Search results for "critical code studies working group"
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[…]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 […]
[…]This our gospel, go(d)spell, good news. We all know that the Torah was written in Secret Divine Code, God’s Code. Accordingly, the language in Mosaic Man is densly gnomic, i.e., salted with gnomes, i.e., short, pithy expressions of general truths, aphorisms. A gnomic writer, Reb Suk rewrites the “wisdom” poetry of the Bible. You know: “the only gospel / the hand writing” (38). After the creation of the world and the word, what does it mean to be Jewish? What does it mean to be a Jew and a writer? A Jewish writer? A writing Jew? Reb Suk doesn’t need […]
[…]of DeLillo’s preceding novel Mao II, and his obsessive chronicle of bodily decay and infirmity. Working on his “great novel,” the book to transcend all the inadequacies and miseries of his personal life, Gray becomes morosely preoccupied with the failing of his own body. He picks dandruff and hair out of his typewriter’s keyboard, discusses the symptoms of internal bleeding after a car accident with a group of strangers, revels in his own slow physical decay. Meanwhile, there is the transcendent purity of the text he is trying to transform himself into – the book that will never get finished, […]
[…]of both professions is the need to mask the truth from outside observers. Or, more bluntly, both groups are paid to lie. This is what journalism has come to: the messengers, at the most, are converts to the straight and narrow, repentant sinners, asking for our trust. (And print journalism is only marginally better, as these books all attest. Isikoff, who in a more tawdry way than Woodward has become part of the story [his subtitle: “A Reporter’s Story”]. Which is why we are reading his story. Isikoff understands the difference between print and television all too well. Given the […]
[…]nonlinear novels, the implications of a self-conscious, networked aesthetic for the practice of critical writing. If, after twenty years of formalized science-and-literature studies, critics in North America have remained partial to a set of major texts, the cause may be in part a tendency, understandable in excursions into the unmapped territory between disciplines, to let the borrowed disciplinary structures and terminology serve a normative function. Strehle, for example, arranges counterintuitive elements from the new physics alongside their experimental analogues in fiction, in order to distinguish the offbeat realism of her chosen writers from “the intentionally aesthetic narratives of metafiction.” She […]
[…]Institute assembled a program of codes to replicate themselves in the environment of a computer, codes with a built-in mutation element. The codes both altered and replicated at a spookily unanticipated rate, producing in the lab what cyberpunk produces in novels: a sense of life “out there” in cyberspace, beyond the control of its human inventors. Given this general scenario, speculation on the relation of organic life to putatively silicon-based life splits in two directions. One, represented by Hans Moravec and his book Mind Children, sees the potential of computers as much more oriented to artificial intelligence – to AI, […]