subversion

The “vernacular” comes from the Latin verna meaning “home-born slave.” In its common understanding, it refers to the native speech, and has long been associated with “populism.” Many assumptions about digital discourse in the United States are framed by the pragmatics pop forms, driving even political and intellectual discourse into what behavioral scientists call “system 1 cognition”: short-term, unreflective, reactive, and, ultimately, manipulable thinking. This paper, drawing on critical writing developed by Justin Katko and Sandy Baldwin, will discuss choice architecture and strategies of détournement in electronic literature. Against the heavy presence of tagging in social media spaces and graphic design in public spaces, this presentation will analyze Typomatic by Serge Bouchardon, et. al, as a form of digital writing that subverts the reductive tendencies of instrumental signification in favor of ambiguity and excess at the level of the word. Even as I draft this proposal, I find myself wanting to describe the it as a work, for it is a concept, an installation, executed by artists and given a title: Typomatic. But the genius of the work reveals the tension between interface and its output. The Typomatic, is not a body of texts, rather it is a platform on which others are allowed to play. While it might not be the immediate thought of those who play with the machine, it is worth considering the relationship between the tools and the model of social interaction they enable. On the one hand, it is “populist” and “democratic”. Everyone is invited to play along, entering their own word, seeking out its relation. But as each player generates their little text, the role of author migrates into her hands, and her audience, whoever she chooses to share these riddles with (and sharing seems rather inevitable), invites the reader to consider “why?’ Why this word? Why this pairing? What do they mean by this? The interplay between author and readers is held together by the text. In this feedback loop, editing, revision, and virtuosity become emergent priorities, as microcommunities of literary entanglement mobilize acts of discretion to improve writerly engagement with linguistic complexity. The tie that binds the reader and writer through the tool is the appreciation for indeterminacy, eccentricity, cleverness, divergence, and surprise. Contrast this to social media, in which togetherness is achieved through consistent repetition of tags, explicit repetition of content through retweeting, and affirmation through favoriting (in the case of Twitter) or through liking, sharing, and commenting (on Facebook), and, more importantly, the structural consolidation of consensus through the metrics of visibility that elevate the already visible (branding), and one can see rather plainly how communication platforms reproduce different models of the public: In the case of so-called social media, reproducing official messaging under the appearance of everyday speech, or in the case of subversive works like Typomatic, reproducing the pleasures of sociality and fecund individuation in the play of the text, while cultivating the sustained, reflective, and, ultimately, liberatory engagement associated with “system 2 cognition.”

This paper will explore subversive practices of electronic literature as contexts for the experience of agency within various systems of control. Through close readings of covert communication practices in prison narratives alongside the works like Rob Wittig’s Netprovs, Richard Holeton’s slideshow narratives, Nick Montfort’s !#, and Darius Kazemi’s “Tiny Subversions,” this essay will consider poetic interventions against media culture, professionalization, and cybernetic systems in relation to the codes, mnemonic devices, and flights of fancy used by political prisoners and POWs to maintain identity against isolation, torture, and manipulation. In particular, this paper will touch down on the question of “the ends of electronic literature” by exploring the interrelational aspect of writing as a process that is primarily concerned with the creator imagining an other (an “author” reaching out to a “reader,” in the conventional literary sense) and the user finding meaning in the text (the reader having an encounter with the work of literature).

In addition to the mediation of relationships via the text, this paper will also consider various boundaries constructed to restrict communication (imposed by social, technical, and penal systems that attempt to discipline subjects and restrict communication to official channels and approved topics). Further, this paper will consider the micro-practices of resistance, the absurd logics of creativity, eccentricity, and interpretation that generate pleasure for the individual reader while guarding subjective practices from what Lyotard has called “the inhuman.” The goal of this paper is to consider (via electronic literature) “the human” as that which is not only essentially without essence (to paraphrase Stiegler), but which actively strives to maintain individuation against control.

(source: ELO 2015 conference catalog)

A manifesto on the polictics of machine poetry, its poetics, and a bit ons its creators.

Our understanding of “subversion” can be traced to its Latin roots: vertere, which means “to turn, overthrow, or destroy,” and the prefix sub, which means, “under, beneath.”  Hence, subversion is literally destruction from below.  This understanding carries with it two different connotations, one which is more concrete, as a form of non-frontal assault on a government or similar institution, by staging the attack from behind enemy lines.  The second, relies upon the antagonistic connotations of the first, but refers to the act of turning a system upon itself from within. This paper deals with subversion in the context of a changing media landscape.  Fundamental to this is the question of subversion as it relates to the norms of digitality itself: the subversion of the “discrete” value as applied to the entirety of existence.  The process of digitization, which reassembles the organic as transmissible, programmable units of abstract value, increasingly permeates all levels of social existence. From digital communication to human labor, from intelligence to food, reality is increasingly being rendered in commodity form, subject to information processing, communication, and storage.  This emerging universal structure, then, is the definitive terrain upon which all future acts of digital subversion will be formed.