English

The notion of entanglement is central to critical posthumanist thought. It might be said to have replaced the ubiquitous network metaphor or even the paradigm of the global in a number of contexts; at the very least, it stands in a tense relationship to them. While the figure of the globe is undeniably linked to human(ist) construction practices and the European colonial project, and a network-like connectedness implies links between objects that are ultimately thought of as separate, the topos of entanglement entails a fundamentally different, relational form of (intra)connectedness with other ethical implications. When fctional texts generate connectivity, e.g. by linking storylines that are separated in terms of their geographies, literary studies often habitually refer to these texts as "global novels" or "network narratives".

The implications of these tropes of connectivity themselves - as briefy outlined above - are rarely given much thought; and as labels, they cannot account for more complex and meshwork-like formations. In this talk, I will be thinking about the poetics and aesthetics of entanglement.

Comparative literature's changing conceptions of world literature have largely been informed by humanist thinking and the global paradigm, but as the climate crisis exposes the inextricable interconnectedness of globalisation and the anthropocene, 'natural' and 'cultural' histories, and species thinking and historical thinking (Chakrabarty 2009), wouldn't it be time to let theories of world literature and critical posthumanism converge? One route into this might be to extend Édouard Glissants poetics of relation to non-human actors, and to put Glissant into a conversation with Karen Barad's concept of agential realism. Working with texts by J.M. Coetzee, Olga Tokarczuk, and Richard Powers, I will show how they destabilise the binaries and demarcations targeted by a critical posthumanist agenda, how literature ultimately test the limits of object-oriented ontology and its anti-relational stance, and how geography still matters in all of this.

At the same time, the framework of posthumanist entanglement helps questioning the popular conception of literature as simply 'playing through' or modelling fctionalised versions of human experience, and to think about literature as an experiential space and as a relational ethics in its own right.

I have frequently spoken of word and image as viruses or as acting as viruses, and this is not an allegorical comparison.

William S. Burroughs, Electronic Revolution

As with bacteriophages – viruses that parasitize a bacterium by infecting it and reproducing inside it –, literature is permeated by a series of centripetal and centrifugal movements of rarefaction, in which a sequence of virulent “wordlyphagic” language processes chew, devour, swallow, digest, and regurgitate words (just to swallow them again). Moving away from the printed page, or being even more deeply impregnated in its textures, these viral processes can either offer a truly literal meaning to Burroughs' often-quoted words, “Language is a virus”, or simply emphasize its metaphoric sense, just as they can be simultaneously analyzed in vivo by means of laboratorial practices and/or scrutinized by digital algorithms.

By exposing the ways in which literature gains new possible readings by means of its disruptive interconnections with different fields of knowledge, namely in the use of digital technology, we argue that such a disruption is far from being exclusively digital. Nonetheless, as digital technologies permeate almost every aspect of our lives, there is also evidence of a boom in inter, trans, and, even, antidisciplinary practices that may as well be a result of this ubiquity.

From Eduardo Kac’s innovative biopoems in the 1980s [http://www.ekac.org/biopoetry.html] to the more recent Cesar & Lois’s bioart installations with microbiological A.I.s [http://cesarandlois.org/], this paper proposal aims to reflect on the poetics and aesthetics of text-organisms capable of breaking boundaries between nature and culture while merging social, technological and biological systems. In addition, an autophagic practice will also be included in the menu. Made by Portuguese collective wr3ad1ng d1g1t5 [https://wreading-digits.com], the Palavrofagia series [http://www.wreading-digits.com/site/uk/projects/palavrofagia] consists of a literary installation combining poetry and cromatography, a digital kinetic poem evincing the contours of a textual spiral and an entirely edible book devoured by its own algorithm.

What makes us human? Descartes believes it is the cogito – the rational mind, or the soul. “Reason,” he writes in the Discourse on the Method, “[is] the only thing that makes us men and distinguishes us from the beasts.” This categorical distinction between the human species and all other living things is embedded in the western philosophical tradition which has held, since antiquity and even before, that man has a privileged position in the natural world. Human life is endowed with intrinsic value, while other entities, such as animals, plants or minerals, are resources that may justifiably be exploited for the benefit of humankind.

If humankind’s core characteristic is intelligence, and the body (to quote Katherine Hayles) may be seen as a mere accessory, then the transference of intelligence to a different kind of body – let’s say, a machine – may create an even more perfect and entitled being. This is the underlying premise of post-humanism. Post-humanism envisions a condition in which humans and intelligent technology are becoming increasingly intertwined. It focuses on function rather than form and defines a species by the way it operates – in other words, processes information – rather than by the way it looks. The post-humanist worldview dethrones the human subject from his privileged status and transcends the boundaries of the human to include other intelligent systems, such as machines, animals and even aliens.

Trans-humanism does not aspire to transcend the boundaries of the human but rather to overcome its limitations. It seeks to enhance the functions of the human body via implants and prosthetics, and to modify human brain power and longevity with the help of technologies such as bio- or genetic engineering. While the post-humanist perspective denounces anthropocentrism, which celebrates the exclusivity and hegemony of the human species, trans-humanism may be described as “anthropocentrism on steroids”, because it centers on the enhancement of the human.

Both post-humanism and trans-humanism address the question of what makes us human, but offer two different answers. A third answer is suggested by the concept of the ecological self, coined by the Norwegian philosopher Arne Naess. We tend to confuse our self with the narrow ego, he argues, but “human nature is such that with sufficient, comprehensive (all sided) maturity we cannot help but identify our ‘self’ with all living beings.”

This is the attitude apparently adopted by the protagonist of The Vegetarian, a novel written by the South Korean female author Han Kang. Winner of the 2016 Man Booker prize, it describes a young woman who refuses to eat meat, repudiates her body and her very humanity and yearns to become a tree. The taboos she breaks, the transgressions she commits and her shocking and spellbinding transcendence of the human are the topic of this paper.

We are living-with our embodied and embedded lives now-here. Our entities are entangled not only with other (human and non-human) entities but also in the present time and local space, which are never only present and local. They should be rather considered as the assemblage of past-present-future with various forms of the glocality.

Merging Timothy Morton's notion of hiperobjects with Karen Barad's onto-epistemology turns us towards the posthuman aesthet(h)ics. According to our living-with now-here, I argue that we cannot differentiate ethics and aesthetics. We rather need to re-lecture Jacques Ranciére's concept of the distribution of the sensible in a posthuman manner.

For this purpose, I propose to analyse the novel "Drach" by Szczepan Twardoch. It is one of the most important contemporary Polish novels. It was translated into German (translation awarded with Brücke Berlin Literatur Award) and French. It is an Upper Silesian saga of two families, but the book's essential part is the narrator – the title character, Drach. They are a synonym of Earth, they have no gender, they speak all languages (so actually the book is written in Polish, German, and Silesian languages), they are in everything, and they are everything. Places and times do not matter to Drach, as well as the lives and deaths of human and non-human entities.

In Drach's perspective, everything happens here and now. The stories of Magnor and Gemander families are comparable to the history of subsequent generations of deer from nearby forests. I would like to propose the eco-logical reading of the novel, which means reading throughthe-oikos, through-the-home, or through-the-Earth. I would like to ask how a reading of Szczepan Twardoch's "Drach" can change our perception of the Earth, the time, space, and the living. Understanding the novel's multi-layered message can bring us closer to appreciating the rules of the posthuman community.

I point out that the concept of Drach is close to Gaia or Medea hypotheses, but I argue that Szczepan Twardoch has created a new notion – "the Drach hypothesis", which can be fundamental for comprehending the posthuman aesthet(h)ics.

What does it mean to be post? In a time of countless movements of post-[x], the value of the prefix itself becomes of interest: what does it do to a concept to reposition it by turning it into a ‘posterity’?

I will unpack this question through an inquiry into the concept of ‘post-digital’, scrutinizing and seeking to overcome the problems of rigid periodization that the prefix ‘post’ might imply. Such an inquiry is arguably also central to the ongoing exploration of posthumanist tendencies in literary and aesthetic fields. Indeed, posthumanism and the (post-)digital are – historically and continuously – closely connected (cf. Haraway; cf. Hayles). As Laura Shackelford argues, the post-digital’s “practice-based experimentation continues to pursue … posthumanist inquiries and immanent engagements with technicity” (349).

But what can the concept of post-digital contribute to the study of posthumanism? A noticeably large proportion of inquiry into the post-digital has revolved around discussions of the troublesome notion of being ‘post’ – discussions which, in my view, are relevant across multiple ‘posterities’. The post-digital is, in Florian Cramer’s formulation, “the messy state of media, arts and design after their digitization” (17, original emphasis). However, while the post-digital “is afterdigital,” it still “remains profoundly computational” (Berry 45, original emphasis). The troublesome question of being ‘post’ points towards a more general “problem of simply declaring something as being ‘post’ something else” (Cox 161). And as Eric Snodgrass points out, the promise of being ‘post’ can readily become a ‘blue flower’, or conceptual red herring, promising but not delivering a romanticist departure from that which is conceptually undesirable – be it the perpetual innovation imperative of the ‘digital’ ethos or the severe micro- and macroscopic oppression inherent to Humanism’s universal Man.

Faced with the problem of periodization, I want to suggest a seemingly paradoxical juxtaposition of the notions of ‘contemporary’ and ‘posterity’ in order to investigate how a status of being ‘post’ can decidedly play out in a contemporary setting, and potentially enact social transformation. Part of this conceptual endeavor is a drive to move beyond rigid periodization and binary oppositions of ‘before’ vs. ‘after’ or ‘digital’ vs. ‘analog’ – or ‘human’ vs. ‘nonhuman’ for that matter. Building on Geoff Cox’s critique of temporality in the post-digital, David Berry’s notion of the post-digital constellation, and Eric Snodgrass’ conceptualization of the post-digital as anamorphosis, I will develop the conceptual stance of contemporary posterity as a way of looking at (and acting within) our contemporary situation by/while looking ‘backwards’, through a positioning of one’s theoretical glance in a (conceptual) posterity, or a moment of what Snodgrass describes as “looking-in-the-(rear-view)-mirror” (30).

If these two posterities share characteristics, posthumanism would be to Humanism what the post-digital is to the colloquial notion of ‘the digital’. What this means in more exact terms is something I will be looking forward to discussing in Bergen. My hope is that a concept of contemporary posterity can help articulate the transformative potential of posthumanism and the post-digital alike – beyond rigid periodizations.

Literature and art forms contribute significantly to the discussion of epistemological concerns of posthumanism. Which is to say that, literature and art imagine, interrogate and nurture the subjective and embodied attributes of the nonhuman experience. It is through such exploration of the experiential aspects that sensitivity and other similar personal engagements can occur, which can augment our comprehension of nonhuman beings and entities, that in turn can lead to conspicuous epistemological and ethical consequences.

To consider critical posthumanism as established only within critical theory and philosophy, wherein the idea of the human has been the moot point, is to neglect the significant role of popular culture and literature in the revaluation of the concept of the human.

This paper while delineating critical posthumanist ideas in critical theory and discourses like animal and monster studies, techno scientific advancements, vital materialism and actor network theory, also concentrates on literary texts. Therefore, the rationale for conjoining the critical posthumanism with literary texts should be traced herewith.

This paper establishes that children’s literature is a fertile ground where philosophy and representation merge, providing a scope that children might think about their “being” and posits children’s literature as a resource to engage in complex philosophical explorations. The mutation of ontologies in children’s fiction challenges the ideological division between human, animal and the artificial. Since, children’s texts experiment with the idea of being, it puts forth ontological questions to their readers and invite readers to question who they are and what they might become.

This paper partakes in the timely debates discussing the possible ways in which posthumanism could operate in literary research by proving useful as an effective tool of analyzing literary texts for children. Posthumanism may, apparently, seem to be at odds with the traditional purpose of children’s literature to socialize and enculturate.

The essential humanist ideas of agency and selfhood conventionally portrayed in children’s literature are contrasted by the multiple and fluid forms of subjectivity as well as networked and assembled forms of selfhood as identified by posthumanist paradigm. However, posthumanism and children’s literature are connected by their shared interest in ethics. Innately preoccupied with the ethical subject formation, children’s literature provides for a ground ideal for interrogating the exclusionary practices that have historically led to creation of the humanist subject.

Moreover, the everyday state of the child or adolescent subjects as being in-between with respect to their relation with the adults and adult culture is analogous to the position that animals, machines and other nonhuman forms occupy in relation to the human subjects within the humanist scheme of things. In their ability to seek “pleasure in their confusion of boundaries” (Haraway, “A Cyborg Manifesto” 172) children emerge as being the ones who delight themselves in discarding absolute ontologies in favour of posthuman ways of thinking about ways of being.

The primary aim of the paper is to connect posthumanist concerns to children’s texts and thereby examine the ways in which these texts facilitate reconsidering and rethinking the ethical and political questions about the human, nonhuman and posthuman in various aesthetic contexts.

With ‘interface criticism’ (Andersen and Pold) as an outset, we will address how the interface is in a transition from a closed system of interaction, to a dispersed network. More specifically, we are interested in how to relate aesthetically to this transition as a new mode of organization of the ‘masses’ (or ‘users’) that takes place in a cultural industry around metainterfaces. Following a path of critique from Benjamin, Kracauer, Crary, Hayles and others, we intend to discuss it as a new form of media spectacle: a ‘metainterface spectacle’ that simultaneously organizes the users, and offers a way of perceiving their reality as ‘cognitive assemblages’.

This spectacle not only makes the interface increasingly transparent, smooth and accessible to the users; it also makes the organization of and perspective on the users more opaque. Put differently, with increased digitization follows not only a smooth user-reality of social media, video conferencing, streaming, and more, but also the displacement of horrific conditions of labor in the countries that produce our platforms (at the factories in Shenzen or the mines in Congo), problems around privacy emerging from increased datafication, the decline of quality (sound and images are ‘poor’ (Steyerl, Sterne) and text is datafied), global monopolies, and more. This paradox poses an interesting question to interface criticism, and digital research more broadly: when the interface disappears, how may one develop a critical understanding of the potential disjunctions (or, dislocations (Laclau)) between the desires of the users and the organization of users (including the maximization of profit, transgression of data privacy, exploitation of resources, and more)? How is perception formatted by and through technology and data, how does this relate to broader reconfigurations of sense-perception and ways of reading?

In search for possible answers, we are particularly interested in the hard to capture dimensions of common practices of digital culture (how images, text, music, user data, etc. are circulated, formatted, metrified, filtered, re-purposed, and more), and how they are exposed and reflected in artistic practices. We will analyse how artists and authors (e.g. Joana Moll, Ben Grosser, or Allison Parish) try to emphasize their own critical practice (‘poetics’) in artist run workshops, and how they in this way seek to help users critically relate to a contemporary ‘metainterface spectacle’.

They do so in quite different ways; engaging different levels of code, technical infrastructures, surface/user interfaces, the use of software tools, and more. An analysis of how these workshop practices reflect the particular poetics of the artists relates to ongoing discussions within software studies (of ‘critical technical practice’ (Agre) and how to ‘(un)learn’ technology’ (Bogers & Chiappini); but it also opens up for discussions with neighboring fields, including digital humanities (how to perform critical textual analysis when the text is algorithmically performative and the performances hidden in the banal discretion of a technological (and often technocratic) system?), as well as design and HCI (how to understand ‘critical technical practice’ as an alternative to ‘design’?).

Considering the effects of machine learning in aesthetic practices, the aim of this presentation is to discuss strategies for authorial inscription and the autonomy of literary writers in relation to programmable writing tools.

In a first moment I will apply David Nickel's notion of "proxy writer" (2013) to algorithmic writing agents in order to characterize these agents in what concerns their relative autonomy and place within human writing practices, and argue that digital writing environments and tools have been gradually becoming more alienated from the writer's control. Vilém Flusser's notion of "functionary" will be applied to computational writing practices in order to situate these in the broader context of writing media.

In a second moment I will discuss the writing strategies present in Jhave's ReRites (2017-18) in order to assess how such strategies cope with the high level of autonomy of neural-networks in text-generation, and how they function as a necessary precondition for literary inscription on a highly mediated writing space.

I will also discuss the reading modalities of ReadingRites, sessions in which "Poets & audience members read poetry written by artificial intelligence at the rate that the machine writes"1, and compare these with the reading modalities enabled by the print form, referring to the collection of 12 books that compile the poems which resulted from the human editing of AI-generated texts.

In a third moment, I will apply John Cayley's concept of "grammalepsy" to the human readings of non-edited AI generated texts and discuss the ontological status of machine-generated language. Finally, I will argue that, while being a tool for expanding creativity, autonomous systems also yield an algorithmicization of human writing and reading.

Jhave's Rerites provide an example of the possibility of human inscription and of relative levels of control over autonomous writing systems, allowing us to reflect on automatically generated language and on writing tools by posing the question: who's whose extension?

In my proposition, I would like to explore the notion of the minor (Deleuze and Guattari, 1986), employed here as a theoretical tool allowing for a critical inquiry into multifarious e-literary post-internet practices, popularly referred to as Third-Generation E-Literature (Flores, 2019), and accompanied by third-wave e-literature scholarship (Ensslin et al., 2020). However, I am going to build on this notion following its recent repurposing by Anne Sauvagnargues (as the minor style) (Sauvagnargues, 2016) and Erin Manning (as the minor gesture) (Manning, 2016). Kathi Inman Berens aptly remarks (Berens, 2020) that de-colonization of e-literature requires multiplicity of perspectives, as it entails not only cultural hegemonies operating along geographical, ethnic and racial axes and following the set of distinctions shaped by modernist aesthetics, but it also needs to address widespread domination of Big Tech companies shaping the popular internet platforms, programming solutions and users' practices. Hence, pointing out to technotexts developed within and with the popular platforms, in instances of "an impersonal assemblage of enunciation" (Sauvagnargues, 2016, p. 25), I would like to explore the conceptual potential of "becoming-minor" (Sauvagnargues, 2016, p.22).

I am going to argue that to provide the accurate critique of the phenomenon, e-literary practices of writing with and within popular social platforms (flurf poetry, memes, Instapoetry) need to be framed in the context of neoliberal landscape of digital, metrics-oriented capitalism (Brown, 2015), exceeding debate fixated on the clash of aesthetic distinctions or generational differences. Seen from such perspective, third-generation e-literary practices often seem to thrive on exploiting the platforms' operational logics and mechanisms, "unmooring its structural integrity, problematizing its normative standards." (Manning, 2016, p. 1).

The strategies - based on mimicry and constituting the "vapors" (Olson, 2017) of ever-present and ubiquitous availability of digital networks - can be seem far from the openly voiced cultural critique. Nevertheless, to grasp the full potential of such "vaporized" collective writing assemblages, hitting the minor key (Manning, 2016, p.1) might be useful. De-colonization of electronic literature might then become less obvious in terms of communicational strategies, but more thoroughly shedding the light on what is below the (textual or even programmable) surface of networked technotexts.

Perhaps the most mysterious of Fernando Pessoa’s heteronymic exudations, Bernardo Soares is the author of the Book of Disquiet, an unparalleled artistic endeavour which was first published only many years after Pessoa’s disappearance. In one of the fragments that became part of the intricate composition of this “book,” Soares asks such questions as the following: “What do I know about the difference between a tree and a dream? I can touch the tree; I know that I dream.” It was through the idea of vegetable tangibility that the Portuguese film director and multi-artist Edgar Pêra made a film out of the words of one other of Pessoa’s texts – Lisbon Revisited (2014), which stemmed from the heteronymic incarnation of Álvaro de Campos. In Campos’s poem, the homonymous “Lisbon Revisited” (1923), the poet disowns metaphysics, appealing instead to the affirmation of the “empty and perfect truth” of the sky, of the river, and of the cityscape of Lisbon. In one of the possible interpretations of the poem, these atmospheres would function as anchoring device for use by the solitary subject onto the kingdom of a “vegetal academia of silences,” of a “confusion of entanglements” in which the “greenness of the trees is part of my blood” (to return to the verbal formulas of the semi-heteronym Bernardo Soares). My intent in the present essay is to analyse the manner in which the director’s use of negative film and of 3D image technology underlines the expression of the materiality of the plants alluded to in the enchanting lines of Pessoa’s multifarious voices. I expect to be able in that same move to demonstrate that Edgar Pêra’s understanding of the modernist poet’s technique of depersonalization implies an almost absolute absence of the figure of human beings in the film: in fact, the human presence is practically only made noticeable by the voice – the materiality of words; yet, when the film editing adjusts this materiality to vegetable images it causes what could be considered the vocalization of the reason of plants, a vegetable thought as it were – a thought that is no longer human.