For Daniel Punday, Bernard Siegert’s historical materialism - a difficult synthesis of historical, literary, and institutional analysis - falls somewhere between Derrida and Foucault. But see also the review in ebr by historian Richard John, who considers Siegert in the line of Walter Ong, Elizabeth Eisenstein, and Harold Innis.
Linda Carroli reviews Michael Joyce on networked culture, whose emergence changes our ideas of change.
Geoffrey Winthrop-Young gets inside De Landa’s total history.
‘The time has come,’ the Walrus said,‘To talk of many things:Of shoes - and ships - and sealing wax -Of cabbages - and kings -And why the sea is boiling hot -And whether pigs have wings.’Lewis Carroll, Alice Through the Looking-Glass
Total history comes in waves. During the first decades of the twentieth century a number of prominent studies appeared that were written either by amateur historians such as Oswald Spengler or professionals like Arnold Toynbee and that mobilized a wide range of alternative disciplines in order to provide a new comprehensive view of history on a global scale. An ambitious commitment ‘to talk of many things’ - that is, to extend the domain of historiography far beyond its traditional boundaries - was linked to the elaboration of all-inclusive algorithms designed to account for the basic dynamics of history, be it the morphologically programmed blooming and withering of autonomous cultures in Spengler’s Decline of the West or the challenge-response scheme of Toynbee’s Study of History. Several reasons conspired to slow down the production of further such grand narratives following the Second World War, not the least of which was the increased institutionalization of historiography, but it appears that we are now caught up in a second wave of total histories. Once again, they are written by historians and non-historians alike, and once again the extension of the disciplinary boundaries is linked to a liberal import of ideas and methods from hitherto unrelated or ‘irrelevant’ fields.
.......what happened in Europe could have happened elsewhere, so there is no innate reason why Western Europe came to dominate the world the way it did. The potential problem is that despite this more open and relaxed view of global history Europe retains its privileged position. Once upon a time historians reduced history to an algorithm that regulated a predictable rise from barbarism to high culture with Europe as the supreme example against which all others had to be measured;
Giorgio Agamben has identified the “State of Exception” as the emergent principle of governance for the 21st Century. Parallel to this crisis in politics, there is the increasing currency of the term emergence in literary criticism, media theory, and cultural studies to describe the general state of change. In this paper, Heckman considers electronic literature in the “state of emergency,” as both a laboratory for formal innovation and a site of critique. Specifically, this paper takes into account the relationship between literacy, law, literature and criticism through a reading of Sandy Baldwin’s New Word Order, a work that reimagines poetry in the context of the first-person shooter game.
Giorgio Agamben has identified the “State of Exception” as the emergent principle of governance for the 21st Century. To summarize Agamben’s argument, alongside the emergence of modern theories of governance (democratic societies with defined human rights), a state of permanent emergency has been declared in response to the various threats (terrorism, ecological disasters, migration, etc.) that have enabled an exception to the rule to persist as the emerging norm. Parallel to this crisis in politics, there is the increasing currency of the term emergence in literary criticism, media theory, and cultural studies to describe the general state of change. Increasingly, this term is used to describe change as a benign and specifically digital determinism. This paper will consider electronic literature as both a laboratory for formal innovation and a site of critique. Specifically, this paper will take into account the relationship between literacy, law, literature and criticism and will rely upon readings of relevant works, like Pullinger and Joseph’s Flight Paths, Baldwin’s New Word Order, and Marino’s Show of Hands, works that deal with dislocation, interruption, and other states of exception.
(Source: http://conference.eliterature.org/critical-writing/literature-state-eme…)
Discussion of how "thought" is visualized in television, computers, and video art. The importance of the proliferation of new forms of inhuman visuality and artificial intelligence to new electronic art.
"This is the noosphere of police work--where the intellect not only flows between members of a highly collaborative, elite crime unit, but between the living and the dead. It is not a supernatural force at play here, but the immortal technology of advanced police work. . . . _Homicide_ is law enforcement in the age of fuzzy logic."