Linda Brigham works through Embodying Technesis by Mark Hansen.
Carsten Schinko on Niklas Luhmann’s Analogue Loyalty.
Aaron Pease reviews Manual DeLanda’s philosophy of the virtual.
Stephen Schryer reviews Mark Taylor and casts a critical eye on the unconditional celebration of complexity.
Chris Messenger reviews Tom LeClair’s first novel, Passing Off (1996).
Of the three major American team sports (Basketball, Baseball, Football), basketball is the only one that is wordless. Baseball is interpreted by language through an umpire’s balls and strikes, football sent into violent collision of bodies by a quarterback’s arcane jargon. Basketball, however, is the sport that at present remains a mystic’s communion, somewhere between a violent ballet and a transcendent praxis. Because of its silence, basketball has attracted only a fraction of the novelists (Updike in his Rabbit series the most prominent) who have memorialized baseball and football in the past few decades. That team roster is large and cuts across a popular and elite sampling of contemporary American fiction (Malamud, Roth, Coover, Charyn, Kinsella, DeLillo, Whitehead, Gent, Jenkins). Furthermore, basketball’s symbology and social relations have been almost totally appropriated by an African American standard of play, excellence, and cultural relevance, stipulating that white American authors must work out their own meaning now in a residual and somewhat tangential sense.
One of a series of eco-critical reviews, Stephen Dougherty exploresthe new ways that “matter is made to matter” in Ira Livingston’swriting on science and literature. The payoff of an ecocriticismgrounded in the materiality of language itself, can bee seen by thestrong political positioning toward the end of Dougherty’s essay.
(source: http://electronicbookreview.com/thread/criticalecologies/fractal)
Linda Brigham reviews the Spring and Fall 1995 issues of Cultural Critique.
Where is the real you? Behind the eyeballs, right; the center of a panoptical cinema, your virtual head spinning around like Linda Blair’s in The Exorcist. Watching the world go by.
Wrong. The address of the Enlightenment Subject has been vacant for a long time, and the front door now opens on a brick wall, or on the threshold of an abyss. So where do we send the mail? One answer to that question is the subject of two special issues of the journal Cultural Critique, subtitled “The Politics of Systems and Environments” (Spring and Fall, 1995). As William Rasch and Cary Wolfe explain in their introduction to the first number, the term “systems” stands in the place of the old subject, and “environments” replaces the old object. Like the old subject/object dichotomy, systems and environments are relative terms; each system becomes environment to another system. But systems and environments also manifest reciprocity: in complex self-referential systems (organism and societies for example), systems-as-observers (an ocular metaphor for perception in general) know they observe observers.
I am a white, here is how I know it. Given that my companions were whites, I thought that, if I were a black, each of them would have been able to make the following inference: “if I were also black, the other, immediately realizing from this that he is a white, would have left straight away; therefore I am not black.” And the two others would have left together, convinced of being whites. If they stayed put, it is because I am a white like them. The three prisoners are a parable of modern society, in which behavior has a double contingency, an agency enfolded into the fabric of other agents.
Contemporary “format disruptions” (Savikas) lead to a new experience and practice of scholarly publishing: it is global, virtual, and instantaneous. How does this apply to electronic literature? Elit works exist in a field of publication, characterized by circulation, commentary, and archiving. They are subject to complex corporate toolchains, software updates, social media, etc. The work is no longer just the work but the entirety of this field. Publication is no longer a single event or a single thing. Think of this in terms of Luhmann’s systems theory: the differentiating distinction between artistic production and critical discourse is shifted; the difference made by artwork - its “poetics” - is now systematically linked to critical discourse.
Our essay is a call for editors and publishers of works on / about elit to become active participants in the process of creating the entire work and in creating the field around works of elit. Traditionally editors were invisible, working in the background. By contrast, the contemporary publishing situation - as well as the specifics of publishing on elit - enables publishers and editors to address the global with local realities of writers, the virtual with the material concerns of the text, and the instantaneous with the measured need for critical reading. We look at two case studies. The first is a discourse analysis of existing publications on elit. Scholarly publishing is already in a tight reflexive relation with elit works (e.g. the ELD). We recognize these contributions, but we also examine how in many cases the unevenness of the existing field of critical discourse re-distributes and re-names these works as dealing with “new media” or “electronic culture,” or similar topics. Our second case study is Po.Ex, a collection of essays on intermedia and cybertext by authors from Portugal, currently being co-edited with Rui Torres, and due to be published in 2013 by the Computing Literature series - releasing print and ebooks - developed at West Virginia University, in collaboration with the University of Paris 8. The three primary contributions of the book are: 1) a historical model of elit within a continuum of avant-garde writing stretching back to the Middle Ages; 2) a hermeneutic model for finding meaning in electronic literature through intermediality; and 3) a semiotic model for the computer as the cybernetic extension of human creativity and as an enabling medium for merging writers with readers as mutual authors (as wreaders). While these essays demonstrably shaped the field of elit, especially in Europe, their influence is limited because new generations of artists, critics, and students of elit do not have access to the works. Our case studies shows that scholarly publishing as a critical practice can address such limitations. Our overall claim is that publishing can organize and create the field of discourse for elit. We conclude with proposals and questions for future directions of critical publishing on elit.
(Source: Authors' abstract ELO 2013: http://conference.eliterature.org/critical-writing/editing-electronic-literature-global-publishing-system)