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.
