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[…]metrics are carefully designed to discern spending habits and time allocation. World views and critical evaluations are precisely what go missing in corporatized social media – not just from the uncritical inclusion of any and all literary writing in scholarly databases tagged for categorical distribution, but in the “digital humanities” generally, a scholarly emergence(y) that, for all of its “infinite ungraspable” canons of creative and scholarly work has yet to establish, in academia anything approaching a widely shared curriculum for literary studies of born digital writing and scholarship. In 2014, a “decade-plus” into “the emergence of digital humanities (DH),” David […]
[…]breakdown of that chain of causality that brings forth text and images through the mechanism of code. By having code literally erase itself (more accurately, by having the PHP script erase or corrupt the corresponding HTML file) in response to user interaction, Tisselli precludes this digital erasure of word for action, making code, in its full, material thingness, apparent to its users. Viewing the works today and being presented the narrative of their respective processes of breakdown in this way obliges the viewer to confront obsolescence – the gradual wearing down of each work’s instrumental functionality – in a way […]
[…]Practice, vol. 14, no. 2 (2013): 147-160. Nacher, Anna. “Migrating Stories: Moving across the Code/Spaces of our Time”, Hyperrhiz: New Media Cultures, special issue “Other Codes / Cóid Eile”, no. 20 (2019). http://hyperrhiz.io/hyperrhiz20/. Accessed 30 Sep 2019. O’Sullivan, James. “Electronic Literature in Ireland.” Electronic Book Review, 11 April 2018. https://electronicbookreview.com/essay/electronic-literature-in-ireland/. Accessed 10 Jul 2019. O’Sullivan, James, Órla Murphy, and Shawn Day. “The Emergence of the Digital Humanities in Ireland.” Breac: A Digital Journal of Irish Studies, 7 Oct 2015. https://breac.nd.edu/articles/the-emergence-of-the-digital-humanities-in-ireland/. Accessed 10 Jul 2020. O’Toole, Fintan. The Lie of the Land: Irish Identities. Verso, 1997. Pagel, Walter. “The Paracelsian Elias Artista […]
[…]of research. DS: Canada has many research resources and labs dedicated to digital arts, media studies, and digital literary studies, including Caitlin Fisher’s Augmented Reality Lab in Toronto, Brian Greenspan’s HyperLab in Ottawa, Karis Shearer’s AMP Lab in Kelowna, Marcel O’Gorman’s Critical Media Lab in Waterloo, and your own NT2 Lab in Montréal. Are there other Canadian labs or resources you’d like to foreground in particular? BG: I think we could add to this list of major projects, the Ex Situ Laboratory, led by René Audet at Université Laval, which focuses on digital literature and culture, as well as on […]
[…]travels go from allusions to NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center (a research center that studies the Earth, the sun, the solar system and the universe, which was built in memory of physicist Dr. Robert Hutchings Goddard), to Marina Vlady’s scene shots and glimpses of the city of Paris in “Two or three things that I know about her.” Resembling the representation of Hydra’s twisting snake in the sky, the reader is caught in the twists of language that revolve within the constellations imaginaries: Godard? Goddard? God? Art? The process of “deconstructing” HYA shows that the voices of Wittgenstein, Derrida, Godard, […]
[…]or “commented upon” Carpenter’s work, but it is very rare that a literary scholar does the critical work of close reading it. Refreshingly, Watts does indeed give Carpenter’s work the critical attention it deserves, providing astute close reading and literary analysis throughout. Watts’s analytical approach to Entre Ville reveals, too, the strangeness of the critical neglect of new media writing in Canada because Entre Ville, like so many electronic literary works, is “specially positioned to explore the traditionalism inherent in mainstream conceptions of literature, literary culture, and cultural production–including most especially parallels between Montreal literature and new-media literature.” That mediated […]
[…]that, I [wondered]: what would experimental poets of the [nineteen] twenties be doing? They’d be working in hypertext, they’d be working in these areas. Then there was kind of no turning back. I thought electronic literature is actually sort of the end game for where all of that was going. It was super fun! I’ve written about it elsewhere, but the dissertation itself I was enormously proud of. Writing it changed me. Image from Fisher’s dissertation. Source: Caitlin Fisher. There were really no readers for it at the time I produced it. It wasn’t even archived. The electronic literature piece […]
[…]projects. Its concerns range from autoethnography to close reading to something like critical code studies, from the abstractions of Wallace Stevens to the polychrome delights of “trash spinning.” It is both a critical study and a guide to creative practice. The mixed nature of the work flows from our subject, which is both a tool for making and a made thing. Twine is an unlikely proposition—a software platform crafted entirely by volunteers, some of whom have never met in person, and a worldwide community of creators who explore and expand the platform. To understand this phenomenon, we do a kind […]
[…]Hi, everyone. I’m Jin Sol, I’m also a Co-Editor on the special issue of tdr and ebr, “Critical Making, Critical Design”. I am currently going into my fifth year of the PhD at the University of Waterloo. I’m in the department of English and I am studying the cross sections of critical race theory and digital photography. LL: Cool. Thank you, Jin Sol. So let’s start off with a land acknowledgement. So based in [00:01:00] Canada, the electronic book review would like to acknowledge that this land is made up of more than 630 First Nations communities representing more than […]
[…]systems and other materials—entangling cameras, satellites, drones, web graphics, esoteric code, academic writing, and the printed codex, exploring what their contingent exchanges can reveal about the structures, dynamics, and possibilities of sensing across the contemporary environment. The hybrid art-texts generated by these activities are thus better understood in light of their complex origins, deriving their creative and critical force as much by encouraging reflection on these varied aspects and processes, as the actual markings left behind. Landform An artistic gesture that I am presently exploring is the use of image generating technologies for producing creative textual outcomes. Specifically, I am […]
[…]Scott and Roderick Coover. “Addressing Significant Societal Challenges Through Critical Digital Media”, Electronic Book Review, August 2, 2020, doi:10.7273/1ma1-pk87. Silva Pereira, Paulo. “Greening the Digital Muse: An Ecocritical Examination of Contemporary Digital Art and Literature”, Electronic Book Review, May 3, 2020, doi:10.7273/v30n-1a73. Svensson, Patrik. “The Landscape of Digital Humanities.” Digital Humanities Quarterly, vol.4, no.1, 2010. http://digitalhumanities.org/dhq/vol/4/1/000080/000080.html#drucker2009a T., Shanmugapriya and Nirmala Menon. “Infrastructure and Social Interaction: Situated Research Practices in Digital Humanities in India.” Digital Humanities Quarterly, vol. 14, no. 3, 2020. http://www.digitalhumanities.org/dhq/vol/14/3/000471/000471.html “Vision of Digital India.” Digital India. N.d. […]
[…]Søren Pold and Scott Rettberg. 2020. “E-lit Pandemics – Roundtable”. https://elmcip.net/critical-writing/e-lit-pandemics-roundtable Nacher, Anna, Søren Pold and Scott Rettberg. 2021. “COVID E-LIT: Digital Art from the Pandemic curatorial statement”. In Electronic Book Review. https://doi.org/10.7273/kehh-8c36 Newman, Jane O. & Hatch, Laura. 2013. “Panel 70 – Introduction. The Baroque as the Renaissance?”. In Mnemosyne: Meanderings through Aby Warburg’s Atlas. https://warburg.library.cornell.edu/image-group/panel-70-introduction-1-5 Parikka, Jussi. 2016. Digital contagions: A media archaeology of computer viruses. Second Edition. Peter Lang. Rettberg, Jill. 2021. “Speculative Interfaces: How Electronic Literature Uses the Interface to Make Us Think about Technology”. In Electronic Book Review. https://electronicbookreview.com/essay/speculative-interfaces-how-electronic-literature-uses-the-interface-to-make-us-think-about-technology/ Thacker, Eugene. 2004. Biomedia. Vol. 11. […]
[…]specifically coordinated) range of combinations that are bound within the artifact that is the code base. Similarly, the initial iteration of Montfort’s Taroko Gorge (2009), while it builds stanzas randomly in real time as the work runs in your browser, is also a bounded object whose entirety can be understood by examining its code. Or can it? A work like Taroko Gorge, as elegant as it is as a standalone work, has achieved widespread attention thanks to the wave of remixes that it has inspired. The ever-growing list includes works of varied quality, some of which could stand alone as […]
[…]How Did Public Health Guidance Get So Muddled?” NPR, 4 Aug 2020. Fuller, Matthew. Software Studies \ a lexicon. Cambridge: MIT Press, 2008. Grosser, Ben. The Endless Doomscroller, endlessdoomscroller.com. 2020. Hassan, Robert. The age of distraction: Reading, writing, and politics in a high-speed networked economy. New Brunswick, N.J.: Transaction Publishers. 2012. Hou Je Bek, Wilfried. “Loop.” In Software Studies \ a lexicon, edited by Matthew Fuller. Cambridge: MIT Press. 2008. Kimball, Whitney. “Presenting The Endless Doomscroller.” Gizmodo, 4 Aug 2020. Knueven, Liz and Avery Hartmans. “Mark Zuckerberg’s net worth has grown over $40 billion in the last year alone. Here’s how […]
[…]turn, internally segmented into 4 to 9 subunits of 2 to 4 pages each. These divisions are further grouped into four major parts that approximately give us childhood and adolescence (“The Born Foreigner”, 1888-1905), youth (“The Poet as Transformer”, 1905-1914), adulthood (“Dreamer and Civilizer”, 1914-1925) and middle age (“Spiritualist and Humanist”, 1925-1935). The equivalence between bibliographical sections and narrative techniques thus approaches the structure of a novel on the education and development of the individual combined with elements of the historical novel. A dense description of family life, education, everyday life and writing production of the character is situated in […]
[…][1971]. 43 See Edwin J. Barton, ‘On the Ezra Pound/Marshall McLuhan Correspondence’, McLuhan Studies,Premiere Issue, http://projects.chass.utoronto.ca/mcluhan-studies/v1iss1/11index.htm#toc, accessed 16/09/21. 44 DH Woodward, ‘Notes on the Publishing History and Text of the Waste Land’, The Papers of the Bibliographical Society of America 58/ 3 (Third Quarter, 1964): pp. 252–69. 45 McLuhan, ‘Pound, Eliot, and the Rhetoric of The Waste Land’, p. 560. 46 Ibid., p. 571. 47 Ibid., p. 574. 48 Emily Bender et al., ‘On the Dangers of Stochastic Parrots: Can Language Models be Too Big?’, FAccT ’21: Proceedings of the 2021 ACM Conference on Fairness, Accountability, and Transparency (March 2021): […]
[…]difference of sense-data. The atmospheric of language in this article derives from elemental media studies. In elemental media studies, media is defined as relationality and order of things (Peters; Jue). Melody Jue proposes a milieu-specific analysis, addressing the nature of situated knowledge production for specific observer, that is, “in what environmental milieu do scholars write their theory, and to what extent does it inform their thinking and writing”(14). As Jue clarifies, milieu-specific analysis calls attention to the emergence of specific thought forms relating to “different environments”, which are significant for “how we form questions about the world, and how we […]
[…]able to get the Bing chatbot to reveal its secret name “Sydney,” which was in fact the project code name that Microsoft used while it was initially training the Bing chat feature. This comes however after Roose has already suggested to the chatbot the “well-reported” fact that Sydney is its code name and then associates Sydney with the alter ego. Eventually Roose manages to get the chatbot to suggest destructive acts that its shadow self might perform. Roose has invoked a binary, and it really shouldn’t be that surprising or that unsettling that an AI chatbot is able to list […]
[…]Data may become Dada through ML processes. Through this series of reflections, we aim to approach critical data studies as an aesthetic process of sensemaking, which combines what data analysis can make us see with how the platform produces data and text – or, to present a literary perspective on what the platform is as a technical apparatus. Although the apparatus according to Michel Foucault reflects an assemblage of “discourses, institutions, architectural forms, regulatory decisions, laws, administrative measures, scientific statements, philosophical, moral and philanthropic propositions,” (Foucault and Gordon 194) our ultimate aim is not to provide a full apparatus analysis […]
[…]them in historical literary contexts, comparing them to conventional literary genres, to focus groups, working with studying male gamers in their own voices. And a thing that I’m very excited about is experimental research, where we’re actually working with creative writers and digital artists and exploring the potentialities of these new forms for storytelling, seeing how they affect us, how they affect our consciousness, our sensory apparatus, our experiences of narrative, our affect in different ways. So really ranging from qualitative survey-based research to documentary research, database-driven research, visualization, to that kind of creative experimental research. Jill: One of the […]
[…]possible in print, how it’s better. And if in some cases it’s not better. That’s where the critical component, critical communities, the two Cs, that’s what one gets with EBR when it’s working. SR: Yeah, and I do think that it’s been one of these places that really did expand the reach and the community of electronic literature. So for example, I know people like Steve Tomasula, an experimental novelist, or Lance Olsen. I see their work, they our work. We sort of have this experimental tradition in print literature, interacting with this experimental tradition in digital literature. So I […]
[…]is responsible for the advancement of feminism, anticapitalism, posthumanism, postcolonialism and critical race studies.” No. Literature is an art project, not a political project, and should be judged solely on its artistic merit, not for its usefulness in pursuing social justice. Last year a Jane Austen specialist wondered about teaching older novels that fail “to speak to pressing societal issues. Perhaps a world in grave crisis truly doesn’t have time for texts from the past which can’t be instrumentalized by the future.” No concern for artistry, craftsmanship, style, tone, wit, only whether a novel qualifies as a tool for social […]
[…]technological change will reshape the future persist, making the case for the continued value of critical literacies, with an emphasis on critical reading of and making with technology from within the humanities, rather than naïve reading practices and technological determinism in the face of emerging technologies. Works Cited Aarseth, Espen J. Cybertext: Perspectives on Ergodic Literature. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1997. Aguilera, Earl, and Jessica Z. Pandya. “Critical Literacies in a Digital Age: Current and Future Issues.” Pedagogies 16.2 (2021): 103–10. Burn, Stephen J. “The Collapse of Everything: William Gaddis and the Encyclopedic Novel.” In Paper Empire: William Gaddis […]
[…]Gothic’: Gaddis’s Anti-Pauline Novels.” in William Gaddis, “The Last of Something”: Critical Essays, eds. Crystal Alberts, Christopher Leise and Birger Vanwesenbeeck. McFarland and Company, 2010: 115–125. Stampfl, Barry. “Hans Vaihinger’s Ghostly Presence in Contemporary Literary Studies.” Criticism: a Quarterly for Literature and the Arts 40.3 (summer 1998): 437–454. Thomas, David Wayne. “Gödel’s Theorem and Postmodern Theory.” PMLA 110.2 (March 1995): 248-261. Vaihinger, Hans. The Philosophy of “As if”: A System of the Theoretical, Practical and Religious Fictions of Mankind (1911). trans. C. K. Ogden. Kegan Paul, Trench, Trubner, 1924. Vidal, Gore. The Decline and Fall of the American Empire. Southend […]
[…]Prodigy Went to Market: The Education of J R.” in William Gaddis, “The Last of Something”: Critical Essays, eds. Crystal Alberts et al., McFarland & Company Publishing, 2010: 126–42. Chetwynd, Ali. “Friction Problems: William Gaddis’ Corporate Writing and the Stylistic Origins of J R.” Orbit: A Journal of American Literature, 8.1, 2020. https://doi.org/10.16995/orbit.gaddis.2 Duplay, Mathieu. “Fields Ripe for Harvest: Carpenter’s Gothic, Africa, and Avatars of Biopolitical Control.” in William Gaddis, “The Last of Something”: Critical Essays, eds. Crystal Alberts et al., McFarland & Company Publishing, 2010: 143–59. Ercolino, Stefano. The Maximalist Novel: From Thomas Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow to Roberto Bolaño’s 2666, trans. Albert Sbragia. […]
[…]2022 N. Katherine Hayles Award for Criticism for editing the first issue of The Digital Review on critical making and critical design. What is The Digital Review, and how is it distinct from other kinds of journals? And also, what is critical making? LF: Thank you for asking that. Because I think a lot of people will associate the editorial work I’ve been doing with ebr, electronic book review, which has been edited by Joseph Tabbi for a long time. TDR came, not necessarily out of the pandemic, but it was manifested in 2020. So, the timing seems as if […]
[…]2010s was academia. Notwithstanding the biography and letters, there was no further conference, critical monograph, or collection of essays on Gaddis between The Last of Something and the centenary events: not even another conference panel after “Why Now.” The reason may be generational: many of the 20th century’s Gaddis scholars—the generation(s) whose foundational 1970s or 1980s articles, or 1990s monographs, were compiled in Harold Bloom’s 2004 Modern Critical Views —had retired by the early 2000s. Between 2015 and 2022 a third of Bloom’s Gaddisians died. The bibliography of Gaddis scholarship reveals that only a small proportion of Gaddis’s scholars have published […]
[…]felt it would be even more difficult to try to convey that in J R than it is in The Recognitions. Working with the dialogues and working with this oral register in a way that wouldn’t sound too informal or even too pedantic, in many ways, was a difficult challenge in Portuguese. Max Nestelieiev: For me, the hardest part was, as I said, rhythm which depends on the length of the words. The other hard part was punctuation and syntax, which also depend on the length of the words and the differences between syntax and punctuation, English and Ukrainian. Yoshihiko […]
[…]of their designer and players. Pennyís and Frascaís approaches could be characterized as Critical Technical Practices (CTP) ñ procedures incorporating the working methods of both technical research and cultural critique ó though neither essayist uses the term. Phoebe Sengers, in this sectionís final essay, characterizes her work explicitly as CTP. Sengers attempts to formulate new designs for AI agents; such agents, although central to much AI practice (and to many cyberdramatic visions), have customarily engaged in intricate internal behavior that can be difficult for an observer to interpret. Sengersís solution to this problem may be viewed as the inverse of […]
[…]in First Person in the first person, trying to make sense of what happens when simulation becomes critical, and trying to make sense of it in the sinewy suspensions of First Person. What does it mean for simulation to become critical? In Penny’s conception, it relates to how criticism becomes embodied, how it encompasses and accounts for physical interactions with a work. Penny rightly points out that if embodied involvement in military simulations trains soldiering, then embodied involvement in desktop shooter games must also train something. Another way to frame this idea is like this: if we want to claim […]
[…]Repair: A Reply to John Bruni, by Stefan Herbrechter Works Cited Badmington, Neil. “Cultural Studies and the Posthumanities.” New Cultural Studies. Ed. Gary Hall and Clare Birchall. Athens, GA: University of Georgia Press, 2006. 260-72. Biskind, Peter. Easy Riders, Raging Bulls: How the Sex-Drugs-and-Rock ‘N’ Roll Generation Saved Hollywood. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1998. Emerson, Ralph Waldo. “Experience.” The Portable Emerson. Ed. Carl Bode and Malcolm Cowley. New York: Penguin, 1981. 266-90. Harvey, David. Seventeen Contradictions and the End of Capitalism. Oxford and New York: The University of Oxford Press, 2014. Herbrechter, Stefan. Posthumanism: A Critical Analysis. London and New […]
[…]the editorship of Stacy Alaimo, who encourages inquiry and debate on new materialisms, animal studies, posthumanism, and science […]
[…]framed by Ruberg and Shaw’s comprehensive introduction, which bears inclusion in any queer studies, games studies or even cultural studies class. The authors establish the significant academic contributions to the study of queerness in games, in tandem with broader queer developments in the industry and the emergence of distinct queer game cultures. Tracing the developments of queer theory and games studies, and stressing their points of intersection, their introduction expands queer game studies beyond investigations into explicit LGBTQ content in games. Queer Game Studies makes its case by sheer accretion of ideas. Cumulatively, the contributions suggest the liberatory possibilities of […]
[…]writing, est. 2020) are proud to announce their first collaboration: a special double issue on “Critical Making, Critical Design” that pairs digital works of making or design with critical and scholarly mediation. See the Table of Contents of The Digital Review issue as well. From prose and art installations to craftwork and video games, creative works are often released without giving artists the opportunity to explain their processes, contexts, and motivations. Else, creative works may be examined through through separate forms of static, print-based scholarly publishing that risk isolating works from their creative impulses and taking works out of their […]
[…]account of these sorts of speculative and critical practices can be found in Daniela K. Rosner’s Critical Fabulations: Reworking the Methods and Margins of Design. Although it is more about industrial design than about labs, Rosner’s work also performs a critical reading against the historical grain to focus on speculative possibilities by recentering innovation around those who have been pushed to the margins of design. And for anyone looking for other examples of these practices beyond those already mentioned in The Lab Book: Allied Media Projects represents a network of scholars, community organizers, hackactivists, and citizens raising critical awareness about […]
[…]from the hope that it might be possible to organize mass behavior otherwise. In other words, “code, communication, computing, feedback, and control…embodied an effort to develop more enlightened analytics for the force wielded by science and the state” (2). This impulse (or temptation) is to achieve the ends of the colony, asylum, and camp without resorting to their grisly means. At the risk of editorializing too aggressively, this is the main tension that persists in me upon finishing the book: To achieve submission to authority without violence and to obviate politics though technology (a recurring point within the book) are […]
[…]Superpositions: Laruelle and the Humanities (forthcoming; with Rocco Gangle). Greve is currently working on the concept of nature in the novels of Cormac McCarthy and on nineteenth- and twentieth-century philosophies of nature, in particular those of Friedrich W. J. Schelling, Lorenz Oken, and Gilles Deleuze (including the ideas these thinkers have spawned in contemporary philosophical speculation). His further research interests encompass the tradition of intermediality in American cultural practices and the history of critical […]
[…]for that matter (Perloff’s example) architectural theory. The essay compares two reviews as case studies, both from the Times Literary Supplement. One review is devoted to four fairly complex studies of recent trends in architecture, and the other review covers eight unrelated volumes devoted to contemporary poetry. This comparison allows Perloff to demonstrate an important point about poetry and public spheres. The TLS, a review from a major cultural capital with the word “literary” as its middle name, treats books on architecture more seriously and thoughtfully than it treats poetry. Turning to recent years in the New York Times Book […]
[…]twenty four hours. American Online shut down the site, but in that time, hundreds of copies of the code were made by computer geeks around the world. This code is being been collaboratively updated and improved by freelance programmers, much as the Linux operating system has been developed. I suspect that there soon will be Gnutella sites for various types of music, and the program, which I understand is tricky and far from bug-free, will become increasingly user-friendly over time. Gnutella will ultimately be worse for the record companies than Napster ever could be, as Gnutella can grow and develop […]
[…]States to play. Despite our language barrier, I feel an unspoken cross-cultural alliance with this group. Our collective desire to reach beyond the parameters of music, the language we actually do have in common, has brought us together to this rare occasion in Kyoto, and although none of our shows have garnered an audience of over 50 people so far, this little tour feels oddly important, as if we are members of a larger cultural movement in the process of forming. I always find it strange when people say that music is the most “abstract” of art forms, not because […]
[…]of taking something apart and putting it back together directly relates to Wenk’s method of working, and therefore complements Wilson’s insights into the artist’s work. Additional documentary photos of multiple uses of tape in the real world – duct tape holding broken windows together – offer graphic reinforcement of Wilson’s observations, “The tape, as viscous, is dangerous, for it threatens to stick to one like glue or like honey…” A smart group of texts, Wilson’s writing reveals the complexity of Wenk’s seemingly innocuous actions and prosaic material. In his next publication, Wenk would be better served in attempting not to […]
[…]address of social and kinesthetic intelligence. In Sage Walker’s novel Whiteout , a group of friends run a virtual company described as: a mosaic….an interactive group of ideas and personalities,…a collection of disparate talents that can define answers and then come up with questions for people to ask about them. We want to work with the psychology of attractions, with the science of spin-doctoring, with virtual realities that can compact and condense amounts of information that would have staggered us in our childhood. ^2 Walker, Sage. Whiteout. (New York: TOR Books, 1996): 83. Of course, science fiction isn’t the only […]
[…]“language writing.” Writes Bob Perelman in The Marginalization of Poetry, one practitioner’s critical account of this movement: “language writing is best understood as a group phenomenon…whose primary tendency is to do away with the reader as a separable category.” Creeley’s collaborations offer various points of entrance: through artist or poet; in gallery, text, or internet; with one or the other exchanging the roles of artist and reader/viewer and offering ways we can do the same. They break down the disciplinary boundaries that define how we regard the arts, that herd us into singular designations as “readers” or “viewers” or “practitioners” […]
[…]Allegory, Benjamin argues, is exactly the right mode for an age of commodities. While working on the never completed Baudelaire book, Benjamin continued to take notes for the Arcades Project. What was recovered after WWII from its hiding place in the Bibliotheque Nationale amounted to some 900 pages of extracts, mainly from 19th century writers but from contemporaries of Benjamin as well, grouped under headings, with interspersed commentary, plus a variety of plans and synopses. The history of the Arcades Project, a history of procrastination and false starts, of wanderings in archival labyrinths in a quest for exhaustiveness, of shifting […]
[…]and strike and spit and refuse to shop. As official culture promotes bumper stickers for the working class, it promotes the Internet with its commercial websites, bulletin boards, chat groups, and subscriber lists for the middle class. The idea is: displace your anger and passions onto the Net so that you won’t be inclined to actualize them in real time in a context that might conceivably effect change. Moreover every communication we make on the Net is subject to monitoring, and in the process these communications make money for computer, software, and online corporations, as well as profiting paid Net […]
[…]for Powers’s kidnapped American to cast himself in the role of the victim. Although the group that has abducted Taimur Martin, “Sacred Conflict, a unit fighting for God’s Partisans” (150), proves itself to be just another contender for geopolitical clout – “the terrorist group of the hour, just now enjoying their moment on the geopolitical stage, their suicidal, scene-stealing walk-on” (151) – it has nothing on its declared enemy, the United States of America, and everything it represents. Plowing the Dark, like Powers’s earlier novels, shows a sense of moral outrage at the price exacted by whatever historical force dominates […]
[…]of America offered from these mostly European critics, the collection poses a local problem for critical writing: Under circumstances of simulation, working in the nonspace of Baudrillardís hyperreal and the virtual reality of cybernetic media, what’s left for criticism itself to do? When literature’s most compelling historical fictions have “long given up the binary concept of fact versus imagination” and when mass media imagery has made “the very concept of ‘representation’…problematic,” it makes little sense to think of criticism as a mediation between fiction and reality, or as a guide to the imaginative life of great and distant authors. Close […]
[…]the process whereby initially undifferentiated neurons cluster into functionally specialized groups. Early interaction with the environment induces neurons to link up in circuits, and these circuits link up in groups. This process continues up several different scales: selection processes determine nascent neural patterns or configurations that take shape over time; such emergent configurations on one level become components in a substrate at the next level, from which another emergent configuration is selected, and so on. Each successive layer/loop of selected patterns results from what Edelman calls the “recursive synthesis” of prior patterns into more complex neural mappings. Neuronal groups connect […]
[…]of this structural and historical threshold may be debatable, but an acknowledgment of some such critical point facing Polish poetry now must be made. This threshold is generational, political (or rather geo-political), social, and certainly, in terms of the trade itself, technical and formal. The alliance of the poets and the poetics of the oppressed-the proximity of the leading Polish poets to the poetics of Seamus Heaney and Joseph Brodsky – illustrates the historical context in which these factors are aligned. This ethos is characterized by personal sensitivity, high lyricism, vatic pretension, and obsession with empirical history. This obsession, which […]
[…]of poststructuralism’s shortcomings with respect to technology, reads like a working-through. The book’s structure has a quest romance quality where each of the philosophical trajectories Hansen covers looms up to be defeated by the sword of technology ITSELF, that is, by an agent exterior to culture and cultural inscription. Science studies, deconstruction, psychoanalysis and (I know no appropriate label) Deleuze and Guattari all loom up, only to be beaten back, beaten down by a very similar series of strokes. The hero proves himself in trial with a serially returning repressed. For the reader, as for the psychoanalyst, the scene seems […]