The Internet Unconscious: On the Subject of Electronic Literature

Description

There is electronic literature that consists of works, and the authors and communities and practices around such works. This is not a book about that electronic literature. It is not a book that charts histories or genres of this emerging field, not a book setting out methods of reading and understanding. The Internet Unconscious is a book on the poetics of net writing, or more precisely on the subject of writing the net. By ‘writing the net’, Sandy Baldwin proposes three ways of analysis: 1) an understanding of the net as a loosely linked collocation of inscriptions, of writing practices and materials ranging from fundamental TCP/IP protocols to CAPTCHA and Facebook; 2) as a discursive field that codifies and organizes these practices and materials into text (and into textual practices of reading, archiving, etc.), and into an aesthetic institution of ‘electronic literature’; and 3) as a project engaged by a subject, a commitment of the writers’ body to the work of the net. The Internet Unconscious describes the poetics of the net’s “becoming-literary,” by employing concepts that are both technically-specific and poetically-charged, providing a coherent and persuasive theory. The incorporation and projection of sites and technical protocols produces an uncanny displacement of the writer’s body onto diverse part objects, and in turn to an intense and real inhabitation of the net through writing. The fundamental poetic situation of net writing is the phenomenology of “as-if.” Net writing involves construal of the world through the imaginary.? Cover Title Copyright Contnets Foreword Introduction I As if I wrote the Internet The great beyond Weapon body Crust II For example oooo ooooooooo OMG LOL Leet or 1337 III Survivable communication Ping poetics Traceroute Urgent interruption Somatolysis IV Lovers of literature Handshakes Binding the subject Chmod -777 Read/Write/Execute V Consumed by the net The crowd of electronic writers Debts and obligations Axiomatics The literary community VI I read my spam PLEASE REPLY MY BELOVED Can spam The end of spam End-to-end VII Logging in and getting off CAPTCHA Taking the test The difference thought makes VIII Plaintext March 11, 1968 Character and glyph Extreme rendition Plaintext performance Friend request IX Bodies never touch Pervy intimate avatars Passion of the avatar, avatar of passion Notes Bibliography Index