Book Review: Laruelle: Against the Digital (original) (raw)
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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.
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'.