Abstract: Deleuze and Guattari’s fifty-year-old claim, in Anti-Oedipus , that capitalism is “‘illiterate” needs reconsideration in the age of large language models (LLMs). This essay argues that such computational language-generating novelties augment their original verdict because they constitute the historical actualization of a paradoxical linguistic form—machinic illiteracy—that finds its most salient prototype in Maria Wutz , an eighteenth-century novella by German author Jean Paul. Six key theories—Brown’s periodization of literary history; Enzensberger’s ordinality of illiteracies; Baudrillard’s notion of communicative overload; McTaggart’s discretization of time; Kittler’s media genealogy; and Blanchot’s great refusal—are focalized through Paul’s novella. This is to diagnose the historical emergence of an ecstatic cacophony and temporal unreality that define our late-modern regime of capitalist legibility and its profuse “illiterature.” These forces are then related, in their inchoate historical forms, to the work of Swiss author Robert Walser and American author William Gaddis, whose visionary texts demonstrate immune responses, within literature itself, to their overpowering disorientation.
Abstract: At the beginning of the twentieth century, a significant atmospheric-affective transformation took place that marked a turning point in the history of war, technology, culture, and society. Air lost its innocence, transforming from a life-giving element into a force of death. This lethal power manifested in the development of airborne weapons, such as airplanes and poison gas. This article will analyze several texts and images (by B. von Suttner, W. Owen, P. Klee, E. Erler, O. Dix, W. Roberts, J.S. Sargent, E. Janicka, J. Armstrong, and Banksy), focusing on the largely nonrepresentational phenomena of air and atmosphere from the First World War to the present. The analysis will demonstrate how modern artistic discourse reflects on the technological conquest of the air and atmospheric terrorism and how art participates in this discourse. Of particular interest is the question of radical artistic acts of protest that focus on the seemingly invisible and intangible element of air to express hope and the desire for peace.
Abstract: This essay examines the representation of quantum computing in Liu Cixin’s Three-Body trilogy, focusing on its allegorical significance that maps questions of national identity and collective consciousness in the context of China’s postsocialist modernity. Drawing on Fredric Jameson’s concepts of ideologeme and national allegory , the essay explores the distinct conceptual and ideological roles of quantum computing in Chinese postmodernism, as manifested in Liu’s trilogy. These roles diverge from their representations in Western postmodernism, where quantum computing often functions both as a trope and as a technological instrument for probing contingent empirical realities, promising to deconstruct the reified logic of the digital and to grant access to an unmediated truth of modernity. From the postsocialist Chinese perspective instanced in the trilogy, however, quantum computing does not symbolize a quest for the fundamental truth of modernity; rather, it carries geopolitical significance of questioning the predetermined course of neoliberal globalization and reimagining alternative telos of modernity.
Abstract: This article uses the pop icon Mariah Carey’s 2018 revelation that she has bipolar-II disorder to open up a theorization of diva and bipolar time. It argues that intrinsic to the affective and performative milieus of contemporary diva culture is an anticipatory and stylized expression of bipolar-II that can be read through the pop singer’s oeuvre and in particular in her public appearances prior to her disclosure and spanning live performance, reality television, music video, and promotional events. Focusing on two strategies that could be misrecognized as symptoms of madness or mania—the deployment of multiple media personalities and multiple media temporalities—this article reads Mariah’s mediated “moments” as forms of resistance to the raced and gendered demands of late capitalist celebrity culture.
Abstract: This article compares two twentieth-century poems—one by Palestinian poet Mahmoud Darwish and another by Israeli writer Dahlia Ravikovitch, both works alluding to settler colonial histories and transnational Indigenous landscapes and experiences. The article proposes a way of reading these poets in conversation, charting how they juxtapose the Palestinian/Israeli context with colonial projects in North America and Australia. Even though the authors composed their works almost three decades apart, in the 1960s and the 1990s, this article locates the generative theoretical overlaps between their poems, demonstrating the ways in which they invoke moments from the past and employ intertexts as a means of political imagination and forewarning. That is, the writers speculate about how the colonizers in these various sites will be haunted by their exploits in the future. By delineating transnational connections between Palestine/Israel and Australia and North America, the poets use comparison for critique, destabilizing colonial discourses, more broadly. I argue that Darwish and Ravikovitch engage in a mapping project across national boundaries, deploying poetic language and conjuring other settler colonial sites to subvert imperial ideologies and utilize an anticolonial lens through poetry.
Abstract: This essay offers a miniature sociology of the institutions that produce autofiction authors, arguing that recent autofictional form should be understood as a rebranding of the campus novel and as an expression of a utopia for elites: arts and humanities education for them, precariousness and indebtedness for the rest of us. Then, turning to apocalyptic horror stories refashioned by Ling Ma and Percival Everett into campus novels, the essay examines how national decline, student debt, and other crises in academia degrade scholarship and culture work to create a class of undead (un- and underemployed) workers. But the essay ultimately argues that, in genre fiction like Everett's and Ma's, we may find more genuinely utopian directions for higher education, ones grounded in racial and class solidarity.
Abstract: Klara and the Sun (2021), Kazuo Ishiguro's first novel after winning the Nobel Prize in 2017, takes the form of the classical dystopia, the privileged "socio-political subgenre" of contemporary science fiction. Ishiguro's novel is set in a near-future United States where humanoid artificial intelligences have taken up a prominent place in an advanced neoliberal economy. Like the clone children in Ishiguro's Never Let Me Go (2005), these AIs serve as allegorical figures of disposable affective labor in a service economy. Klara and the Sun also explores the undermining of the bonds across generations produced by desperate efforts to reproduce an upper-middle-class status quo within what William Davies terms "punitive neoliberalism." This is figured in the novel by way of the changes that have occurred over the last four decades in the modern university. And yet for all the novel's grimness, Ishiguro ends on a note of hope.
Abstract: This essay interprets the project of Tom Comitta's experimental novel The Nature Book as a response to the crisis of the metabolic rift. Defined by John Bellamy Foster and others as a rupture in environmental circuits of renewal and repair, the metabolic rift provides one way to describe human alienation from the natural world. Comitta's novel seeks recuperation from this injury through a deep immersion into nonhuman perspectives. The novel consists of a collage of passages focusing on nonhuman agents; the passages were clipped from three hundred well-known novels. By arranging these snippets in a dreamlike flow that travels across landscapes and seasons, Comitta builds up a remarkable literary experience and new readerly relation to the natural world.
Abstract: This article considers the relationship between formal representations of political violence in postcolonial works of fiction—and their subsequent canonicity—by tracking the dialectic of obliquity and concreteness in the representation of political violence in postcolonial literature, which offers a blueprint by which to understand the literary market's reaction to the gradual waning of postcolonial optimism. Locating this dialectic across three sites—Dublin, Lagos, and Johannesburg—this article argues that the literary market has been content to reproduce marketable and fungible forms of literature that paper over the uneasy histories that frustrate optimistic narratives of national coherence and postcolonial development. In the process, historical crises become representative fodder that engages a paradoxical form of historical memory predicated on selective forgetting, which in turn facilitates the rebranding of various postcolonial nations into primarily privatized capitalist entities. The article argues that by facilitating this rebranding, postcolonial novels produce the conditions for their canonicity; even those works nominally critical of the subordination of postcolonial states to global capital are almost invariably recruited in this rebranding exercise, such that these novels are transformed by canonization into objects of their own critique.
Abstract: This article examines Leïla Slimani's novel, Chanson Douce , with an interest in what bad or failed care reveals about care work. Representations of care work in the novel, the article argues, highlight a particular structure of labor and erasure. The argument then demonstrates how the novel translates erasure to a formal principle. Omission, in this case, functions as the formal rule that guides the novel's claim to literary autonomy, a work capable of being interpreted, and judged, as art. Arguing for social or political heteronomy as an interpretive horizon, the article finally examines how erasure informs the novel's social intervention. The article concludes by examining aesthetic autonomy as a precondition for social critique of the novel.
Abstract: This essay outlines a Marxist theory of the Anthropocene. It argues that Marxism is, at its heart, ecological, that Marx's critique of political economy is also a critique of what capitalism does to life, life-making practices, and the planetary conditions of life. It draws out the ecological dimensions of Marx's use of terms such as "metabolism" and "species-being." It proposes that ecology in Marx and Marxism should be understood as a set of formal dynamics; it anchors the examination of these formal dynamics in the questions: How does capitalism warp human form? How might we reimagine and change human form? It makes the case that the value of Marxist ecology is not only critical and diagnostic but also utopian.
Abstract: This article presents a reading of Itay Meirson's Hebrew novel The 90-Minute War , the premise of which is that a soccer match would decide the end of Israeli oppression of Palestinians. The article begins by articulating the dialectic of futurity in Marxist theoretical accounts of science fiction and utopia. It then examines the treatment of political contradictions in the novel, showing how it refuses to reconcile these. The main thrust of the article is to argue that the novel is symptomatic of a postmodern collapse of our historical perception, even as it tries to overcome this very collapse, to thematize it to imagine its outside.
Abstract: This essay revisits the ethics of failure in J. M. Coetzee's Waiting for the Barbarians (1980). The novel's narrator, a colonial magistrate, fails to impose a liberal humanist narrative of reconciliation onto the barbarian girl, a racialized native. While much scholarship has focused on this failure, I argue that the novel's self-reflexive fragmentation of its allegorical narrative invites readers to see its stylized and opaque fragments as allegorical signs in themselves—hieroglyphs revealing a political message of community in a visual rather than a narrative form. Drawing on Walter Benjamin and Roman Jakobson, my method of interpretation shifts the locus of the novel's allegorical enunciation from the magistrate to the barbarian girl, demonstrating how the novel's formal innovation is imbricated with its ethical and political concerns.
Abstract: "Three times I was shipwrecked," Paul of Tarsus wrote. "I spent a night and a day in the open sea," he continued. In this reading of Paul, influenced by Michel Serres and Herman Melville, the "openness" of the sea refers to its vast indistinguishable expanse. It also refers to the ways the sea opened Paul to understand the "interior" as part of the infinite of the exterior, as Pip experienced during his time adrift in Melville's Moby-Dick . Paul's formats (as law) were threefold: divine order, linguistic designation, and political identity. Paul saw the watery part of the world, and it taught of the inescapable disorder splashing around these formats, as ways of establishing being and ontological specificity in a turbulent world. The sea taught the indistinguishable nature of distinctions; it taught the newness of life. Traveling through water, even in baptism, signified a freedom from law and sin, for Paul. It was an entrance into a less singular body. This essay argues that this open body, unboxed from the law, provides a way to live with the planet and its warming waters.
Abstract: What is the relationship between decolonization and translation in processes of knowledge and cultural production? This paper addresses this question through the work of Frantz Fanon with a view to illuminating the relevance of a complex understanding of translation to broad processes of decolonization. Proceeding through a critical-theoretical analysis of Fanon's psychiatric writings, the paper suggests that his work opens up the space for thinking of translation ("transmutation" as he terms it) as an analytical and transformative praxis through which to reclaim the epistemic and political value of cultural sources and experiences oppressed by colonial forces. On the one hand, Fanon illuminates the epistemological significance of attending to psychic life for mobilizing a critical function of translation beyond models of colonial assimilation. On the other hand, he points to the healing possibilities that translation offers when viewed as a creative process involved in the reconstitution of personality and the restoration of agency in the production of social and cultural life.
Abstract: An illness memoir written by a terminally ill person at the end of his/her life is a thanatoir, an example of which is Paul Kalanithi's When Breath Becomes Air (2016). The leitmotif explored in this essay is the overlapping of autonomy and causal determinism in Kalanithi's thanatoir. While dying of cancer, Kalanithi becomes a father and a writer. And in the end, he lets go of his breathing support. The tacit dichotomy between such ostensibly autonomous choices of Kalanithi and those that are already causally determined forms the core of this essay. This article also assesses the exercise of autonomy in the midst of death and asks if autonomy is, in fact, possible vis-à-vis causal determinism.
Abstract: This essay considers what Donna Haraway and others have called "multispecies relations." It takes artist Alison Ruttan's The Four Year War at Gombe (2009–2011), which comprises photographs of a reenactment of a chimpanzee war studied by Jane Goodall, as an invitation to contemplate how the biological and behavioral similarities between humans and chimpanzees have been figured. Exploring the promises and risks of multispecies imaginings and multispecies mourning, the essay cautions against the way "species," as a category of thought and a means of differentiation, is used in contemporary discourses in a manner that elides its troubling racist history. Indeed, the relation of chimpanzees to humans has been racialized historically, and "species" have been evoked to divide not only the order of primates but also the category of the human.
