Book Review: Laruelle: Against the Digital (original) (raw)
Dialogue, 2015
In Herman Melville's short story, Bartleby, the Scrivener: A Story of Wall Street (1853) Bartleby's obstinate response to every request made of him is that 'I prefer not to.' Bartleby withholds participation in his environment and gradually recedes from society altogether thus fostering a curious indeterminacy in his outright refusal to do anything at all. Yet Bartleby emerges as an unlikely fi gure of resistance. Is Bartleby's withdrawal, revolutionary and an effective act of protest? Or is his solipsistic and ultimately infuriating behaviour a symptom of the overall social and political malaise of neoliberal society. Alexander Galloway invokes Bartleby's abstention from society in the second chapter of Laruelle: Against the Digital likening his withdrawal to the Occupy movement's demand of having no demands. Slavoj Žižek and Antonio Negri (among many others) have also connected Bartleby's attitude of passive resistance to the Occupy movement. In Laruelle: Against the Digital, a critical analysis of self-styled, so-called non-philosopher, François Laruelle, Galloway also connects the Occupy movement with Bartleby. Bartleby seems a fi tting archetype to embody Laruelle's non-philosophy, despite Laruelle's disdain for representation, metaphor or allegory. Laruelle privileges homogeneousness rather than a hybridity as espoused by phenomenology, psychoanalysis, existentialism, deconstruction and identity politics; he dismisses those schools of thought as mere "therapeutic crusades" (85). Rather, Laruelle seeks a generic state setting him apart from most continental philosophers' theories, with the exception of Gilles Deleuze. In particular, Deleuze helps us understand the theme of digitality in Laruelle. In order to illustrate this, Galloway cites Deleuze's famous short essay from 1992, "Postscript on the Societies of Control." According to Galloway, the Postscript demonstrates that historic "periodization … defi nes today's mode of being" (100); furthermore it asserts "historical breaks" (109) as tropes that increasingly defi ne society and culture. Galloway draws distinctions between the 'analogue' and 'digital' as conceptual infrastructures that are based on a binary system. However, Laruelle disdains the root of all digitality: zeroes and ones. In addition, technology is repulsive to Laruelle. Laruelle sees technology as "provide[ing] little more than an avenue for transit or meditation in and
Posthuman Magazine, 2024
«A Finnegans Wake for the postdigital millennium, Kenji Siratori’s Blood Electric is probably the foundational text of the language-horror sub-genre: an evasive, esoteric and ultraexperimental writing style produced by the convergence of poetics and methods borrowed from avantgarde literature, electronic/noise music, synthetic abstract image generation, and severe—yet delicate—syntactic deconstruction. Siratori’s unique writing technique results in a hardcore-cyberpunk material account of a bio-techno singularity network in which flesh-code wetware and silicon-thriving software infold together into wave-multitudes of text-organisms. While most contemporary authors exploring the possibility of the blending of humans and machines focus on the extrapolation of logical and transcendental interactions (as in classical cyberpunk, from which Blood Electric initiates a radical breakup), Siratori’s language emanates directly from the contingent, rhizomatic, non-teleological, reciprocal disruption of several unstable and immanent modes of embodied (in)existence. In Blood Electric the text becomes an incantation demanding full abandonment, generating its own unpredictable rhythms as it enraptures you beyond reading, beyond yourself, like when participating in a rave.» — Germán Sierra «… Blood Electric is unreadable in anything other than short, migraine-inducing bursts.» — The Guardian «Following the publication of Kenji Siratori's Blood Electric, the Japanese cyberpunk writer perhaps pioneered a movement among all non-English speaking writers whose languages are radically dissociated from the dominant Latin-Anglo-Franco-German linguistic germ-line on the one hand, and are, on the other, enthusiastically seeking to contribute to the diversification of the English language whose centrality has already been sabotaged in the wake of emerging cyber-societies.» — Reza Negarestani, in 3:AM Magazine «Kenji is making rather more sense than usual. Perhaps the lad is finally coming into his own as the literary avatar of our times.» — Bruce Sterling «Kenji is a madman for sure, but if you scan his hallucinatory textual mashups in just the right frame of mind, they begin to make sense. And that's the scary part.» — Douglas Rushkoff «Contemporary Japan is exploding in slow-motion, and Kenji Siratori arranges the blood- and semen-encrusted deris with the finesse of a berserk Issey Miyake. Rendering English-language cyberpunk instantly redundant with his relenteless, murderous prose-drive, Siratori transmits his authentic, category-A hallucinogenic product direct to this reader’s cerebellum. A virulently warped amalgam of Tetsuo and cut-up era William Burroughs.» — Stephen Barber (author of Tokyo Vertigo) «Blood Electric is the black reverb of soft machine seppuku, a molten unspooling of sheet metal entrails and crucified memory banks into the howling void of violence. It is a cyborg crash nightmare of the new flesh, a final dispatch from mutant Hell where the embryo hunts in secret.» — Jack Hunter (author of Eros in Hell) «Siratori’s hypermodern project articulates the nonarticulation that currently dominates the substratum of much current discourse. Without the intense atomization of the individual, Siratori’s work does not resound. Yet, if we take pause, Siratori’s work resonates at a fever pitch, blaring at the limitless informational realm of our minds as it bursts the parameters of the skull. As a kind of accelerationist aesthetic, Siratori critiques technology by pushing it beyond its sensible potentiality; he cultivates alien cognitions where alternatives thrive, where semantic derangement is revolt, where epistemology uncoils. Ultimately, he uncompromisingly forces us to pause on the chaos of the glitch, to claim the instance where embodying the unquantifiable amounts to insurgency.» — Andrew C. Wenaus, author of The Literature of Exclusion: Dada, Data, and the Threshold of Electronic Literature
Digital Literature and the Digital
Journal of Writing in Creative Practice (JWCP), 2011
Bouchardon, S. (2011). « Digital Literature and the Digital », Journal of Writing in Creative Practice (JWCP), volume 4 numéro 1, juin 2011, Londres : Intellect Books, 65-78. ---------- In this paper, the approach to the Digital is based on the distinction between three levels: a theoretical level, an applicative level and an interpretative level. Now digital literary works play on the tensions between the three levels and allow these tensions to be highlighted. Studying the conjunction of the Digital and of literary creation – by analysing digital literary works – thus proves to be relevant. Looking into the specific properties of the Digital can throw light on the potentialities of digital literature; in the same way, digital literature can act as a revealer for the Digital.
Review: Erich Hörl, Nelly Y. Pinkrah, and Lotte Warnsholdt (eds.), ‘Critique and the Digital’
Theory, Culture, and Society, 2021
This compact volume aims to take stock of the myriad critical responses elicited in recent years by transformations in computational media and digital capital. Attending to the growing prevalence of artificial intelligence in the construction of digital media environments, these essays collectively highlight the contingency embedded within algorithmic functionality while addressing the oppressive organizational structures and governmental capabilities such operations make available to big data. Containing entries from Mark Hansen, Luciana Parisi, Claus Pius, and others, Critique and the Digital provides an impressive overview of both the theoretical and practical stakes of coming to terms with the digital in its increasingly ubiquitous forms.
The Bloomsbury Handbook of Electronic Literature, 2017
Bruno Latour's provocative statement reads like a call to arms, hammering out urgency with every line. Latour immediately launches his proposal with the discomfiting and confrontational language of war-and the primary question is one of tactics. Have we, as scholars and professional critics, been ineffectually launching our missiles of critique at misjudged or decoy targets? Are the tactics inadequate to the task at hand? Have we simply been misled by, or tricked into, hollowed-out habits which have "outlived their usefulness" (229)? He points to shifts in the struggles to be addressed, fought, engaged with, or resisted. Critical tactics, he observes, have all too easily lent themselves to co-option by "enemies." The fault, moreover, lies not with those who turn such tactics to their own conservative ends, but within critique itself, which, by failing to adjust to change, has left itself open to just such a repurposing. The piece delivers an accusation and call for reevaluation which spares no one. Rather than endeavoring to distinguish the different uses of the critical arsenal, Latour takes the altogether more devastating approach of highlighting the troubling underlying similarities between, for example, conspiracy theories and the standard critiques of ideology. "Critique has not been critical enough" (232), and yet in some ways, sometimes against ill-chosen targets, much too critical-the kind of skepticism which, he suggests, throws out the baby with the bath water and seems to authorize wholesale suspicion and dismissal of facts. Those who question the soundness of warnings and prognoses about global warming are in effect only following, ad absurdum , the example already set by critics themselves. However, Latour demands more of critique-his is, indeed, a critique launched on critique itself, a call to radically rethink the familiar bases of our own critical thrusts. He forces the critical eye back upon itself-unpicking at the blind spots, undeclared inconsistencies, and contradictions in the critic's own position and method, unraveling the false safety nets which allow one measure to be applied to all other targets (the easier targets), while cradling and protecting the illusory untouchability of the critic's own cherished values. Latour voices some frustration with the existing situation, but proposes a way out of it. Science studies, Latour suggests, is well placed to be the critic of critics. Like the Socratic gadfly, "it is the little rock in the shoe that might render the routine patrol of the critical barbarians more and more painful" (242), recognizing, in Latour's formulation, the respect due to facts (enabling the "retriev[al] of a realist attitude" [243] and "their fascinating emergence as matters of concern"[242]). Matters of fact emerge as a "gathering," an "assembly" rather than a critical dismantling. Latour here refers to Heidegger's "thingness of the thing" (245), and brings Heidegger into dialogue with A.N. Whitehead, in his advocacy of an approach which requires "dig[ging] much further into the realist attitude" (244), and into experience which phenomenology is inadequate to explore (244). Facts gathering matters of concern resist the kind of critique Latour takes to task, but also offer the basis for a different "direction" (245) of critique. Latour strategically closes with an extract from Allan Turing's "Computing Machinery and Intelligence" (1950), noting that it is one of the iconic papers on formalism and computing, and at the same time "so baroque, so kitsch,. .. assembl[ing] such an astounding number of metaphors, beings, hypotheses, allusions, that there is no chance that it would be accepted nowadays by any journal" (247)-an eclectic gathering. Turing's analogy 9781474230254_ref_p421-446.indd 436 9781474230254_ref_p421-446.
LIMITE unbound: François Bon's digitalized fiction and the reinvention of the book
2016
Since 2005, François Bon, who began his literary career in the 1980s as a novelist, has gradually shifted the focus of his work onto his now all-encompassing web-based literary and multimedia oeuvre, tierslivre.net. As part of this transition from paper to web, Bon returned to his printed books to showcase them digitally. Most notably, in 2010 he undertook to retype his second novel, Limite (1985), to publish it in the form of a blog, prefacing each passage with an autobiographical and critical commentary. Once completed, he reedited the full commented text as an e-book. This article argues that even though all three versions have the same narrative at their core, each stage of this project offers something different to the reader and suggests a different focus and conception of literature. Together they illustrate that the shifts between media change the reading experience even without exploiting much of the potential for hyperlinking and interactivity, and that before and beyond all the possible narrative experiments it enables, the digital transition means for literature a move away from the logic of the book towards the 'logic of the project'.
Storie e Linguaggi, 2019
Against the opinion (false, to my mind) that Lachmannian textual criticism consists only in outdated technicalities, other voices, much more authoritative, but perhaps unheeded and certainly less mainstream, support the contrary view. Among the numerous aspects of this debate, by no means secondary is the constitution of digital text and apparatus in cases of complex recensio: between the extremes of a Lachmannian selective apparatus, and of a Bédier-style “democratic” one, the rules for a comprehensive digital apparatus remain to be created, and the enormous technical problems of tagging cannot and must not obscure the quintessentially scientific ones of the critical approach. With a series of operational reflections on two case studies (Cicero and Seneca the Philosopher), I try to trace a pathway that, while keeping a proper distance from any antiscientific, anticritical, antilachmannian, descriptive and genetic drift, makes it possible to find, if one exists, a principium individuationis of the digital edition, with repercussions backwards, so to speak, on the choice of variants in the apparatus as traditionally printed.
"Books and Computer Technology: 'It Looks Like a Book…'”
With the exponential expansion of information technology, it is superfluous to expound the virtues of computers in reproducing and making written works available to large numbers of readers. It is however crucial to understand that such technology is not simply a neutral vehicle for conveying words and messages, for the fundamental reason that language is not primarily about meaning and communication of ideas. It therefore becomes apparent that the complementary acts of reading and writing necessarily involve the material and the subjective (understood in logical terms as Lacan’s subject of the unconscious) dimensions of human existence. We can then see that Computer technology entails the eradication of the material aspect of writing: kept at an incalculable distance behind a screen, the book becomes ‘virtual’. At least two consequences can be observed. Firstly, one can read only the page which appears on the screen, the rest vanishes. Secondly (the ‘Google effect’), we are lead to believe that nothing is forgotten or lost, that everything is immediately available thanks to a search engine. What is lost is the material and tactile aspect of reading and writing: both concern the material and physical trace on the page, that correspond to the original inscribing of the subject’s body into the humanizing world of language. Thus, reading, for example, requires the dialectic movement back and forth through the pages of a physical book, a movement that involves alternation between forgetting and recall, rediscovery and anticipation. The same physical dimension involved in inscribing is called upon in all forms of creation (dance, painting…). Our research thus aims to explore what is at stake for individual liberty and creativity, taking into account the physical – or even carnal dimension – of existence that is systematically evacuated from post-modern approaches. Keywords: Book, Computer, Writing, Psychoanalysis, Memory, Language Stream: Books, Writing and Reading Presentation Type: 30 minute Paper Presentation in English or French Paper: Books and Computer Technology, Books and Computer Technology
From 1984 to Sueños digitales: The Dystopian Novel in the Age of Globalization
2005
In 1949, George Orwell’s novel 1984 was received by readers and critics as botha reaction to the political, economic and social changes that had taken place in the world after World War II and a warning of their possible consequences. Fifty years later, Jose Edmundo Paz Soldan updated this classic dystopia with Suenos digitales (2000). Like 1984, Paz Soldan’s novel can be read as both a response to the changes that have takenplace in the world since the end of the Cold War and a warning of the consequences thesemight bring. Suenos digitales, however, is much more than a simple rewriting of 1984. Unlike Orwell’s futuristic tale, Paz Soldan sets his novel in the present and, rather than warning us of what might happen in the future, he opens the reader’s eyes to thecontradictory effects of globalization and technological development on today’s society. Hence, Suenos digitales is a poignant commentary on the socio-political situation ofcontemporary Spanish America and a wake-up c...
The tensions of Digital Literature
Electronic Literature Organization (ELO), 2014
Bouchardon S. (2014). « The tensions of Digital Literature », colloque Electronic Literature Organization (ELO) 2014, 18-21 juin 2014, Milwaukee, Etats-Unis.
2014
Discussions about the .inancial system reveal two sets of perspectives. Financial experts, bank CEOs and politicians adopt a technical discourse that seems alienating and super .icial to critical academics, NGO campaigners and environmental activists who are often in.luenced by schools of thought ontologically located outside the .inancial system. With 'The Heretic's Guide to Global Finance: Hacking the Future of Money', Scott aims at 'radicalizing reform and reforming radicals' (p.1), by empowering individuals of the latter group. Based on his .irst-hand anthropological observations , Scott wrote a two-in-one book, combining a course on the inner workings of .inance with various forms of subversive .inancial activism. Scott takes his readers on a tour of a .inancial city. He equips them with a 'map' helping them to orientate among the .inancial monuments, and showing how these are cleverly connected. The reader is then invited to take a sneak peek behind the doors of the .inancial institutions and become familiar with the local culture. Finally, the guide presents a series of alternative 'routes' allowing the reader to escape being a '.inancial tourist'. This, in a nutshell, is the threefold structure adopted by Scott.
Dancing with the Digital: Cathy’s Book and S
Gramma: Journal of Theory and Criticism, 2016
Discussions about the future of literature and reading tend to assume a paper/digital technologies divide. A similar divide between literary and media studies is entrenched as regards institutional structures and curricula. In reality, the relationship between literature and the Internet/digital media is much more ambiguous and complex. To explore some of these complexities this essay focuses on two print novels that "dance" with the digital: Cathy's Book: If Found Call ( ) 266-8233 (2006), written by Sean Stewart and Jordan Weisman, and illustrated by Cathy Briggs, and S. (2013), written by J. J. Abrams and Doug Dorst. While vigorously asserting the primacy of print (not least through their extensive appeal to touch), the novels nudge the reader to enter the digital world, prompting, among others, a re-thinking of the concept of the author and of genre classification. Self-consciously and cautiously, the paper proposes the term "web-augmented novels" to describe the type of texts that Cathy's Book and S. stand for: the novels that offer a "bounded" reading experience, while acknowledging the Internet-saturated reality of today's readers.
Coll. Res. Libr., 2022
Whether this work is worthwhile or not is an open question. Another consequence of the vast scope of Beller's investigation and the constraint of putting it all into a single volume is that certain aspects of the analysis and argument appear ungrounded and vague. At timesand this is also a function of his very difficult style-it is unclear whether Beller refers to a concrete material reality, a theoretical construct, a metaphor, or perhaps all three at once. In many ways, these two weaknesses are a result of Beller's obvious passion and excitement for the project, as words and ideas fall over themselves in the urgency of their expression. But the work would have benefited from more space and more clarity of expression. The kernel of Beller's project is that "the history of the commodification of life [is] a process of encrypting the world's myriad qualities and quantities" (6) and that "what we today call digitization began more than seven centuries ago with commodification" (17). This work will be of interest to anyone working in the area of digital services, education, information management, and technology from a critical perspective. There are plenty of compelling ideas in here, not the least of which is the offering of a program to "secure victory-in the form of a definitive step out of and away from racial capitalism-for the progressive movements of our times" through the "decolonization of information, and therefore of computation, and therefore of money" (7). This book can be recommended for anyone interested in the critical theory of information, with the caveat that it will require a disproportionate amount of work to intellectually come to grips with Beller's extensive engagement with his material and to excavate what is significant or useful. More specific to librarians is Beller's contention that the business-asusual of racial capitalism and the world computer are insufficient for survival and revolution. Librarianship's focus on technological solutions, and even the progressive politics of much of Digital Humanities, must directly confront the mechanisms of technological oppression Beller describes. "The politics, expressivities, pedagogies, practices of relation, and media of value creation and distribution adequate to the task of redesigning the entanglements of culture and economy remain to be collectively realized" (254), Beller writes, and this might stand as a mission statement for academic libraries committed to real social transformation. As challenging as this book is, library workers can draw valuable lessons about the relations between racial capitalism, technology, and information work, lessons concerning both the immensity of the challenges we face and the importance of addressing them.
ENTHYMEMA
In the face of the theories that dismiss digital arts for being facilitated by the capitalist system, this paper argues that a critical awareness on the dangers of new technologies does not necessarily lead to the condemnation of technological arts. Indeed, the evidence suggests that digital technologies are an excellent medium through which literature can voice a nuanced and critical consideration about the world in which it appears. The analysis focuses on Spanish-Argentinian writer Belén Gache’s transmedia project Kublai Moon (2013-2019) in order to demonstrate that hypothesis. Firstly, it is shown that the novel reflects on the compatibility between humans and machine, in its content as well as in its forms. Secondly, it is contended that the axiological judgments on literature must be based on updated criteria when it comes to evaluating digital works.
Review: by André Cossette and translated by Rory Litwin
Interactions: UCLA Journal of Education and Information Studies, 2011
Humanism and Libraries: An Essay on the Philosophy of Librarianship by Andre Cossette, translated by Rory Litwin. Duluth, MN: Library Juice Press, 2009. 102 pp. ISBN 9781936117178. The 2009 translation of Andre Cossette’s Humanism and Libraries: An Essay on the Philosophy of Librarianship into English from the original French was timely. Written in accordance with the curriculum of the Graduate School of Library Science at the Universite de Montreal, it was first published by L’Association pour l’avancement des sciences et des techniques de la documentation (ASTED) in 1976, under the title Humanisme et bibliotheques: essaisur la philosophie de la bibliotheconomie (Montreal). It is a short polemic, intense in its ability to be thought provoking while addressing central issues of the field, such as the roles that libraries fundamentally serve in terms of education, democracy, and society. Cossette’s main argument wavers from a position that celebrates a liberal progressivism, affirmat...