The Literature of Exclusion : Dada, Data, and the Threshold of Electronic Literature

In the early twentieth century, the Dadaists protested against art, nationalism, the individual subject, and technologized war. With their automatic anti-art and cultural disruptiveness, Dadaists sought to “signify no thing.” Today, data also operates autonomously. However, rather than dismantling tradition, data organizes, selects, combines, quantifies, and simplifies the complexity of actuality. Like Dada, data also signifies nothing. While Dadaists protest with purpose, data proceeds without intention. The individual in the early twentieth century agonizes over the alienation from daily life and the fear of being converted into a cog in a machine. Today, however, the individual in twenty-first-century supermodernity merges, not with large industrial machinery, but with the processual and procedural logic of programming with innocuous ease. Both exclude human agency from self-narration but to differing degrees of abstraction. Examining the work of B.R. Yeager, Samuel Beckett, Jeff Noon, Kenji Siratori, Mike Bonsall, Allison Parrish, and narratives written by artificial intelligence, Wenaus considers the threshold of sensible narration and the effects that the shift from a culture of language to a culture of digital code has on lived experience. While data offers a closed system, Dadaist literature of exclusion, he suggests, promises a future of open, hyper-contingent, unprescribed alternatives for self-narration. Cover Half Title Title Page Copyright Page Dedication Contents Acknowledgments Introduction: The Literature of Exclusion Where Word Breaks Off: Language, Finance, and Automated Signification Digital Modernism Digital Supermodernism: Dataism, Psychopolitics, and Neuro-totalitarianism The Voice of the Unknown: Dada and the Superidiot Power Is All about Making Things Easy: Neuro-totalitarianism and Poiesis The Apparatus Turned Human: AI and Self-Narration The Chapters Notes Chapter 1: Metaphor and Metanoia: Linguistic Transfer, Cognitive Transformation, and Exclusion The Flower’s Coleridge: Platonism and Cognitive Linguistics Coleridge’s Flower: Phenomenological Engagement Psycho-ecology Notes Chapter 2: The Radical Poetics of Impersonality: The Posthuman, the Inhuman, and Dada Dada and the Radical Poetics of Impersonality Notes Chapter 3: The Divine Neutrality of the Apparatus: The Self-Reflexive Conceptual Horror of B. R. Yeager Notes Chapter 4: “Something Is Taking Its Course”: Zero-Player Games, Proceduralism, and Samuel Beckett’s Endgame Procedure without Intention Actants and Pataphysics: Imagining Exclusion Endgame, Experimentation, and Scientific Narrative: Experiment without Experimenter Zero-Player Games and Proceduralism: Endgame as Automaton Simulation Fever: Endgame as Zero-Player Simulation Thinking Exclusion: Endgame, Flusser, and Information Illiteracy Notes Chapter 5: Blossoming Ghost: Memetic Engineering, Hauntology, and Metamorphiction in Jeff Noon’s Falling Out of Cars Impersonal Memetic Engineering and Metamorphiction Hauntology and the Specter of the Novel The Spectrality of Epistolary Writing and the Chaotics of Memory Characters as Metasignals and Writing Pattern from Randomness The Chaotics of Memory, Narcosis, and Contingent Consolation Notes Chapter 6: Swarm Annihilation and Supermodern Transcendence: Chaotics, Granular Synthesis, and the Glitch Poetics of Kenji Siratori Glitching the English Language Mavo in Japan Cyberpunk in extremis and the Japanese Avant-Garde Electronic Music, Granular Synthesis, and Digital Cut-Ups Siratori, Antinationalism, and the Western Avant-Garde Glitching the Nervous System Swarm Annihilation Notes Chapter 7: The Electronic Literature of Exclusion and Autopoiesis: Obsession and Fictionalism Coping with Zero to a Million Decimals: Mike Bonsall’s J. G. Ballard Twitter Bots, Autopoiesis, and Functionalist Psychopathology Nothing Is Going to Be a Thing: Benjamin’s Sunspring, Mathematical Fictionalism, and AI Narrative Notes Chapter 8: The Electronic Literature of Exclusion and Allopoiesis: Asemic Word Processing, Technical Images, and Allison Parrish’s Ahe Thd Yearidy Ti Isa Notes Conclusion: Extro-Science Fiction, Hyper-Contingent Literatures of Exclusion, and Unthinkable Thought Narrating Contingency with Noise Factiality, Probability, and Hyper-Chaos: Extro-Science Fiction and Hyper-contingent Literatures of Exclusion Notes Bibliography Index About the Author "The Literature of Exclusion considers what effects the shift from a culture of language to a culture of digital code has on lived experience. While data offers a closed system, Dadaist literature of exclusion, he suggests, promises a future of open alternatives for self-narration"-- Provided by publisher