AFTER DIGITALISATION
RJ 2022

POST-DIGITAL LITERATURE

Jesper Olsson

Translated by Clare Barnes

Riksbankens Jubileumsfond
in collaboration with Makadam förlag

MAKADAM FÖRLAG

GÖTEBORG & STOCKHOLM

WWW.MAKADAMBOK.SE

After Digitalisation is the 2022 Yearbook for Riksbankens

Jubileumsfond

Editor: Jenny Björkman

Editorial board: Nicklas Berild Lundblad, Ingrid Elam, Lisa Irenius,
Sven Anders Johansson

POST-DIGITAL LITERATURE

© Jesper Olsson 2022

Graphic design: Johan Laserna

eBook: Bulls Graphics, Halmstad 2022

ISBN this volume 978-91-7655-409-8

ISBN for the box set of six essays: 978-91-7061-404-0

ISSN 2000-1029

This work is licensed under Creative Commons — Attribution 2.5 Sweden.

To view a summary of the licence, go to http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.5/se/ or contact Creative Commons, PO Box 1866, Mountain View, CA 94042, USA.

Contents

Foreword: After Digitalisation

Literature, media archaeology and post-digital symptoms

Retro cultures: the post-digital as a reaction

“Sea of data”: poetic transfers and literary maximalism

Digital formats, post-digital readings

Protagonists in exile: literature as artificial intelligence

Esc

References and suggested reading

List of illustrations

Presentation of Riksbankens Jubileumsfond

Foreword:
After Digitalisation

“After digitalisation”? The theme could give the impression that digitalisation is complete: first we lived analogue lives, then digitalisation arrived, and now it is finished. But the “after” of the heading does not mean that digitalisation is a stage we have passed through, nor that the relationship between digitality and its analogue counterpart is as simple as we imagine. Nevertheless, perhaps we have arrived at a situation or state in which we can gain perspective on digitalisation, and examine its effects and conditions in a critical and nuanced manner.

The essays in this collection are wide ranging in their subjects, but they all relate to the question of what the digital is and how it affects our lives. Nina Wormbs’ essay, on how what is often presented as an ethereal sphere of ones and zeroes, beyond the material world, examines the extent of its hunger for resources and its impact, with the vast amounts of e-waste it produces. Hans Ruin’s piece examines the paradoxical longing for control and submission that can be discerned behind our expectations of AI, artificial intelligence. Malin Åkerström’s text about meetings as a phenomenon demonstrates how digital technology encourages both a new meeting etiquette and new opportunities for escape. In turn, Orsi Husz reveals the continuity behind the transition from an analogue documentary regime of verification to a digital surveillance capitalism. In area after area, the consequences of digitalisation appear to be double or, rather, dialectical. The digitalisation that promised simplicity seems, in reality, to lead to the generation of increasingly complex systems, writes Nicklas Berild Lundblad. If technology reveals the world, it also appears to simultaneously hide it.

In this essay, literary scholar Jesper Olsson examines what happens to literature in a post-digital world. The binary code infiltrates and renegotiates both reading and culture as a whole, he writes. Audiobooks are the most obvious example, where letters are transformed to sound via ones and zeroes and we listen using apps.

Book production has fundamentally changed, as has reading, which has moved from between covers and into our screens. How does this affect reading? What do data extraction, algorithms and surplus information do to literature? Can digitalisation create something new? Can an artificial intelligence write poetry? And can knowledge of how literature and reading are changing in a post-digital era help us understand this new world?

Jesper Olsson has excavated the media archaeological of the recent past and found new patterns, but also nostalgia for the analogue era. The retro trends are strong and, even online, we select books from virtual bookshelves. “Literature and art have always explored media and material conditions,” states Olsson, and says that the philosophers who, at the end of the 1980s, believed that only some people would need to learn to read in a digital future, will probably not be proved correct. Reading – and writing – continues.

The Editors

Literature, media archaeology and post-digital symptoms

Recent years have seen an intense debate in the field that is sometimes called literature, and sometimes, more properly, the book market. The rotating hub of that discussion has been the sound or, to be precise, the oxymoron that goes by the name “audiobook”. Opinions and arguments have come from various places. Their solidity has varied, but there is no mistaking the pathos; everyone appears to defend phenomena such as “reading” and “literature”. On one side are those who regard listening to audiobooks as the contemporary saviour of reading and storytelling. On another front, there are those who perceive, in that same listening at the kitchen sink, when jogging or driving the car, the undermining of reading as an act of enlightenment.

Naturally, closer examination would provide a more nuanced image of the voices in the debate. It is particularly difficult to disregard the problematic tendency of some audiobook providers to favour commercially viable and streaming friendly prose above more challenging aesthetic formats that cultivate critical and intellectually challenging reading. However, one circumstance that has not received the attention it deserves in this debate could be seen as the fundamental issue, the discussion’s ontological vanishing point: What is an audiobook?

The answer to this question may lead us to a long narrative about oral and written culture (also very relevant to our times), about reading and writing technologies and inventions in media technology, such as the phonograph and cassette player. However, if we adopt an archaeological approach to the media and dig deeper through the layers of material, there is a realisation that the audiobook’s existence today, its virulence and economic potential, does not primarily concern sounds, voices or listening – but is basically due to “voltage differences”, to use the words of German media theorist Friedrich A. Kittler. In other words – it is due to the material bases of binary code and the algorithms that have increasingly infiltrated and reorganised not only the domains of reading, but also culture and society in general.

The audiobook thus appears to be a symptom of a broader and deeper technological transformation, where digitalisation has become a natural condition of existence, almost second nature. In this way, it is also an expression of how what we call literature and books are influenced by what could be called a “post-digital condition”, which includes e-books, more innovative electronic literature and, of course, printed books, whose production and distribution have long since been embedded in digital technology. As literature and media scholar Andreas Nyblom recently emphasised, more or less “new” forms of reception have become relevant in this context, not just via the ear, but also via rapid scanning, on-screen “hyper reading” – to use a phrase from literary critic and media theorist N. Katherine Hayles – and via various types of machine reading, of which the epistemological and aesthetic potential can as yet be regarded as unclear.

It is this post-digital condition that is in the foreground of my essay – especially how literature has oriented itself in this terrain during a period of time that stretches beyond Facebook and TikTok. I will be following a few different tracks, which all filter into the media apparatus and aesthetic processes under discussion and out into history – and thus test the “post-digital” as both a spade and a mirror in an analysis of our evasive times. Here, there are links to my previous archaeological investigations of post-digital screens and books in contemporary literature, in the book Läsning – apparat – algoritm (2016), and to what literary scholar Jonas Ingvarsson has analysed as a “digital epistemology” in his ingenious study, Bomber, virus, kuriosakabinett (2018).

The first track follows a reactive and nostalgically mined turn towards what is said to have preceded the onrush of digital media: the analogue. A retro action that not only concerns the rising popularity of vinyl records, but also, supremely, books. The second track runs towards a literature which, without always directly expressing it, recognises the digital as a naturalised and decisive factor in contemporary lives and society, but also, in format and language, illuminates digitalisation as a material and historical process that thereby actualises aesthetic, ethical and political problem in a data saturated 24/7 world. This leads to the third track, and the question of whether literature’s aesthetic investigation of computers, digital media, coding, algorithms, databases and so on, which dates back to the 1950s, has embraced a post-digital element from the very beginning. Perhaps it is even the case that literature – old medium, old art – can provide perspective on the innumerable attempts to raise digital technology to an artificial intelligence?

As hinted above, perspectives and navigational aids in this essay will partly be drawn from the theoretical-methodological field that, based upon the work of Michel Foucault, has come to be described as media archaeology, and which emphasises media as material conditions for writing, reading, thinking and acting. Media thus become forms of “ontological infrastructures”, to quote media historian John Durham Peters. Such a material perspective can be both synchronous and drill deeper down into technological artefacts and their effects, and search backwards, diachronically, through time, to investigate fault lines and overlaps between different media histories; one specific domain in media archaeology comprises “dead media”, those that have fallen out of the versions of history as a progression.

The post-digitally organised and aesthetically oriented media archaeology covered here thus, via the medium of books and the forms and fantasies of literature, aims to provide historical perspectives on and to make visible the material and technological conditions for the digital and its assimilation into the lives, cultures and societies of the twenty-first century. Perhaps the vague contours surrounding future formats for reading and writing will also start to come into focus.

Retro cultures: the post-digital as a reaction

The concept of “post-digital” started appearing in academic and artistic circles as the new millennium approached – including articles about post-digital studies and music – and, ten years later, the term was circulating at conferences, in books and journals. Its appearance was not unexpected, given the prefix’s utility in the previous half-century, but also given the intensity with which digital technology expanded at the time of the turn of the millennium – through the spread of the internet, increased processing and memory capacity, mobile tools, advanced interfaces, web 2.0 and social media, which influenced everyday life as well as science, art, economics and infrastructure. A literal interpretation of the concept perhaps indicates a state that is after or beyond the digital but, just as in the case of theoretical relatives like postmodernism or posthumanism, in reality it has less to do with adopting a temporal approach than with highlighting how the word has been condensed and problematised.

In a Swedish context, Rasmus Fleischer was early to examine the post-digital in relation to the new media conditions for music in Det postdigitala manifestet (2009). Another, very ambitious attempt, to interrogate the meaning of the concept was undertaken in 2013, in the web-based publication A Peer-Reviewed Journal About (APRJA). The editors’ foreword emphasises how the term does not wish to admit any distinction between the old and new media, how the post-digital includes the reuse of analogue technologies, but with a twist, how there is a striving for DIY agency beyond the ideologies of innovation, as well as networking beside “big data capitalism”. Still, it is laconically stated, the concept has – from the very beginning – “become commercialised”.

There is reason to consider the turn towards the analogue and DIY that is highlighted in APRJA. It emphasises an important aspect of the post-digital: as a reaction to the media dominance of digital technology. If the contemporary world, on the one hand, is characterised by the rapid availability of information for an increasing number of “users” – there are lower thresholds for listening and reading, consuming and communicating, publishing and sharing – the underlying technology appears, on the other hand, to be ever-more impenetrable and difficult to understand. Technology controls and shapes, even creates, its users. In this situation, solid artefacts and tools that can be examined and played with will be attractive, not least for artists (in the broad sense) who have always contemplated and processed the media conditions of their activities.

Around a decade ago, British music critic Simon Reynolds developed an observation that leans this way – on how contemporary pop music and its cultural costumes are increasingly characterised by reuse. Bands reunite, works are reissued, sub-genres are reborn, tracks are remixed and forms, styles and approaches reoccur. “Retromania”, is what Reynolds called this trend, while philosopher Mark Fisher read and contemplated the pattern via Jacques Derrida’s “hauntology”. Furthermore, the French critic and curator Nicolas Bourriaud’s analyses from the early twenty-first century can be actualised in this context. They examine contemporary art as a form of “post-production” which observes, perhaps rather than the psychosocial and affective investments in the past, the technological conditions for massive reuse and an editorial approach. For Bourriaud, the situation is summarised by two iconic contemporary figures: the DJ and the programmer, whose practices rest directly on the media’s potential. Elucidating the technological medium is decisive. This diagnostic retromania would not have arisen unless the digital archives and networks had, to a greater degree, made musical history constantly and virtually available via platforms such as Spotify.

That this concerns a media-material retromania is also suggested by the renaissance of the vinyl record and turntable, in some places even cassette tapes, in recent decades. In addition to hi-fi aficionados and sharp-eared listeners being able to discern a more granular register of tones and frequencies and, as a bonus, re-experiencing the noise of the gramophone needle in its track, this development, albeit limited to specific sociocultural niches, is indicative of a longing to tie sensual experiences to actual physical objects: objects that can be handled and even changed by the user. Naturally, someone who listens to digitally distributed music also interacts with the objects they desire, but there are nevertheless tangible differences. The post-digital retromania therefore contributes, in its own way, to emphasising the differentiation of the contemporary media landscape. Something similar can be said of the more innovative post-digital combinations of old and new being developed in fields such as augmented reality (AR) and mixed reality (MR), although these are beyond the scope of this text.

Literature and books have also, perhaps to an even greater degree, participated in this nostalgically mined and materially manifested reaction. Ever since the growth of personal computers and the internet in the 1980s and 1990s, anxiety about the death of the book has been aired by academics, critics, authors and journalists. Even if such debates can be traced further back through history – they appear to intensify on the thresholds of media history – the volume of these lamentations increased at the end of the twentieth century, as summarised in the title of literary scholar Sven Birkert’s oft-cited The Gutenberg Elegies (1994). Concerns have since widened to not only encompass the book as a successful technology, but also the practices that accompany it. A good example is journalist and author Nicholas Carr’s reflections on the shallowness of reading in a digital ecology, memorably summarised in a gloomy insight: “Once I was a scuba diver in a sea of words. Now I zip along the surface like a guy on a Jet Ski.”

An eye-catching response from the publishers, authors and – perhaps not least – the designers has been to enhance the bookishness of books through shifting (icono)graphic operations. Novels are published in expensive bindings, with ornamentation that has an aura of fin-de-siècle and high culture, poetry is embodied in strict, elegant volumes, essays and non-fiction are equipped with covers, paper and ink that emphasise reading as a tactile and olfactory operation, and so on. Ironically, the same aesthetic approach that characterises the remediation of the printed book has also occurred on-screen over the past decades of e-book publishing. Here too, bookishness is highlighted, with the intention of not worrying the recipients with a new interface, rather the opposite, to contribute to naturalising the digital.

However, it would be premature to generalise about this affectively loaded gesturing; it not only deals with using pathos and a nose for what is sellable to promote the codex as a product or an experience-shaping and culture-making “guiding medium”, to use a term from literature and media scholar Jochen Hörisch. The situation is ambiguous, and each case must be examined separately. A historicising and critical operation can be performed here – a media-archaeological investigation and figuration that, via the material history and aesthetic of the book, can expand the time and space of twenty-first-century digital networks and remind us of their media history and physical finitude, of their dependence on embodied labour, materials and energy, as well as of their many ideological layers. Books are therefore situated as both a form and an historical technology; the media and the aesthetic forms and expressions they promote are a sedimented and complex history.

“Sea of data”:
poetic transfers and literary maximalism

If, from one perspective, the digital explosion around the turn of the millennium put analogue devices and old media practices in the shade, from another it contributed to an increased level of complexity. It is a telling sign that in the same year, 1997, American poet and artist Kenneth Goldsmith publishes his first more standard book, No. 111 2.7.93–10.20.96, and also founds one of the twenty-first century’s most influential literary and artistic online archives, Ubuweb (ubu.com). On the one hand, a monstrously growing collection of analogue material is created – of poetry, essays, music, sound art, films and so on – resting upon the possibility of digitalisation, the conversion of text, images and sound to binary code. On the other hand, a six-hundred-page “novel” is written, with its roots in the celebrated experiments of modernism (à la James Joyce or Gertrude Stein), but irradiated by the contemporary screen landscape.

No. 111 built upon materials that Goldsmith had captured technologically, using a tape recorder, over a period of almost four years (see the title) among the clouds of sentences and words formed in the urban spaces of New York at the end of the century. It unites a rag-tag sequence of dialects and styles, which have been joined to other text material, organised alphabetically and arranged according to strict rules or, if one wishes, algorithms. If the work has literary predecessors – in addition to those previously mentioned, one might include the French Oulipo group – associations must also be made with the postwar development of digital media, where there has been an enormous accumulation of information that is now collected on the internet, as well as massive development of cultural technologies and methods designed to manage such vast amounts of data, such as searching, linking, copying, pasting and so on.

While Ubuweb is a digital creation, an opportunity to store and make available art that would not otherwise reach a wider audience, Goldsmith’s novel (and perhaps his archive too, from another perspective) can be read and described as post-digital, because the technology and practices that already characterised the digital in the mid-1990s were incorporated into a bookish and literary process. Computers, software and the internet are not directly described in the text, instead they are apparent in the form and the method. In this way, what I would call a media-archaeological dimension of the work will be uncovered in the interweaving of old and new, from the respect of both media and aesthetics – I will develop this idea shortly.

Whether, at this time, the author himself saw this as part of his poetics can be left unsaid. A decade or so later, however, the idea is explicitly expressed, for example in the introduction to an essay collection, Uncreative Writing (2011), where Goldsmith states that people’s cutting and pasting has now gone on for decades. Authors have not only come to “mimic [the computer’s] workings”, but also to “exploit these functions in extreme ways that weren’t intended by their creators”. This idea is accentuated in other works by Goldsmith that build upon transcription and scanning, such as the Weather, Traffic and Sports trilogy (2005– 2008), for which radio programmes have functioned as a source. The transfer of language between different settings is thus a linchpin of his work. In retrospect, this characteristic is also apparent in No. 111, which punctures the myths about automated and frictionless conversion and processing of data that should be entailed by the digital, manifested in jaunty fantasy futures like “the paperless office”.

Someone could perhaps object that Goldsmith belongs to a small field in contemporary literature, that he is not representative, despite having received some attention thanks to his readings for President Obama and the First Lady at the White House and articles in magazines like The New Yorker. Still: similar post-digital traces can be discerned at several locations in the landscape of the contemporary novel.

In the 1980s, when word processing made its breakthrough, there were recurring expressions of concern about a graphomania promoted by technology, whose most important symptoms were streamlining and monstrous amounts of text. However, in the early twentieth century, such verbal maximalism had instead been transformed into a literary strategy, with conditions to be found in a digital setting. As British author Tom McCarthy reminds us in his astutely media-historical novel Satin Island (2015), the modern(ist) idea of a novel or book that can encompass everything may have played out its role in a time when an all-inclusive text is unceasingly being written by a disseminated digital infrastructure that has infiltrated the lives and realities of humans and other creatures. The post-digital response to McCarthy’s thoughts can thus, perhaps, be traced in the many contemporary literary works that push the issue of fiction off balance, and which, through their explosive emission of words, swell out from the binding of individual volumes and, in some cases, generate entire series of books.

If we turn our gaze to the Nordic literature of recent decades, Martina Lowden’s textually versatile work Allt (2006) offers us an early expression of such a digitally conditioned but post-digitally composed novel. Immediately after this, the tendency is further accentuated in notable works such as Karl Ove Knausgård’s My Struggle (2009–2015) and Lars Norén’s thousands of pages in En dramatikers dagbok (2007–2020), where the media-archaeological dimension is emphasised by it being written on a typewriter.

Aside from every nostalgic and affective track in the individual author’s body and psyche, Norén’s typewriter appears as an anachronistically placed fold in the successful history of digital media. Norén’s heroic act of writing, which he shared with both Goldsmith and Knausgård, does not lack “masculinist” overtones, just as it is not without significance that Lowden, a member of a younger generation, is more playful and interested in digital forms and expressions. However, the primary impression is of a literature that succeeds in uncovering aesthetic and historic sediments in a smart contemporary world, whose self-understanding often builds upon a forgetting of the past and the future – a literature which reminds us of how the “old” is always embedded in the “new”, as Marshall McLuhan observed in his media theory as far back as the 1960s.

This insistence on the long unfinished text is, in turn, associated with autofiction’s examination of the boundaries between the work and life, which is naturally part of the interrogation of how the boundaries between private and public, individual and environment, are renegotiated and even eradicated in a digitally reinforced contemporary society of data extraction, identity-shaping algorithms and control. These texts find their way into everyday corners, observe every detail and vitalise a double relationship to the multitude of events, objects and information encompassed by the twenty-first century’s globalised and accessible world. On the one hand, an uninterrupted flow, where everything seems convertible to binary code. On the other hand, a dedicated attention and concern for the most trivial – both the unremarkable coffee cup and the loaded branding – but also the most concrete, which in Knausgård’s case is motivated by the importance of “attaching” the gaze, which literary scholar and philosopher Martin Hägglund has interpreted as an affirmation of life’s transience, but which also becomes an act of particular ontological and epistemological value in a “sea of data”, to use the words of artist and critic Hito Steyerl, in a world where our “seeing is superseded by calculating probabilities”.

From this perspective, these text flows express an affirmation of physicality and embodiment in time and space – in contrast to the data flows that apparently provide a freedom from limitations, as well as an illusion of endless opportunity, while also placing new shackles on us through what Shoshana Zuboff summarises in her term “surveillance capitalism”. These works can thus also be said to search for and explore a literary form for reflection and political resistance at a time when every expression and identity appears to be characterised by a type of “data behaviourism”.

The collecting and accumulation of words – or “data” – become a way of exploring how reading and writing, as well as thinking and acting, are reshaped in the twenty-first century’s media ecology and Hydra-like control society. Perhaps minimalist tendencies in contemporary literature could also be investigated from a similar perspective, such as the American author Lydia Davis’ sparse and absurd narratives, whose few lines of text display a format related to that of digital texts (e.g. tweets and text messages), but also radically differ from the informational discourse – even if charged with visual additions ☺ – through their semantic density and worrying resonance. In this regard, it is possible, here, to discern the contours of a critical and post-digital but reductively oriented literature.

Digital formats, post-digital readings

Maximalism was just one element in the poetics that Kenneth Goldsmith employed in his strange novel, No. 111. As stated, he also designed rules – or a “programme” – for how words and sentences should be organised and put in motion. One such rule was that the number of syllables in the words and the number of words in the sentences increase with each alphabetically organised chapter. Such an “algorithmic imagination” must, in the same manner as the maximalism above, be described through its double connection to digital media: influenced by and simultaneously problematising – a form of modifying appropriation.

As early as the 1960s, when poets and artists started to investigate the dawning computer technology’s aesthetic potential, their approach was marked by both curiosity about the opportunities to create new forms and a playful criticism, which toned down the celebration of technological progress. Forms such as concrete poetry and conceptual art contained the seed of a post-digital aesthetics through the investigation of software-like writing methods, the use of lists, clusters and “databases”, and through the play with codes and figures, which must be linked to the growth of what philosopher and psychoanalyst Félix Guattari has called a “machinic universe” and what Katherine Hayles describes as a “computational regime” in the field of cybernetics and early computers. Together, all this provoked a diverse artistic exploration of how humans and machines, language and code, became more closely interlinked. Hayles has described this as an increasing “intermediation” in post-war culture.

Over the past fifty years, these types of intermediations have been most clearly expressed in literature cultivated for and in digital media. Depending on the current ideas and concepts, the practice has been given various names and profiles: hypertext novels, cyberpoetry, electronic literature, code poetry and so on. But more important has been how computers, screens, keyboards and other equipment have been partially diverted from their primary function and transformed into aesthetic technologies: how the hyperlink generated a narrative form, which was not untested in the context of books (think of footnotes), but which in the 1980s was radicalised through a click and rapid switch of textual environment; how Flash software became the source of a poetic microgenre with animated images and texts in the 1990s; or, for that matter, how social media and messaging services such as Twitter and SMS established frameworks for not just flows of information, but also literary texts that in more interesting (albeit rare) shapes problematise the specific format.

If these activities and objects deserve the epithet “digital”, books and paper and print have also been summoned in their wake – as well as some other, older media – as media-archaeological observers and providers of perspective on what this description implies. But the question is, can similar post-digital effects already be discerned in the remediation of the codex to which the e-book market has dedicated itself over the past fifteen years? With the intention of providing the text on the screen, and the interface as a whole, with a more familiar appearance, the architecture of the printed book has, as we have seen, functioned as a visual scheme for e-books too, with fabric bindings, cover illustrations, and so on. Nevertheless, reading these “volumes” includes operations such as quick searches and hyperlinks, sometimes out of the book and to the web as a whole, which rather defamiliarise the experience of a “book”.

Hayles and her colleague Jessica Pressman have, against the background of what they call “comparative textual media”, partly influenced by media archaeology, highlighted how the analogy between the book and the screen has lost some of its force as screens have become both smaller (mobile phones) and larger (exhibition settings) and, additionally, to varying degrees, been integrated in the everyday landscape – as a part of the more comprehensive naturalisation of the digital via WiFi, phone networks, sensor networks, the internet of things and so on. At the same time, the enquiring media archaeologist can observe how this similarity between screen and page was weak, materially and technically, from the very start. As literary scholar Dennis Tenen states in Plain Text. The Poetics of Computation:

Screen reading […] happens on screens that refresh themselves at a rate of about 60 cycles per second (Hertz). The digital word is technically an animation; it moves even as it appears to stand still. This property attunes the reader to a particular mode of apprehension, affecting not just the physics but also the aesthetics of digital media.

Screen reading is thus (as we already knew) not book reading, but it is these differences and tensions – and the accompanying potential for de-naturalisation – that attract the post-digital literature that is cultivated on paper. If interest in other sign systems and codes started to infiltrate literature back in the 1960s, this traffic has now expanded and differentiated. The intermediation of media and ontologies (human, animal, machine) can take different forms but, not infrequently, the thresholds, the absurd dislocations and disturbances are highlighted. In brief: it deals with extracting meaning and, perhaps, beauty from conversion problems.

How do such conversions, exchanges and translations come to be more concretely expressed? There is no short answer. Instead, multiple impulses in form and narrative technique can be brought to light. One example is a poetics of lists and series, utilised in a range of contexts and which can be linked to the textual maximalism discussed above, as a metonymy for the contemporary information explosion, but also as an imitation of the menus that now textually organise everyday life – and as a reflection on how data storage takes place beyond the narratives that, previously, (orally or in writing) documented and organised the knowledge of cultures and communities. Even if media theorist Lev Manovich was exaggerating, there is a seed of truth in his famous claim in The Language of New Media (2001) that the database will replace narrative as the symbolic form of our culture. It is from this horizon that experimental novels, such as Lotta Lotass’ Den vita jorden (2007) – a work that Jonas Ingvarsson has also described as post-digital – can be interpreted: the causally and temporally driven narrative in a collection of loose pages of text becomes a series or a list.

An elaborate expression of this post-digital turn in literature is also found in works that more directly build upon transfer and translation between languages and codes, or different media and modalities. If lists and menus are easily found in printed contemporary literature, approaches like those mentioned usually belong in more experimental settings. Recent decades have thus witnessed things such as bar code poetry, literature translated to genetic code, texts which transform into diagrams and pictures using an algorithm, and much more. Alongside the bodily and semantic effects, such works ask questions about how information is stored, processed and shared, how technological media – code and silicon or paper and letters – as well as aesthetic forms, regulate these exchanges and thus also thought, emotion, experience. New poetic forms are explored to depict desires and relationships, politics and ethics in an era of big data and mass surveillance, operating on entirely different scales to that of the individual and family.

Nevertheless, it is of course entirely possible to return to written literature’s older forms and measures, to place these alongside contemporary calculations, algorithms and code practices and thus generate a special resonance. This is seen in Malte Persson’s latest poetry collection, Undergången (2021), where the rhyme and metre bring shape to wide-ranging and clear-sighted reflections on the twenty-first century’s computational regime:

Våra självspelande hjärnspelsdosor
spelar nu oss själva: likt kung Midas
gjorde guld gör vi en värld av glosor,
där materien kan överskridas.*

Persson’s lines elaborate on the “cyber idealism” that emerged in the 1990s, when dreams of a freer life on the internet were vivid; an idealism that still penetrates parts of the discourse about accessibility, freedom of choice and interactivity on social media, and which handily chooses to forget how technology and matter always impose limits – a shiny-eyed idealism that sometimes borders on cynicism and rests upon what Kittler once described as “computer illiteracy”. This idealism is one element confronted by the critically oriented, post-digital literature through its staging of overlaps and thresholds between different media.

Perhaps the clearest example of such a staging is when the traffic between e-book and codex changes direction – when the screen’s aesthetics are replanted between the covers of a book, through screenshots from websites, emails, Google searches and so on. Such inversions have taken place for decades and can now be studied in best-selling novels as well as conceptual poetry. At a microlevel too, this screen culture has left impressions in literary writing through the intensified circulation of some forms of punctuation and diacritical marks. Even if an explicit link to the digital interface is not always discernible, the general increase in multimodal and typographic variation in twentieth-century poetry and novelistic art must be interpreted in the light of a digital ecology – sometimes as an adaptation to the aesthetics of the screen, sometimes as critical interventions in a culture of e-publishing and streaming services. And, even if Hayles and Pressman are right about the analogy between screen and book beginning to weaken as the screen landscape becomes more varied, it is also obvious how the format and forms of the codex have multiplied in several places.

One of the most ingenious examples in this context remains Lotta Lotass’ poetic teleprinter tape Fjärrskrift (2011), which was delivered in a cardboard box and accompanied by a YouTube video that showed the coding, distribution and printing of a poem about desire and distance, nature and culture, via a Siemens teleprinter from the war-haunted 1940s. This can be interpreted as an attempt to expand the territory of the book via an archaeological expedition that aims for a technology that historically preceded and contributed to the establishment of a digital condition, but which has now been forgotten. Another example of how the codex has expanded (literally) and challenges its established physical boundaries is poet Peder Alexis Olsson’s 772-page conceptual poetry book Tennis (2015), which can be unfolded to create a tennis court, with white lines and all. Here, a set of associations are triggered, actualising, for instance, the white cube (the gallery) that once separated art from reality. At the same time, the author upends the French poet Mallarmé’s famous statement about how everything in the world exists to end up as a book.

The path is opened up, so to speak, for a post-digital literature that not only nostalgically reuses elements from an analogue culture, but critically investigates how old and new infiltrate each other – a path that leads beyond both screen and book into a vaguer, more complex terrain. Another example of this is the collectively written and coded novel and app – and now printed book – The Silent History (2012/2014), whose narrative and meanings are partially generated by GPS technology and depend on where in the world the listener is. That this novel, via a strange story about children who lose the ability to speak in a pandemic, represents a culture and a world beyond language and alphabets, beyond an anthropocentric gaze on the planet, appears congenial. It displays the contours of a silent history.

* Our autonomous music boxes
now play us: like King Midas
made gold, we build a world of words
where matter can be transcended.

Protagonists in exile: literature as artificial intelligence

Recently, people who subscribe to Netflix can benefit from a new-yet-old service from the company; after a moment of hesitation in your clicking, an offer to help you choose appears. The algorithms that previously organised its enormous offering under strange headings and invented genres now come out from hiding to directly address the viewer. Such automated processes, using data extraction, statistics and probability calculations are of course now normal. The “computational regime” that Hayles discerned in the wake of cybernetics is long-established and naturalised. Although the word is perhaps appalling, it is difficult to deny that the human world has become “machine-centric”.

Many people are also aware that one essential station in this transformative process was shaped by the humanist tradition, by an experience of the world of books. In the 1990s, a young economist read a novel by Kazuo Ishiguro, founded Amazon and replaced human readers and critics with code and algorithms that satisfactorily managed everything at a lower cost. The reader’s tastes were confirmed and the company earned money.

And why stop there? Calculated expectations do not only need to be coupled with existing books; the latter can be produced using the values that the algorithms uncover. Works can be adapted to the readers and, if not strictly “personalised”, as good as. And here, a glimpse of the audiobook debate I highlighted at the beginning appears. One of the controversies in this debate is whether recorded works will, to a greater extent, be calibrated and composed according to the most commercially viable (thriller, erotica, feelgood… just as teasers), which risks literature’s relative autonomy and critical potential as well as opportunities for gaining new knowledge. Or, perhaps, reading as such is simply cancelled – a person becomes their own author. According to American literary scholar Mark McGurl, Amazon’s digital platform for self-publication and its efficient distribution system are beginning to fundamentally change the art of the novel and turn everything that is disseminated into “genre fiction”.

Amazon’s inventive use of algorithms is often presented as a success story about automation and efficiency. Naturally, this does not mean that these smart technologies have been freed from human work and material extraction. This aspect has also been investigated by a post-digital and media-archaeologically interested literature. In this terrain, one astute work is Nick Thurston’s “outsourced” poems in his collection Of the Subcontract: or Principles of Poetic Right (2013), which examines the issue of smart technology and opens it up to the shadowy side of techno-capitalism. By using advanced software in combination with Amazon’s much-debated service for cheap labour, Amazon Mechanical Turk – named after Wolfgang von Kempelen’s late-eighteenth-century chess automaton, which was actually controlled by a person hidden in a box – Thurston has created poetry that in many ways exposes the media-technical, biomaterial and labour-based foundation of automation. As the publisher’s blurb concisely states: “[The book] reduces the poetic imagination to exploited labour and, equally, elevates artificial intelligence to the status of the poetic.”

The latter element contains a greater meaning than is perhaps first apparent. The other year – the first of the pandemic, 2020 – a couple of books with sober black bindings were published. Furthest down on one of them was a face, cropped and lying down, in profile. If something familiar could be discerned in its features, these vague associations were probably confirmed by the title and author: Ammaseus horisont. AI tolkar Karin Boye [Ammaseus horisont. AI interprets Karin Boye]. The second book, attributed to K. Allado-McDowell, had a cut-out hole in the middle, through which a colour photograph was visible. The picture appeared abstract, somewhat obscene, until the page was turned and a flower surrounded by greenery appeared. The bio-connotations were reinforced by the title, Pharmako-AI, as well as how the context was a time when viruses and microbes were a frequent topic of discussion. Both these books had been written by, or in close conversation with, an artificial intelligence of the type known as a neural network, which is not something finite, but something that can learn.

Is the author with a capital A thus leaving the stage? And what can be said about Danish artist Andreas Refsgaard’s conceptually fascinating and consistently undertaken project Booksby.ai, in which an AI not only writes, but also designs, distributes and sells its books?

However, the relationship between smart technologies, on the one hand, and literature, particularly poetry, on the other, already goes back about seventy years. In the early 1950s, in cooperation with mathematician Christopher Strachey, a relatively “small” mainframe computer – therefore called Baby – at the University of Manchester, composed love letters with lyrical characteristics. At the end of the decade, mathematician Theo Lutz created an algorithm that had some “mastery” of syntax and grammar, and wrote poetry based upon Franz Kafka’s novel The Castle. Lutz called them “Stokastische Texte”, but the stochastic quality corresponded to a (post)modern poetic sensibility in the making, so their meaning is not lost on contemporary readers.

In the 1960s, poetry was generated through collaborations between humans and machines and, from the 1980s onward, as we have seen, digitally based literature developed. Claims to a directly machine-composed literary work were, however, limited. One high point consists of the novel (if we can call it that) The Policeman’s Beard is Half-Constructed, created by the RACTER AI and published (naturally!) in 1984, as a printed book. Contemporary distribution options were not available.

From one perspective, these experiments may appear ominous, like variations on a familiar myth and nightmare about a future in which machines reign supreme. However, against a contemporary background – a background that includes the instrumental view of technology represented by the audiobook’s commercially calibrated defenders – it is more reasonable to emphasise how the above-described literature and its intermediations of various sign systems and ontologies offer a critical and historicising investigation of dichotomies such as human and machine, artificial and organic, nature and culture.

Within the framework of the techno-ecologies that have developed over the past century, in a world of all-encompassing digital networks, sensor environments and what the German media philosopher Erich Hörl describes as distributed and environmental agency, it is also increasingly difficult to maintain sharp divisions between such concepts and worlds. French philosopher Catherine Malabou thus emphasises, in her discussion of the latest generation of AI, how human and machine ontology can no longer be strictly separated: “Any attempt to separate the fields so as to save ‘nature’ or human integrity from technological ‘singularity is a dead end.”

In a later book, Katherine Hayles has analysed such biotechnological compositions in terms of “cognitive assemblages”, and started to examine the complex and urgent questions about agency and responsibility that arise due to autonomous vehicles, semiautonomous weapon systems, mass surveillance, selection algorithms in care services and others. Here, literature can function as a critical testbed for thinking and feelings in areas of concern, but this requires fundamental examination of conceptions of human and machine.

The most interesting factor is perhaps not that a machine becomes intelligent (in the human sense), but that technology can generate knowledge that is not created, perhaps not even imaginable by people, if we can imagine something like this. As media theorist Luciana Parisi has stated, there is a potential to generate something unexpected and unknown in contemporary AI – not just an artificial, but an alien intelligence that contributes to an “alien epistemological production”, as Parisi writes. Perhaps it is at this point that AI can approach art and literature – by ministering to the unexpected, by making strange, not by reconstructing unfinished Beethoven symphonies.

Such a perspective on digital ecology, one which thinks beyond technology as subservient or threatening, could also contribute to a problematisation of data-behaviourism’s control society and the algorithms that fuel filter bubbles. Such a perspective on literature could expose this as an AI in itself: a defamiliarising and artificial intelligence, whose language, when it has an emotional effect, seems to stem from somewhere else (muse, machine), to disrupt the reader and crack open a way towards the more-than-human.

Esc

In the summer of 2005, the Monochrom activist and artist collective held what they called a “magnetism party”. Their intention was to gather magnetic media – hard drives, memories, MP3 players and so on – with the aim of eradicating data through demagnetisation. The event was described as a potlatch, a ritual and symbolic act of expenditure, while the critical potential of the event was obvious in an era of digital escalation. Can this be described as a post-digital action? Was it reactionary or a meaningful intervention in a cultural and social situation in which the (problematic) consequences for thought, agency, integrity and so on, had become apparent?

If, at a quick glance, Monochrom’s magnetism party could be linked to the analogue nostalgia and retro culture that arose at the start of the millennium and – for music – was surveyed by Simon Reynolds, its playfulness and its recognition of the digital as an existential infrastructure also encompass an element of the post-digital aesthetics I have aimed to uncover in literature. It can be described as an activist and artistic media archaeology – through the emphasis on the material media and through attention to the digital’s history. Among the iPods and hard drives that were exposed to the magnetic forces were also cassette tapes, a media-historical remnant which, through its memory function in early computers, built a bridge between the analogue and the digital.

Both the autofictional maximalist writing and the post-cybernetic poetry that I have discussed above are thus located in a setting and situation where digital technology has become increasingly naturalised; they are forced, so to speak, to act on its terms; excessive information, data extraction, regulative algorithms are the stuff of today’s everyday life. However, by actualising old tools and misusing technologies, through historicization, distortion and play, a critical operation and an aesthetically reshaping practice becomes possible. Other perspectives can be suggested. This comes close to what critic Diedrich Diedrichsen and artist Oier Etxeberria recently called the “cybernetics of the poor”: “the ways in which art that is aesthetically, cognitively, affectively, and experientially engaging has developed various kinds of […] counter-cybernetics that overturn, subvert, and repurpose the methods and techniques of total control and management”.

Art and literature have always explored their material and medial conditions, which naturally shift through time and space. What now needs to be processed is the digital materiality that sets the boundaries for audiobooks, e-books and printed books. Such an investigation can, as we have seen, lead beyond the modern novel and a lyricism that has been based on the self-reflective individual, her relationships and intimate interactions – lead towards other forms and ways of writing and modes of reading that represent and examine the ethics of mass surveillance, the epistemology of data extraction, the algorithmic constructions of reality.

When, at the end of the 1980s, philosopher Vilém Flusser speculated in Does Writing Have a Future? (1987) about the future of reading and writing, his forecast for a digital future was dark. “Only historians and other specialists will be obliged to learn reading and writing in the future”, he pessimistically noted. Does this also apply to literary works – are they doomed to become obsolete or a specialist interest for followers of the avant-garde and collectors of rare books? Are we approaching the end of literature as we have understood it in the modern era? Perhaps. But the viewpoints for such assumptions are not exactly stable. For the moment, reading and writing of various types continue in a complex and diverse media ecology.

References and suggested reading

Allado-McDowell, K., Pharmako-AI, London: Ignota, 2020.

Ammaseus horisont: AI tolkar Karin Boye, Malmö: Svensk Sci-Fi, 2020.

Birkerts, Sven, The Gutenberg Elegies: The Fate of Reading in an Electronic Age, Boston & London: Faber & Faber, 1994.

Bolter, Jay & Richard Grusin, Remediation: Understanding New Media, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1998.

Bourriaud, Nicholas, Postproduction, Berlin: Sternberg Press, 2002.

Carr, Nicholas, The Shallows: What the Internet is Doing to our Brains, New York: W & W Norton, 2010.

Cramer, Florian, “What is Post-Digital?”, A Peer Reviewed Journal About, “Post-Digital Research”, 2014, https://aprja.net/article/view/116068 (retrieved May 2022).

Davis, Lydia, The Collected Stories of Lydia Davis, New York: Picador, 2014.

Derrida, Jacques, Specters of Marx: The State of the Debt, the Work of Mourning and the New International (1993), trans. Peggy Kamuf, London: Routledge, 2006.

Didrichsen, Diedrich & Oier Etxeberria, Cybernetics of the Poor, Wien: Kunsthalle Wien, 2020.

Fisher, Mark, Ghosts of My Life: Writings on Depression, Hauntology and Lost Futures, Winchester, Hampshire: Zero Books, 2014.

Fleischer, Rasmus, Det postdigitala manifestet, Stockholm: Ink förlag, 2009.

Flusser, Vilém, Does Writing Have a Future? (1987), trans. Nancy Ann Roth, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2011.

Foucault, Michel, Archaeology of Knowledge (1969), London: Routledge, 2002.

Funkhouser, Chris, Prehistoric Digital Poetry: An Archaeology of Forms 1959–1995, Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2007.

Goldsmith, Kenneth, No. 111 2.7.93–10.20.96, Great Barrington, MA: The Figures, 1997.

Goldsmith, Kenneth, Uncreative Writing, New York: Columbia University Press, 2011.

Guattari, Félix, The Machinic Unconscious, Los Angeles: Semiotext(e), 2011.

Hayles, N. Katherine, How We Became Posthuman, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999.

Hayles, N. Katherine, My Mother was a Computer, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005.

Hayles, N. Katherine, Unthought: The Power of the Cognitive Unconscious, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2017.

Hayles, N. Katherine & Jessica Pressman (eds.), Comparative Textual Media: Transforming the Humanities in the Postprint Era, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2013.

Huhtamo, Erkki & Jussi Parikka (eds.), Media Archaeology: Approaches, Applications, and Implications, Berkeley: University of California Press, 2011.

Hägglund, Martin, This Life: Secular Faith and Spiritual Freedom, London: Profile Books, 2019.

Hörisch, Jochen, Ende der Vorstellung: Die Poesie der Medien, Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp Verlag, 1999.

Hörl, Erich, “Introduction to General Ecology: The Ecologization of Thinking”, in Erich Hörl (ed.), General Ecology: The New Ecological Paradigm, London: Bloomsbury, 2017.

Ingvarsson, Jonas, Bomber, virus, kuriosakabinett: Texter om digital epistemologi, Göteborg: Rojal förlag, 2018.

Johansson, Sven Anders, Litteraturens slut?, Göteborg: Glänta, 2021.

Kittler, Friedrich A., Maskinskrifter: Essäer om medier och litteratur, Gråbo: Anthropos, 2003.

Knausgaard, Karl Ove, My Struggle 1–6 (2009–2011), London: Penguin Books, 2019.

Link, David, Archaeology of Algorithmic Artefacts, Minneapolis: Univocal, 2016.

Lotass, Lotta, Den vita jorden, Stockholm: Bonniers, 2007.

Lotass, Lotta, Fjärrskrift, Stockholm: Drucksache, 2011.

Lowden, Martina, Allt, Stockholm: Modernista, 2006.

Ludovici, Alessandro, Post-Digital Print: The Mutation of Publishing since 1894, Eindhoven: Onomatopee, 2012.

Malabou, Catherine, What Should We Do with Our Brain? (2004), trans. Sebastian Rand, New York: Fordham University Press, 2008.

Malabou, Catherine, Morphing Intelligence: From IQ Measurements to Artificial Brains (2018), New York: Columbia University Press, 2019.

Manovich, Lev, The Language of New Media, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2000.

McCarthy, Tom, Satin Island, London: Jonathan Cape, 2015.

McGurl, Mark, Everything and Less: The Novel in the Age of Amazon. London & New York: Verso Books, 2021.

McLuhan, Marshall, Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man, New York: Scribners, 1964.

Norén, Lars, En dramatikers dagbok, Stockholm: Bonniers, 2008.

Nyblom, Andreas, ”I litteraturens transitrum: Från stillhet och tystnad till rörelse och distraktion”, in Julia Pennlert & Lars Ilshammar (eds.), Från Strindberg till Storytel. Korskopplingar mellan ljud och litteratur, Göteborg: Daidalos, 2021.

Olsson, Jesper, “List>Program>Ecology: Digital/Post-Digital in Swedish Poetry”, in Jesper Olsson, Jonas Ingvarsson & Jakob Lien (eds.), Archive Book Conference: Representations and Reconfigurations of the Digital in Swedish Literature 1950–2018 – A Digital Publication, 2019 (www.reprecdigit.se; part B in production).

Olsson, Jesper, Läsning – apparat – algoritm, Stockholm: OEI editör, 2016.

Olsson, Jesper, Alfabetets användning: Konkret poesi och poetisk artefaktion i svenskt 1960-tal (diss.), Stockholm: OEI Editör, 2005.

Olsson, Peder Alexis, Tennis, Stockholm: Drucksache, 2015.

Parikka, Jussi, What is Media Archaeology?, Cambridge: Polity Press, 2012.

Parisi, Luciana, “Computational Logic and Ecological Rationality”, in Erich Hörl (ed.), General Ecology: The New Ecological Paradigm, London: Bloomsbury, 2017.

Persson, Malte, Undergången, Stockholm: Bonniers, 2021.

Peters, John Durham, The Marvelous Clouds: Toward a Philosophy of Elemental Media, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2015.

Racter, The Policeman’s Beard is Half-Constructed: Computer Poetry and Prose by Racter, New York: Grand Central, 1984.

Reynolds, Simon, Retromania: Pop Culture’s Addiction to its Own Past (2011), London: Faber & Faber, 2012.

The Silent History, 2012/2014 (www.thesilenthistory.com).

Slater, Avery, “Crypto-Monolingualism: Machine Translation and the Poetics of Automation”, Amodern 8, January 2018, https://amodern.net/article/crypto-monolingualism/ (retrieved May 2022).

Steyerl, Hito, Duty Free Art: Art in the Age of Planetary Civil War. London: Verso Books, 2017.

Tenen, Dennis, Plain Text: The Poetics of Computation, Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2017.

Thurston, Nick, Of the Subcontract: or Principles of Poetic Right, Toronto: Coach House Books, 2013.

Zuboff, Shoshana, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism: The Fight for the Future at the New Frontier of Power, London: Profile Books, 2019.

List of illustrations

Screenshot of a generic e-bookshelf.

Extract from Kenneth Goldsmith’s No. 111, 1977.

Anonymous source code poetry.

Screenshot from YouTube video showing Lotta Lotass’ Fjärrskrift (2011) being printed.

Page from RACTER’s The Policeman’s Beard is Half-Constructed, 1984.

Riksbankens Jubileumsfond:
promotes, inspires and participates

Riksbankens Jubileumsfond (RJ) is an independent foundation with the goal of promoting Swedish research in the humanities and social sciences. The foundation was established through a resolution in the Swedish Riksdag in 1964, when a donation from Riksbanken (the Swedish Central Bank) was approved and the statutes adopted. RJ’s establishment was part of the tercentenary celebrations for the world’s oldest still operating central bank. These celebrations also included the Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel and the bank building on Brunkebergstorg, Stockholm. The Riksdag and Riksbank aimed to use the foundation to benefit an urgent national issue: scientific research linked to Sweden.

For more than fifty years, the foundation has promoted research in the humanities and social sciences. In 2021, total funding for research and collaboration amounted to more than SEK 500 million. Hundreds of researchers in these disciplines have received grants for conducting research, building infrastructures and networks, establishing new contacts and participating in conferences and seminars, as well as in public debate.

RJ 2022

After Digitalisation

Editor: Jenny Björkman

Editorial board: Nicklas Berild Lundblad, Ingrid Elam,
Lisa Irenius, Sven Anders Johansson