance broadside conventional aesthetic standards.
Carlos Muñoz - 03.10.2018 - 15:57
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Digital Sound Poetry: Peripheral Platform for Posthuman Performativity
According to Steve McCaffery (1998), sound poetry’s primal goal concerns “the liberation and promotion of phonetic and sub-phonetic features to language to the state of a materia prima for creative, subversive endeavors.” (163). Accordingly, it thrives on an embodied conflict between expectation and interpretation as it allows communicative ‘uptake’ while problematizing the communicative ‘relation.’ Or, as Brandon LaBelle (2010) argued, “sound poetry yearns for language by rupturing the very coherence of it.” The ‘techniques’ thereby employed vary widely: mounting idiosyncratic language and notational systems, performing spontaneous and improvised poetical oralities, fooling with the performer’s body to rupture the ordered movements of vocality, or indeed by appropriating new technologies and digital devices in order to disassemble, reconfigure, and ‘cobble together’ personal or imported sounds and utterances.
Vian Rasheed - 12.11.2019 - 03:47
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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
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Fictionality in Critical Posthumanism: Why some Philosophies Need Genres of Invention
This paper explores the pervasive presence of literature, film, speculation, fabulation, and other genres of invention in the theoretical writings also known as “critical posthumanism.” Identifying a set of different appropriations of fictional discourse in theoretical work by, amongst others, Astrida Niemanis, Stacy Alaimo, Rebekah Sheldon, Donna Haraway, and Jane Bennett, the paper asks why theorists united by a common interest in “getting real”, to use Karen Barad’s phrase (1998), often turn to a type of discourse that is defined precisely by not committing itself to reality. What, in other words, do genres and rhetorical devices that deliberately and explicitly make stuff up allow thinkers within critical posthumanism to do that traditional academic styles of writing do not?
Cecilie Klingenberg - 24.02.2021 - 15:01
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Vegetable thought in Edgar Pêra’s Lisbon Revisited
Perhaps the most mysterious of Fernando Pessoa’s heteronymic exudations, Bernardo Soares is the author of the Book of Disquiet, an unparalleled artistic endeavour which was first published only many years after Pessoa’s disappearance. In one of the fragments that became part of the intricate composition of this “book,” Soares asks such questions as the following: “What do I know about the difference between a tree and a dream? I can touch the tree; I know that I dream.” It was through the idea of vegetable tangibility that the Portuguese film director and multi-artist Edgar Pêra made a film out of the words of one other of Pessoa’s texts – Lisbon Revisited (2014), which stemmed from the heteronymic incarnation of Álvaro de Campos. In Campos’s poem, the homonymous “Lisbon Revisited” (1923), the poet disowns metaphysics, appealing instead to the affirmation of the “empty and perfect truth” of the sky, of the river, and of the cityscape of Lisbon.
Cecilie Klingenberg - 24.02.2021 - 15:23
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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
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Making language: re-writing and control in algorithmic poetics
Considering the effects of machine learning in aesthetic practices, the aim of this presentation is to discuss strategies for authorial inscription and the autonomy of literary writers in relation to programmable writing tools.
In a first moment I will apply David Nickel's notion of "proxy writer" (2013) to algorithmic writing agents in order to characterize these agents in what concerns their relative autonomy and place within human writing practices, and argue that digital writing environments and tools have been gradually becoming more alienated from the writer's control. Vilém Flusser's notion of "functionary" will be applied to computational writing practices in order to situate these in the broader context of writing media.
In a second moment I will discuss the writing strategies present in Jhave's ReRites (2017-18) in order to assess how such strategies cope with the high level of autonomy of neural-networks in text-generation, and how they function as a necessary precondition for literary inscription on a highly mediated writing space.
Cecilie Klingenberg - 24.02.2021 - 16:07
