Electronic Literature In Latin America: From Text To Hypertext 3030309878, 9783030309879, 9783030309886

Table of contents :
Acknowledgements......Page 6
Praise for Electronic Literature in Latin America......Page 8
Contents......Page 9
List of Figures......Page 11
Chapter 1: From Text to Hypertext: Electronic Literature in Latin America......Page 12
The Advent of Digital Technologies and Their Impact on Literary Formats......Page 16
Towards a Critical Latin American Digital Cultural Studies......Page 26
Intertextual Dialogues and Metatextual Play......Page 37
Critiques of Material Conditions of Technologies......Page 43
Aesthetics, Technologics, Ethics: Latin(o) American Digital Authors at Work......Page 50
Works Cited......Page 57
Chapter 2: Revitalising Legacy Media: Carlos Labbé’s Pentagonal: Including You and Me (2001) (Chile)......Page 61
Legacy Media, from Collage to Cut-and-Paste......Page 63
From Epistolary Novel to Hypertext Fiction......Page 82
Works Cited......Page 91
Chapter 3: Foregrounding Fragments and Gaps: Marina Zerbarini’s Eveline, Fragments of a Reply (2004) (Argentina)......Page 95
From Textual Gaps to Electronic Gaps......Page 98
Digitally Enhanced Inconclusive Endings......Page 104
Towards a Digital Stream of Consciousness?......Page 107
Ontological Troubling: Realms of Fiction......Page 120
Works Cited......Page 124
Chapter 4: Reanimating the Whodunnit: Jaime Alejandro Rodríguez’s Coup de Grace (2006) (Colombia)......Page 127
The Interface: Shape-Shifting the Crime Victim......Page 134
Exquisite Corpse: Surrealist Game Tactics Disrupting the Whodunnit......Page 135
Mortal Line: Ludic Dreamscape Meets Detective Fiction......Page 143
Digital Death: The Classic Modus Operandi?......Page 153
Works Cited......Page 158
Chapter 5: Animating the Baroque and Resisting the Brand: Belén Gache’s Góngora Word Toys (2011) and Radical Karaoke (2011) (Spain-Argentina)......Page 162
Góngora Word Toys: Baroque Excess Meets Animation......Page 166
Radikal Karaoke: Resisting the Brand, Resisting the Platform?......Page 182
Works Cited......Page 197
Chapter 6: Twitter Poetry and Rethinking the Aphorism: Eduardo Navas’s Minima Moralia Redux (2011 to date) (US-El Salvador)......Page 201
Minima Moralia Redux: Remixing Adorno for the Twenty-First Century......Page 204
Minima Moralia Redux, Part Two: The Ideology of the Algorithm......Page 219
Works Cited......Page 229
Chapter 7: Critiquing Web Structure and Online Social Capital: Doménico Chiappe’s Minotaur Hotel (2013–2015)......Page 232
Rhizomes and Labyrinths: Navigating Locales and Hypertext Structures......Page 235
Pasiphae and Compelled Sexualised Performance Online......Page 245
Email Conceits and Technocapitalism......Page 256
Works Cited......Page 264
Chapter 8: Conclusion......Page 268
Works Cited......Page 273
Index......Page 274

Citation preview

NEW DIRECTIONS IN LATINO AMERICAN CULTURES

Electronic Literature in Latin America From Text to Hypertext Claire Taylor

New Directions in Latino American Cultures Series Editors Licia Fiol-Matta Latin American and Puerto Rican Studies Lehman College Bronx, NY, USA José Quiroga Emory University Atlanta, GA, USA

The series will publish book-length studies, essay collections, and readers on sexualities and power, queer studies and class, feminisms and race, post-coloniality and nationalism, music, media, and literature. Traditional, transcultural, theoretically savvy, and politically sharp, this series will set the stage for new directions in the changing field. We will accept well-­ conceived, coherent book proposals, essay collections, and readers. More information about this series at http://www.palgrave.com/gp/series/14745

Claire Taylor

Electronic Literature in Latin America From Text to Hypertext

Claire Taylor Department of Modern Languages and Cultures University of Liverpool Liverpool, UK

New Directions in Latino American Cultures ISBN 978-3-030-30987-9    ISBN 978-3-030-30988-6 (eBook) https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-30988-6 © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2019 This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, express or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. Getty Images Credit: mbortolino This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Switzerland AG. The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland

Acknowledgements

I have been fortunate to benefit from the guidance of many colleagues and friends who have supported, inspired, and advised me throughout the research and planning of this volume. These include Robert Blackwood, Jordana Blejmar, Sarah Bowskill, Debra Castillo, Hilda Chacón, Luis Correa Díaz, Diana Cullell, Sally Faulkner, Dunja Fehimovic, Charles Forsdick, Erika Fulop, Loss Pequeño Glazier, Lise Jaillant, Jane Lavery, Abi Loxham, María Mencía, Nohelia Meza, Rebecca Ogden, Emanuela Patti, Ailsa Peate, Héctor Perea, Thea Pitman, Andrew Prescott, Lisa Shaw, Paul Spence, Scott Weintraub, and Simeon Yates. I am also very grateful to the students, academics, and members of the public who formed the audiences at the various seminars and conferences at which I have given papers over the past five years on the topic; their comments and feedback on the papers have been immensely helpful. Likewise, I also thank the anonymous readers at Palgrave for their thorough reading, their attention to detail, and their detailed comments, which have helped me in the shaping of the finalised volume. I also owe a debt of gratitude to the authors whose work is analysed in this volume, for their time and patience in answering my queries, for their sharing of their ideas with me, and for their generosity in allowing me to reproduce images of their work. To Doménico Chiappe, Belén Gache, Carlos Labbé, Eduardo Navas, Jaime Alejandro Rodríguez, and Marina Zerbarini, I am immensely grateful. Some preliminary thoughts informing this volume appeared in an article published in the Journal of Comparative Critical Studies: Claire Taylor, v

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ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

‘From the Baroque to Twitter: Tracing the Literary Heritage of Digital Genres’, Journal of Comparative Critical Studies, 13:3 (2016) 307–329. My final thanks go to Jairo Moyano, Lara Moyano-Taylor and Catherine Moyano-Taylor, for everything. Any errors in the volume are, of course, my own.

Praise for Electronic Literature in Latin America “Taylor’s focus on these texts as the inheritors of long-established literary traditions provides a useful and refreshing alternative to a tendency to frame electronic culture as exclusively popular or even mass culture. The project thus builds a vital argument about how radical literary traditions, both past and present, can make important contributions to ideological and political debates.” —Professor Par Kumaraswami, University of Reading, UK

Contents

1 From Text to Hypertext: Electronic Literature in Latin America  1 2 Revitalising Legacy Media: Carlos Labbé’s Pentagonal: Including You and Me (2001) (Chile) 51 3 Foregrounding Fragments and Gaps: Marina Zerbarini’s Eveline, Fragments of a Reply (2004) (Argentina) 85 4 Reanimating the Whodunnit: Jaime Alejandro Rodríguez’s Coup de Grace (2006) (Colombia)117 5 Animating the Baroque and Resisting the Brand: Belén Gache’s Góngora Word Toys (2011) and Radical Karaoke (2011) (Spain-­Argentina)153 6 Twitter Poetry and Rethinking the Aphorism: Eduardo Navas’s Minima Moralia Redux (2011 to date) (US-El Salvador)193

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7 Critiquing Web Structure and Online Social Capital: Doménico Chiappe’s Minotaur Hotel (2013–2015)225 8 Conclusion261 Index267

List of Figures

Fig. 2.1 Fig. 3.1 Fig. 3.2

Carlos Labbé, Pentagonal: Including You and Me (2001) 54 Marina Zerbarini, Eveline, Fragments of a Reply (2004), close-ups 91 Marina Zerbarini, Eveline, Fragments of a Reply (2004), textual fragments93 Fig. 3.3 Marina Zerbarini, Eveline, Fragments of a Reply (2004), blurred textual fragments 101 Fig. 3.4 Marina Zerbarini, Eveline, Fragments of a Reply (2004), tracks and signals 103 Fig. 3.5 Marina Zerbarini, Eveline, Fragments of a Reply (2004), map and compass106 Fig. 4.1 Jaime Alejandro Rodríguez, Coup de Grace (2006), ‘Exquisite Corpse’129 Fig. 4.2 Jaime Alejandro Rodríguez, Coup de Grace (2006), ‘Digital Death’143 Fig. 5.1 Belén Gache, Góngora Word Toys (2011a), ‘Spiral Dedication’ 159 Fig. 5.2 Belén Gache, Góngora Word Toys (2011a), ‘The Art of Falconry’ 172 Fig. 5.3 Belén Gache, Radikal Karaoke (2011b) 175 Fig. 6.1 Eduardo Navas, Minima Moralia Redux (2011a), aphorism 14 204 Fig. 6.2 Eduardo Navas Minima Moralia Redux (2011a), aphorism 14 remixed210 Fig. 6.3 Eduardo Navas Minima Moralia Redux (2011a), aphorism 51 214 Fig. 7.1 Doménico Chiappe, Minotaur Hotel (2013–2015), opening interface231 Fig. 7.2 Doménico Chiappe, Minotaur Hotel (2013–2015), right-hand door239 Fig. 7.3 Doménico Chiappe, Minotaur Hotel (2013–2015), left-hand door254 xi

CHAPTER 1

From Text to Hypertext: Electronic Literature in Latin America

This book proposes a framework for understanding contemporary digital literary genres and the complex negotiations they undertake with earlier literary experimentation. Arguing that digital literature must be understood not as a radical break with prior norms, but as works on a continuum, this book charts the ways in which selected authors of digital works in the Hispanic world speak back to the rich tradition of literary experimentation, which goes well beyond the Anglophone. For the purposes of this book, six landmark authors and their works at different stages of the development of electronic literature as a phenomenon in the Hispanic world have been selected. In my analysis, I distinguish two main features that can be identified as commonalities in their works: firstly, the combination of intertextual and metatextual plays; and secondly, the critique of digital technologies and their (perceived or actual) imbrication in the technocapitalist system underpinning them. Regarding the first of these—intertextual and metatextual plays—I argue for a position that is not an unproblematically laudatory one that sees digital literary production as a radical break with the printed form that is, in and of itself, empowering, liberatory, or even revolutionary. Instead, I argue, we must conceive of digital literature as being in negotiation with previous literary forms so that it functions as both continuum and break. At the same time, I situate this development in a context that goes well beyond the more conventionally noted Anglophone one, and I undertake a detailed analysis of pre-digital literary experimentation © The Author(s) 2019 C. Taylor, Electronic Literature in Latin America, New Directions in Latino American Cultures, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-30988-6_1

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across a range of national and transnational contexts, demonstrating how the characteristics of these prior experimentations continue to manifest themselves—and yet, are also inflected differently—in contemporary digital literature. I advocate establishing and tracing connections, both implicit and explicit, underscoring the national, regional, and transnational dialogues that these digital literary genres undertake with previous literary canons, texts, techniques, and genres. My focus on these works as the inheritors of long-­established literary traditions thus builds an argument about how radical literary traditions, both past and present, continue to make incisive contributions to ongoing debates about digital technologies—debates which also have ideological and political implications. In so doing, I focus on the dialogues between literariness and technology, and I reveal the tensions that are established between moments of utopian radicalism and moments of highlighting the limitations of digital technologies. Regarding the second of these key features—the critique of digital technologies—I analyse how the authors I have selected simultaneously employ and take a critical stance on the electronic medium. In this sense, I aim to resist what has been termed ‘technological determinism’ by exploring some of the negative effects associated with digital technologies and the material conditions that promote and support them. In so doing, I propose a counter-argument to recent popular orthodoxy which at times assumes the inherently emancipatory or democratic potential of digital media—of which more is discussed below. Moreover, I explore, in particular, how these authors do so in relation to the specific challenges of twenty-­ first-­century Latin America, such as the manifestations of late capitalism, the use of culture as an instrument for building markets, and the rise of the immaterial commodity, amongst others. I elucidate how these authors, in their different ways, attempt a neo-Marxist gesture of unmasking the structural inequalities that are upheld by, and naturalised by, technocapitalism, and how they encourage us to contest these uses. As I do so, I engage in this book—and particularly in this Introduction—with debates about cultural studies, and the lament over the loss of its critical edge; rather than a necessary loss of critical edge, I argue, there still does exist an oppositional stance that can be perceived within digital cultural production and in (digital) cultural studies of the Left. Thus, my book maintains a focus on close textual analysis, attention to the digital, and to the wider structural concerns, with each chapter investigating the complexities of digital cultural production, not viewing the text as a free-floating,

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a­ utonomous aesthetic object, but also, not positing that the text is determined by its technological features. I start firstly with a discussion of the advent of digital technologies and their impact upon cultural and literary norms and formats, undertaking a detailed engagement with leading theorists of hypertext and electronic literature. Charting the developments in the theory of hypertext and electronic literature, from Bolter, Moulthrop, and Landow’s early pronouncements on hypertext as an infinitely recentrable system with a truly active reader, through the work of Aarseth, Murray, Hayles, Ryan, Bell, Ensslin, and many others who have nuanced and developed our understanding of new configurations of textuality, the author, the reader, and narrative structure, I draw out the main implications for our understanding of electronic literature and digital textuality. Drawing on Aarseth, Hayles, and others, I end this section by concurring that we should not, therefore, fall into the trap of technological determinism and see digital technology, as of necessity, liberatory or experimental. Subsequently, the Introduction undertakes a detailed scrutiny of the relationship between digital culture studies and cultural studies, and advocates for a critical digital culture studies which involves a potential recuperation of the leftist underpinnings of cultural studies as first conceived. I posit a critical digital culture studies that would involve a three-fold approach, combining what I term aesthetics, technologics, and ethics, understanding digital literature as, simultaneously, making use of technological affordances without being determined by them; as building on prior literary traditions without being bound by them; and as providing a critical stance on contemporary socio-economic conditions, all the while being aware of its own imbrication in them. After this, the Introduction moves on to an examination of the first of the two major traits identified in these authors—namely, their use of intertextual and metatextual references. This section addresses Latin American literature as a literary precedent, detailing the specifics of the authors studied in this book, and in particular, setting forth that one of the hallmarks of their work is how, in their different ways, they make sustained intertextual references to prior generations of literary experimentation at the same time as making frequent metatextual references to the process of their works’ own (digital) creation. This dialogue, I argue, is critical and often self-aware, as their digital literary works often make metatextual references to the digital tools and platforms that they make use of. In so doing, their overt references to digital technologies themselves often play with, and yet

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question or thwart, key notions of interactive literature. The authors often make implicit or explicit mention of some of the key debates in electronic literature, from some of the earlier, utopian pronouncements by scholars such as Bolter or Landow about hypertextual writing as offering radical rethinkings of the conventional form of the text, the author, and writing systems, through to some of the latest concerns about electronic surveillance and social media. In their references, however, these authors do not uncritically celebrate digital technologies as offering radically new tools for literary experimentation. Rather, they often warn us against viewing digital technology, as of necessity, emancipatory or experimental. In other words, it is not that these authors posit digital technologies as the culmination of literary experimentation, and as the answers to the limitations of the printed page; instead, they simultaneously use and highlight the shortcomings of the potentials of these technologies. The subsequent section then moves on to the second of the two traits— namely, how these authors also engage in a critique of the material conditions that underpin these technologies. In this section, I analyse how through their different ways, the authors undertake an unmasking of contemporary social relations of the digital era, and rather than accepting blindly the technologies they employ, encourage us to question these very technologies. I argue that these authors highlight the potentially negative aspects of a range of phenomena associated with digital technologies, undertaking a de-fetishising process, as they endeavour to denaturalise the hegemonic discourses of corporate capital, and strip away the fetishistic aura of technology. In so doing, they provide critical stance on issues such as the corporate colonisation of the lifeworld, the commodity fetishism of the digital era, the alienation of the individual in informational capitalism, amongst many others. In this way, I demonstrate how their critique is two-fold, as they question the limitations of digital technologies, and draw our attention to the negative aspects of the material conditions that underpin them. Finally, the Introduction ends by bringing together these various issues as they coalesce around the debates about electronic literature, digital technologies, and the conditions of contemporary capitalism. I argue for an approach that involves bearing in mind the rich, non-Anglophone tradition of literary experimentation that informs the works of the authors studied in this volume who dialogue with, and yet problematise, prior literary genres, traits, and techniques; that involves paying close attention to the self-conscious way they employ digital technologies, and their

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c­ autioning about the radical literary potential these technologies purportedly offer; and that involves taking on board the sustained critical enquiry they undertake of the material conditions of the very technologies that they employ.

The Advent of Digital Technologies and Their Impact on Literary Formats The discussion of electronic literature and its heritage must begin with the debates in hypertext and, more broadly, digital textuality, of the early 1990s. As is widely acknowledged, landmark texts of this early period such as George P. Landow (1992)1 and Jay David Bolter (1991)2—comprising what Alice Bell has termed ‘first wave hypertext theory’ (Bell 2010, p. 10)—posited a largely utopian vision of hypertextual writing as offering radical rethinkings of the conventional form of the text, the author, and writing systems. Bolter’s early work, particularly his Writing Space (1991), envisaged electronic technologies—and in particular, hypertext—as instrumental in producing new ways of reading. Bolter set out various ways in which, in his view, the electronic book destabilises some of the central tenets of our conventional understanding of the book, including its structure, the way in which it is displayed visually, the fixity of the order of the words on the printed page, and its cohesion as a self-contained work. Focusing in particular on the implications that electronic technologies held for role of the reader, Bolter argued that an electronic book can ‘tailor itself to each reader’s needs’, and that this leads to the ‘vanishing of the fixed text’, which in turn, ‘alters the nature of an audience’s shared experience in reading’ (Bolter 1991, p. 8). Giving examples of the ways in which electronic texts 1   Landow’s book first came out in 1992, entitled Hypertext: The Convergence of Contemporary Critical Theory and Technology; it was subsequently updated in a second edition in 1997, with the slightly revised title of Hypertext 2.0: The Convergence of Critical Theory and Technology, and again in a third edition in 2006, this time with the title Hypertext 3.0: Critical Theory and New Media in an Era of Globalization. Where I mention his early work, I cite from the original 1992 edition. 2  Bolter’s monograph was first published in 1991, with the title Writing Space: The Computer, Hypertext, and The History of Writing (Hillsdale: Lawrence Erlbaum, 1991); an updated second edition came out in 2001, with the amended title of Writing Space: Computers, Hypertext, and the Remediation of Print. Where I make reference to Bolter’s early work, I cite from the 1991 edition.

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can allow the reader to make changes in the text or add new connections, Bolter concluded that ‘as readers we become our own authors’ (Bolter 1991, pp. 30–31). Bolter also put forth the claim that hypertext forces the reader to read differently, and assumes a more active role. In a section entitled suggestively ‘The end of authority’,3 Bolter argued that: As long as the printed book remains the primary medium of literature, traditional views of the author as authority and of literature as monument will remain convincing for most readers. The electronic medium, however, threatens to bring down the whole edifice at once. It complicates our understanding of literature as either mimesis or expression, it denies the fixity of the text, and it questions the authority of the author. (Bolter 1991, p. 153)

Bolter here read the advent of digital technologies in relation to existing notions of the literary work, arguing that literature is institutionalised and reified in the form of the book, and that this monumental status of literature—the putting of author and the work on a pedestal—is threatened by digital technologies. What is significant here is that Bolter extrapolates from the potentials of electronic technologies to suggest that the authority of literature as enshrined in the figure of the author is under threat. Expanding on this, Bolter contends that, in electronic literature, ‘there is no single univocal text apart from the reader; the author writes a set of potential texts, from which the reader chooses’ (Bolter 1991, p.  158); this, for Bolter, thus means that ‘the role of the reader in electronic fiction therefore lies halfway between the customary roles of author and reader in the medium of print’ (Bolter 1991, p. 158). In these ways, in this book, Bolter argues (utopianly) for how technological features, such as the reader being able to choose which link to follow, or being able to add text to the existing text, constitute a radical subversion of literary norms, and threaten to bring down the existing institution of literature. 3  Bolter’s title makes implicit reference to poststructuralist debates which encouraged the dismantling of the author as authority figure, with echoes of Barthes’s notion of the ‘AuthorGod’. Barthes, in his famous 1967 essay ‘The Death of the Author’, argued that ‘we know that a text does not consist of a line of words, releasing a single “theological” meaning (the “message” of the Author-God)’ (Barthes 1977, p. 416). The figure of the author as representing the authority of the text, and as being ultimately in control of its single theological meaning, is closely tied to Bolter’s argument about the monumentalisation of the literary text here.

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Stuart Moulthrop, meanwhile, writing in an early volume edited by Landow, proposed understanding hypertext through poststructuralist and reader-response theories, including those of Roland Barthes and Wolfgang Iser, paying particular attention to issues such as lack of finality and indeterminacy. Noting firstly that poststructuralist theorists have for decades alerted us to the fact that even in conventional fiction, ‘closure may relapse into continuity, metaphor into metonymy’, Moulthrop then argues that there is a particularity of electronic literature in relation to this lack of textual closure, for: Our understanding of a Dickens novel may change after we learn to appreciate its commitment to indeterminacy […] But the actual structure of Dicken’s discourse remains untouched, protected by its mantle of authority, and the inviolate stability of this primary text colours our interpretative departures […]. However, if hypertextual narrative is allowed to carry out fully its transformation of metaphor and metonymy, a new fiction could develop without such guarantees of integrity. (Moulthrop 1991, p. 130)

Thus, for Moulthrop, hypertextual narrative can have a transformative effect on literary norms and, in particular, disrupt the purported integrity of the literary text as a finalised, bounded object. Similarly, Landow shared Bolter’s and Moulthrop’s optimism about hypertext and its potential for revolutionising literary norms, specifically drawing out its reconfiguration of the text, of the author, and of narrative. Landow argued that hypertext reconfigures the author, in that: the figure of the hypertext author approaches, even if it does not entirely merge with, that of the reader; the functions of reader and writer become more deeply entwined with each other than ever before […] Hypertext, which creates an active, even intrusive reader […] infringes upon the power of the author, removing some of it and granting it to the reader. (Landow 1992, p. 71)

Here, Landow views hypertext as having a disruptive function, and of fundamentally disrupting the existing power relationship between author and reader, robbing the author of his/her authority, and ceding this power to the reader. Crucially, Landow envisaged the radical literary potentials of digital technologies, and their disruption of the power dynamic between author

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and reader, as empowering, and as having inherently political implications. In a chapter entitled ‘The Politics of Hypertext’, Landow undertook a trenchant defence of digital technologies, inveighing against those he called ‘self-proclaimed Luddites’,4 and maintaining a positivist position that technology intrinsically leads to empowerment: Technology always empowers someone. It empowers those who possess it, those who make use of it, and those who have access to it. From the very beginning of hypertext […] its advocates have stressed that it grants new power to people. Writers on hypertext almost always continue to associate it with individual freedom or empowerment. (Landow 1992, p. 168)

Landow here sets forth a utopian argument, arguing from a positivist, technologically determinist position that technology, of necessity, always empowers. Landow then goes on to proclaim: ‘I contend that the history of information technology from writing to hypertext reveals an increasing democratization or dissemination of power’ (Landow 1992, p.  174). Notable in Landow’s argument is the slippage from the technological feature to claims of democracy and the transformation of power. In fact, a change in the relationship between an author and a reader occasioned by the use of hyperlinking does not, of necessity, mean a more democratic text. Moreover, what is also notable, of course, is what is left unsaid and unacknowledged by Landow: the inequalities of access, of infrastructure, of cultural and economic capital which, as several scholars have argued, attest to the ways in which significant portions of the world are further disempowered by technology.5 4  Landow saw his defence of technology as necessary to counter those whom he saw as Luddites, who take pride in not engaging with technology, and includes Fredric Jameson and like-minded Marxist critical theorists within this, criticising what he sees as Jameson’s ‘need to exclude technology and its history from Marxist analysis’ (Landow 1992, p. 166). Landow situates his critique of Jameson within a wider argument which, for him, is that ‘discussions of the politics of the hypertext have to mention its power, at least at the present time, to make many critical theorists, particularly Marxists, uncomfortable’ (Landow 1992, p. 164). I do not agree that this purported lack of attention by Marxist theorists to technology is necessarily the case, and indeed, as we shall see below, a significant body of Marxist-informed scholarship has produced detailed, historicising analyses of the contemporary regime of digital technologies. 5  There have been multiple studies which have warned about the increasing inequality and disempowerment caused by the unevenness of access to digital technologies, and which have highlighted how these are structured along Global North-Global South divides. Pippa

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If these and other early pronouncements constitute first-wave hypertext theory, subsequent scholarship, both by a successive generation of scholars, and also, to an extent by Landow, Bolter, and Moulthrop themselves, has since nuanced or challenged some of the ideas put forth. Janet H.  Murray’s research into immersive digital environments, for instance, has demonstrated that although a substantial rethinking of narrative is needed when approaching such works, the increased interactivity that they offer is not in itself a measure of agency. With a particular focus on the extrapolations from technological features requiring some action on the part of the user, to ideas of agency, Murray argues that ‘because of the vague and pervasive use of the term interactivity, the pleasure of agency in electronic environments is often confused with the mere ability to move a joystick or click on a mouse’, and she then cautions that ‘activity alone is not agency’ (Murray 1997, p. 128). In this way, Murray’s useful distinction between activity and agency is crucial to unpicking some of the sleights of hand in Landow and others’ early works: this distinction allows us to differentiate between actions that the reader-user undertakes, and their ability to have agency within the work. Similarly, David Ciccorico has also argued that it is necessary to temper some of the earlier pronouncements about electronic literature. Where Murray focused in particular on the issue of activity being misconstrued as agency, Ciccorico focuses on the issue of multiple paths often being misinterpreted as delivering greater freedom for the reader. Ciccorico argues that: In fact, it is difficult to equate the reader’s new responsibility with new ‘power’ at all, since the writer prearranges the paths that exist in network fiction, and the reader’s ‘freedom’ is circumscribed—subject to the design of the author-as-artificer. (Ciccorico 2007, p. 9) Norris, writing in the early 2000s, cautioned that, with differential investment and take-up of digital technologies across the globe, many poorer nations, particularly those of subSaharan Africa, Latin America, and South-East Asia are lagging behind, with the concomitant risk that ‘the emerging Internet age may reinforce disparities between postindustrial economies at the core of the network and developing societies at the peripheries’ (Norris 2001, p. 5). More recently, Ivo Ritzer has again drawn our attention to the fact that digital media are ‘still widely unequally distributed around the earth, with a decisive lack in the Global South, above all in Africa where global contradictions often are sharpest’ (Ritzer 2015, p. 452); crucially, Ritzer links this unequal distribution to geopolitics, since, for him, the digital divide is ‘based on colonial legacies, failed post-independence reforms and unfair trade policies’ (Ritzer 2015, p. 452).

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In a similar fashion to Murray’s distinction between activity and agency, Ciccorico’s approach here usefully distinguishes responsibility from power. Whilst the reader may indeed have the responsibility of selecting links, manipulating a mouse, clicking on buttons, and so forth, this is distinct from power, which would represent the real empowerment of the reader in having control over the design of the fiction. Hayles, similarly, has cautioned against associating the hypertext with the empowerment of the reader or user per se—in her case, basing her criticism on the conflation of one feature with electronic literature as a whole. Discussing the tendency of early theorists such as Landow and Bolter to stress the hyperlink as electronic literature’s distinguishing feature, and then to extrapolate from this to make claims about hypertext as a ‘liberatory mode that would dramatically transform reading and writing’, Hayles argues that: One problem with identifying the hyperlink as electronic literature’s distinguishing characteristic was that print texts had long also employed analogous technology in such apparati as footnotes, endnotes, cross-reference, and so on, undermining the claim that the technology was completely novel. Perhaps a more serious problem, however, was the association of the hyperlink with the empowerment of the reader/user. As a number of critics have pointed out […] the reader/user can only follow the links that the author has already scripted. (Hayles 2008, p. 31)

Hayles’s criticism of the early stance of Landow et al. is therefore multiple: firstly, that one structural feature—the hyperlink—is conflated with electronic literature as a whole; secondly, the failure to historicise, in that these early theorists ignored a long tradition of print texts which employed analogue techniques to cross-reference, and to move across the text in a non-­ linear fashion; and thirdly, of technological determinism, by extrapolating from this digital technology that it is of necessity, liberatory or experimental, and that it delivers empowerment to the reader. Finally, Alice Bell, in her recent book-length study of hypertext fiction, draws our attention to the degree of control that readers have within a hypertext. Bell notes that: As an inevitable consequence of the form and structure, readers of hypertext do have some agency. They can click back and forth through the predefined structures and any reading can be extended or terminated according to the reader’s desire. However, readers are sometimes unaware of how long each

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path will last so that they are not necessarily able to make informed decisions about their experience in the text. Overall, while hypertext fiction does offer choice, the reader’s degree of control, which was envisaged by many first-­ wave theorists, is inflated and readers are erroneously attributed with unrealistic powers in their actual capacity to manipulate and operate within the text. (Bell 2010, p. 12)

Again, Bell encourages us to make a distinction between the technological feature and the actual role of the reader; in this case, Bell makes an important distinction here between the technological platform (the hypertext structure) and the extent to which readers are provided with enough information to make ‘informed decisions’ about their experience. That is, although links are indeed available through the technological affordances, this does not mean that readers are given infinite, revolutionary power. Given all of the above, it becomes clear that analysis of electronic literary works cannot and must not fall into the trap of technological determinism, and extrapolate from a technological feature assumptions about the role of the reader, the structure of the text or, indeed, the democratic content of the narrative. It is necessary, therefore, not to over-emphasise the technological as, in and of itself, offering a particular radical, liberatory, experimental literary experience for the reader. That said, there still remains a strong exhortation within digital literary scholarship that this does not mean rejecting a focus on the technological in favour of focusing solely on the literariness of such texts. Those scholars cited above who have sounded notes of caution about some of the more utopian pronouncements about digital technologies as revolutionising our understanding of textuality have also accompanied their caution with a detailed attention to the features of these same digital technologies, and how they function. That is, these scholars do not advocate rejecting any focus on technology; they are far from the ‘self-proclaimed Luddites’ against which Landow inveighed. Nor do they simply advocate returning to literary theory as it was developed for print texts. Indeed, these scholars have developed increasingly sophisticated models for how we understand these new types of narrative, with specific reference to particular platforms or software.6 6  See, for instance, Bell’s lengthy 2010 study, which aimed to set out the interpretative parameters for those hypertext fictions created using the Storyspace software; or Ciccorico’s 2007 book, which distinguishes overtly between earlier works using Storyspace, and later works developed for the world wide web. In both of these cases, as in many others, these

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It is not the case, therefore, of rejecting any emphasis on technological platforms. Indeed, as Hayles herself has summed this up, pithily: ‘to see electronic literature only through the lens of print is, in a significant sense, not to see it at all’ (Hayles 2008, p. 3). Thus, a scholarly approach to digital literature must, on the one hand, bear in mind that the utopian pronouncements about the revolutionary potentials of digital technologies have been largely problematised but, on the other hand, still needs to heed the exhortation not to dismiss the technological or focus purely on the literary features of these works. We must, in our approach to this literature, combine an awareness of the specifics of digital technologies and the fact that we cannot uncritically apply literary norms to a digital product, with an awareness of the fact that digital technologies in themselves do not determine the cultural product, and that technologies are not inherently liberatory or experimental per se. An analysis of digital literature must therefore negotiate the central tension that persists in digital literary scholarship: maintaining a focus on the technological, and yet also heeding the multiple warnings against technological determinism, and not uncritically championing digital technologies as producing a radical new textuality. In my response to this, I take my cue from some suggestive comments made by Espen J. Aarseth regarding electronic literature and technological determinism. Aarseth, along with the other second-wave scholars noted above, acknowledged the potentials that technological advances have for literary works, and yet warned against technological determinism, inveighing against the presentist approach, which consists of a ‘rhetoric of novelty, differentiation or freedom’, and which claims that ‘digital technology enables readers to become authors’ (Aarseth 1997, p. 14). Noting firstly the indiscriminate use of terms such as ‘electronic’ and ‘hypertext’ to cover many different phenomena, Aarseth then undertook an implicit attack on Landow et al. by arguing that: As an unfortunate result, many assumptions made about the general concept of hypertext are really about a specific implementation. Added to that are the political conjectures about the benevolent effects on the structures of power between writers and readers, teachers and students, government

scholars pay attention to the specific features afforded by the software or platform, without assuming that these technologies determine the content in themselves.

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and the public, in which the good guys seem to be winning, at least in theory. (Aarseth 2003, p. 771)7

Aarseth’s apparently casual comments here in fact point to a central issue which, I argue, warrants further attention in digital literature scholarship. Firstly, Aarseth makes the point that the functioning of hypertext should not be extrapolated to make assumptions about the entire body of electronic literature as a whole, as other scholars have noted above. Secondly, and more importantly, Aarseth alerts us to the fact that even when this does result in the changing of the relationship between the author and the writer, the ceding of authorial power to a reader does not equate to challenging the power structures of society. For, as Aarseth then goes on to remind us, ‘the balance of power between readers and writers is not changed by hypertext alone, nor by its enhancements, but by the political and economic logic of society’ (Aarseth 2003, p.  772). I argue that Aarseth’s comment here, said in passing, in fact, raises some fundamental issues for the scholar of digital literature—and it must inform our approach to the genre. What I take from Aarseth is not just that hypertext is not radical in and of itself, as has been noted by many other scholars mentioned above, but also that the element of radical or contestatory power lies in the ‘political and economic logic of society’. If it is the political and economic logic of society to which our attention must be drawn, then it is this issue, in conjunction with an attention to the technological features and to the literary style, upon which scholars of electronic literature must focus. As scholars of electronic literature, we must be attuned to those works that attempt to undertake a critical evaluation of the existing political and economic logic of society (of which, more is discussed below). In this way, what I propose in this book is that a negotiation of the conundrum of how to analyse electronic literature can be found through a maintaining of attention to three aspects concurrently, which I am here naming aesthetics, technologics, and ethics.8 In my proposed paradigm, to  Aarseth’s chapter, entitled ‘Nonlinearity and Literary Theory’, was first published in 1994  in George Landow, ed., Hyper/Text/Theory (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press), 51–84, and subsequently reproduced in Wardrip-Fruin and Montfort’s The New Media Reader in 2003. 8  I am here implicitly proposing an updating of the more commonly understood duality of aesthetics and ethics, by bringing technologics into play as a third term. I am not proposing 7

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do electronic literature is to do the following: firstly, we must pay ­attention to the aesthetics: that is, the literary form, the genres, the literary tropes, and other features that are mobilised within these texts. Digital literary products speak to a long (pre-digital) literary heritage, and the authors of these works do not undertake their literary experimentation in a vacuum. Rather, they dialogue with their predecessors and contemporaries, and they mobilise a whole range of pre-existing literary tropes and tricks. We must, then, pay attention to the aesthetics of these works, to their literariness. Secondly, it is to pay attention to, although not to be pre-determined by, the technologics: that is, the platforms, the technological structures, and the digital features employed. The specifics of digital technologies must be recognised, and we absolutely must pay attention to the procedural factors, technical platforms, interactivity, and many other such features. Yet we need to do so bearing in mind all the while that digital technologies do not determine the cultural product, and that technologies are not inherently liberatory or experimental per se. And thirdly, we must pay attention to the ethics: that is, to the political and economic system in which these works have been constructed, and which they critique in their subject matter. That is, we must pay attention to the ethical, critical stance that works of electronic literature take in relation to their subject matter. As I note later in this Introduction and in the main chapters of this book, the authors studied frequently highlight the negative features of the conditions of late capitalism within the content of their works. If neither the technologics nor the aesthetics offer a radical positioning per se, then it is in the nexus of these two terms with the socio-­ political critique where these writers attempt to create momentary tactics of resistance. Through a three-fold approach, thus, combining technologics, aesthetics, and ethics, I propose a paradigm for examining digital literature as, simultaneously, building on prior literary traditions without being bound by them; making use of technological affordances without being determined by them; and as providing a critical stance on contemporary socio-­ economic conditions, all the while being aware of its own complicity with them. this term as in opposition to the other two, and instead am proposing that it has relevance for both aesthetics and ethics, but is not pre-determined, nor it itself is deterministic, of either.

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Towards a Critical Latin American Digital Cultural Studies With this in mind, and the taking on board the need to examine the political and economic logic of the digital literary artefacts we study, I now move on to a consideration of the broader field of cultural studies within which digital culture, and digital literature as a sub-set of digital culture, sits. In this section, I address the laments about the loss of the radical edge of cultural studies in recent years, and propose an approach that consists of a critical digital cultural studies, which would enable us to undertake a sustained focus on (digital) culture, and maintain a critical stance. Digital literature is one of the many new and emerging forms of digital culture and, whilst it has its own sub-field and its own theorisations, emerging genre conventions, and trends in scholarship, as noted above, digital literature is, of necessity, part of the broader field of digital culture.9 Within this context, digital culture studies sits within the broader field of cultural studies, yet, to date, the relationship between digital culture studies and cultural studies is under- or unexplored, and under-theorised. There have indeed been several inclusions of digital culture within cultural studies’ mainstream texts, with examples of digital culture now appearing as subsections or chapters within cultural studies companions and edited volumes. This is the case, for instance, with the third edition of Simon During’s The Cultural Studies Reader (2007), which now includes, in the section on ‘Media and Public Spheres’, chapters on the internet, as well as Stuart Hall’s classic ‘Encoding, Decoding’. What this indicates is that digital culture is now considered a standard component of cultural studies, in that pieces on digital culture are now included in these survey or companion volumes, and alongside such classic texts such as Halls’s; what is missing from this volume, and others like it, however, is a coherent theorisation 9  An overview of readers and companion volumes in the field of digital culture reveals how they often include digital literature within their purview, even if this is not their primary focus; for example, David Trend’s reader, Reading Digital Culture (2001) anthologises a number of key publications, including several that deal with new textualities, such as Vannevar Bush and Sadie Plant’s contributions to the volume; Lev Manovich’s The Language of New Media (2001), whilst focussing mostly on the histories of montage in cinema and new media, also includes textualities and print forms; Charlie Gere’s Digital Culture includes how various fields respond to the digital, including literature, alongside art, music, design, and film (Gere 2008); Chaney, Ruggill, and McAllister’s The Computer Culture Reader (2009) includes literary formats such as blogs alongside anime, hacking, web design, and others.

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of the precise relationship between digital culture studies and cultural studies. There have also been some publications addressing the intersection of cultural studies theories with digital culture, such as a recent special issue of Critical Studies in Media Communication (2016) dedicated to Stuart Hall, and the continued relevance of his theories in the age of digital media. In this volume, we see for instance, individual applications of certain theories of Hall to digital media, such as Ingraham and Reeves’s analysis of how the new technological capacities and cultural velocities enabled by digital technologies have created different relationships between media technologies and ‘moral panics’ (Ingraham and Reeves 2016), or Henrik Bødker’s analysis of how Hall’s encoding/decoding model can be applied to journalism in the digital age (Bødker 2016). That said, this special issue proposes maintaining the relevance of Hall for the present day, but does not develop a sustained theory of the precise fit of digital culture studies with cultural studies. John Hartley’s 2012 book, Digital Futures for Cultural and Media Studies, meanwhile, comes the closest to establishing some parallels between cultural studies and digital cultural studies, although his endeavour is more concerned with updating our understandings of different media for the contemporary era (which includes, but is by no means limited to, the digital); thus, for example, we have a chapter in Hartley’s book focused on the changes to our viewing experience, now that television programmes are increasingly consumed online, and so forth. Moreover, Hartley’s take is predominantly positivist and utopian, arguing that, with the emergence of digital, interactive, and participatory media, we are no longer ‘consumers’, but ‘myriad unmanaged and self-­ organizing “users”’ (Hartley 2012, p.  2), and is not dedicated to a thorough-­going inspection of how digital culture fits with existing debates about the nature of cultural studies. In this way, what these volumes, and others like them, demonstrate, is that digital culture is indeed a fundamental part of cultural studies today, but that the precise relationship between the cultural studies theorisations and debates of previous eras, and the debates in digital cultural studies, remains untheorised. It is this relationship which I would like to elucidate in this section, and I am particularly interested in how digital culture studies forms part of the broader field of enquiry that is cultural studies, and in revealing how the ongoing questions that still trouble cultural studies also pertain to digital culture studies.

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Cultural studies had its origins in the late 1950s, with landmark early publications by leading figures such as Richard Hoggart and Raymond Williams, and became most famously associated with the ‘Birmingham School’ from the mid-1960s onwards, this referring to those associated with the Birmingham Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies. Hoggart, founding director of the Centre, was from an English department, and argued vehemently for the widening of the remit of the study of English, resisting cultural elitism, and calling for the expansion of literary criticism to include working-class culture. Hoggart’s The Uses of Literacy (1957), described by Hall as one of the ‘founding texts’ (Hall 2007, p. 39) of cultural studies, proposed the innovative application of the literary criticism method of close reading to the actual lived experience of culture, particularly working-class culture. Borrowing from this method of close reading, Hoggart proposed that we should ‘try to see beyond the habits to what the habits stand for, to see through the statements to what the statements really mean (which may be the opposite of the statements themselves) to detect the differing pressures of emotion behind idiomatic phrases and ritualistic observances’ (Hoggart 1957, p. 4). In this work, Hoggart combines both a sustained analysis of the banality of mass media, with a celebration of the vibrancy of the culture of working-class people themselves, and as such, ‘differentiated between what was offered by the “popular providers” (media, popular fiction, advertisements) and the resilient culture of working-class people themselves’ (Owen 2008, p. xvi). Williams’s work, meanwhile, envisioned the disruption of the hierarchical division between high and low cultures as central to the project of cultural studies. For Williams, this had inherent political implications; as Couldry summarises this, the project of cultural studies for Williams was the idea that ‘studying culture in the right way might contribute to a widening vision of democracy’ (Couldry 2011, p. 9). Similarly, Stuart Hall, who became the Centre’s director from 1969, staunchly defended the need to study popular culture. Writing in the first issue of the New Left Review, of which he was founder, Hall argued that the study of popular culture is important because it is ‘directly relevant to the imaginative resistances of the people who have to live within capitalism—the growing points of social discontent, the projection of deeply-felt needs’ (Hall 1960, p.  1). Hall saw popular culture not in binary terms, but as a site of

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i­ntervention, and the questions raised by culture as ‘deadly political questions’; as Proctor sums this up, Hall sees popular culture as ‘crucial to the redescription of socialism’, and that it ‘might be reclaimed for a socialist politics’ (Proctor 2004, p. 18). Although taking varied approaches, what was common to the different exponents of cultural studies in these early decades was a very clear sense of the political purpose of the project of cultural studies. Their call for the need to pay attention to working-class culture, and to popular culture, was informed, in different ways, by Marxism, by the theories of Althusser and Gramsci, and by a sense of the political, democratising force that cultural studies could be. Calling this period the ‘heroic moment’ (Belsey 2003, p. 22) of cultural studies, Belsey notes how this was the heyday of cultural studies, and how this early attention to working-class culture was politically motivated, consisting of, ‘in the first instance the defence of working-­ class values, and then increasingly the unmasking of the values promoted among the working class by capitalist mass culture’ (Belsey 2003, p. 22). If this was indeed the impetus behind cultural studies in its heyday, subsequently, there has been recognition that cultural studies has transformed over the succeeding decades, with a range of concerns being raised against it. These concerns include the fact that the project of cultural studies is largely unrealised; that cultural studies is indiscriminate; that it has become too celebratory; and that to champion popular culture is no longer radical. The first of these concerns—that the project of cultural studies remains largely unrealised—is picked up on by Paul Smith, amongst others. Smith, drawing on Jameson’s suggestive phrasing of ‘the desire called Cultural Studies’ (Jameson 1993, p. 16; my emphasis), argues that Jameson’s formulation emphasised ‘the degree to which it [Cultural Studies] was constituted more by its aspirations than by its actual achievements’ (Smith 2011, p.  1). Smith then goes on to note that cultural studies ‘did not really become the radical intellectual movement that upset disciplines and reformulated knowledge; nor did it eventually open out onto some thriving area of politics and the public sphere beyond the academy’ (Smith 2011, p. 1). Secondly, on the issue of indiscriminate approach, several scholars have lamented how cultural studies is becoming increasingly indiscriminate in its choice of subject matter and, indeed, in its stance. Bowman, in the introduction to his recent edited volume on new approaches to cultural studies, summarises this common concern of cultural studies nowadays as

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being its ‘indiscriminate studying of anything’ (Bowman 2003, p. 5), posing a series of questions regarding this: A strategy chosen or perpetuated conveniently and/or cynically perhaps just because it is popular, and just to keep it popular (because disciplines need students)? Is it that, actually, it effaces its own pointlessness and political and intellectual ineffectuality, providing spurious token justifications for its own existence by invoking alibis about ‘political engagement’, ‘resistance to domination’, ‘ethical relations to alterity’, etc., which are utterly without substance? (Bowman 2003, p. 5)

If cultural studies has become indiscriminate, in the eyes of some allowing anything to become its object of study and, crucially, with no particular vantage point for doing so, it risks losing its critical edge. This issue of indiscriminacy is also linked to another concern that is levelled against cultural studies, namely, that it becomes too celebratory of the objects of study that it analyses. Garnham has argued that cultural studies has become too celebratory of popular culture, in what he views as cultural studies’ refusal to ‘think through the implications of its own claim that the forms of subordination and their attendant cultural practices—to which cultural studies give analytical priority—are grounded within a capitalist mode of production’ (Garnham 1995, p. 64). Garnham sees that this problem lies in cultural studies’ focus on consumption, reception, and interpretation, which has ‘exaggerated the freedoms of consumption and daily life’, and which, he argues, ‘has played politically into the hands of a Right whose ideological assault has been structured in large part around an effort to persuade people to construct themselves as consumers in opposition to producers’.10 This form of cultural studies is what Meehan has termed ‘celebratory cultural studies’, which Meehan sees as having roots in US brands of cultural studies associated with Bowling Green University. Such a version of cultural studies, for Meehan, involves celebrating popular culture as ‘the people’s culture with no attention paid to the roles of corporations, market structures, laws, or regulations that 10  This is not to say that Garnham assumes an economistic model that sees culture as superstructure and as solely the expression of the economic base; Garnham does acknowledge that ‘people can and often do reinterpret and use for their own purposes the cultural material, the texts, that the system of cultural production and distribution offers them’; rather, he argues that this interpretation is not random, and that the pleasure that consumers can experience can be manipulated (Garnham 1995, p. 65).

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c­ onstrained them’ (Meehan 2012, p. 24). Here, Graham’s and Meehan’s criticism of celebratory cultural studies rests in the fact that it does not pay attention to the ways in which these same cultural forms are constructed in the vested interests of the corporations, legal frameworks, and so forth, that condition them. In this way, for these and other scholars, one of the potential dangers of recent trends in cultural studies is that it may become an uncritical celebration of popular culture, over-emphasising the role of the consumer, ignoring the ways in which the forms of popular culture are grounded within capitalist models, and thus, ultimately, depoliticising its endeavour. Finally, it has also been noted by many that the gesture of championing popular culture, once radical in Williams’s day, is today no longer quite so oppositional. Williams’s challenge to the hierarchical division between high and low culture, and his championing of working-class and popular culture, came in the particular cultural context of 1950s and 1960s Britain, a period in which elite institutions—such as the university sector in which Williams worked—privileged high culture and its values, and denigrated perceived low culture, which was associated with the lower classes. Williams’s stance of promoting the study of popular culture has to be understood, therefore, within the class politics of Britain of the time. However, as Couldry has noted, this cultural de-differentiation for which Williams strove is now complicated, for, nowadays, ‘after half a century of cultural de-differentiation, it would be hard to argue, even in Britain, that defending popular culture is itself a gesture with political potential’ (Couldry 2011, p.  10). This changing configuration of popular culture can be seen, Couldry argues, in the fact that there are extreme forms of class-based discrimination within popular cultural forms themselves (such as reality television); moreover, he argues ‘the axis along which threats to democracy arise has long since moved elsewhere’ (Couldry 2011, p. 10). In other words, defending popular culture, in and of itself, is not radical, and the battle lines of cultural studies of the mid-twentieth century are not the same as they are now. To understand where these battle lines lie, we must pay attention to the new axis of which Couldry speaks—and of which more is discussed below. Thus, a variety of transformations of cultural studies have been widely acknowledged in recent years, with scholars noting a trajectory of cultural studies from its initial, left-leaning stance, towards, more recently, a possible loss of oppositional stance, and even recuperation by the right. Those scholars working more specifically on Latin American contexts have also

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voiced similar concerns in recent years. Neil Larsen, after charting the evolution of cultural studies as a response to the Frankfurt School, then laments that its increasingly ‘celebratory tone’ may be ‘less radical than it appears’, and ‘presents the danger of a move further to the right’ (Larsen 1995, p. 192). Elaborating on this, Larsen contrasts an Adornian sense of lack of agency with an overly optimistic promise of emancipation coming from cultural studies, arguing that ‘while […] Adorno paints a picture of frank hopelessness, cultural studies broadcasts the false hopes of emancipation through the spontaneous cultural subversions of dominant order, leaving class relations intact’ (Larsen 1995, p. 192). Larsen’s phrasing of ‘false hopes’ here carries echoes, of course, of the notion of false consciousness, and he implies in this that cultural studies is complicit in instilling a false consciousness in which consumers subvert the cultural products they consume, without any true systemic subversion taking place. Similarly, Jon Beasley-Murray in his recent book has lamented what he sees as ‘the decline and banalization of cultural studies’ (Beasley-Murray 2010, p. 19), contending that ‘with its popularization and Americanization, much of its specific political context and rationale was lost’ (Beasley-­Murray 2010, p.  18), echoing some of Meehan’s observations, as noted above. Beasley-Murray starts from the premise that ‘cultural studies is, effectively, populist’, and as a result, cultural studies, along with civil society, ‘mimic the structures of power that they set out to understand’ (Beasley-Murray 2010, p. xvi). Whilst I take on board some of the criticisms that BeasleyMurray enumerates against certain examples of cultural studies analysis, I take issue with the sleight of hand that takes place here—namely, that to study the popular is, of necessity, populist. In this Introduction, and in this book, I attempt to counter this view that cultural studies, of necessity, ‘mimic the structures of power that they set out to understand’. Indeed, in setting out my stance here, I take my cue from many scholars who have called for the revitalisation of, and urgent need for, a continued cultural studies today, a cultural studies which would entail a radical, oppositional understanding of the contemporary axes of power. A variety of scholars have proposed different terms or approaches as to what this renewed cultural studies would look like in recent years. Bowman has argued that although the radical polemics of the earlier era of cultural studies have passed, this does not mean that this radical polemics is now ‘completed, finished, or exhausted’; rather, for Bowman, cultural studies is an ‘incomplete project’, implying the need for its continuation and renewal today (Bowman 2003, p.  3). Belsey has argued for a new

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f­ormulation which would be ‘cultural criticism’, which would ‘break[s] with the limitations of cultural studies, insofar as cultural studies concentrates on the present and the popular’ (Belsey 2003, p.  26), and which would treat ‘culture, including social behaviour and practices, as of interest in the first instance as the inscription of meanings, given that meanings […] are complex sites of political struggle’ (Belsey 2003, p.  28). Charusheela proposes a ‘renewed cultural studies [that would] rethink the underlying culture-­economy relationship’ (Charusheela 2011, p. 177) in the light of contemporary global economic relations and the new regime of capital accumulation. For Couldry, meanwhile, cultural studies can indeed still be about ‘the politics of politics’, because the project of cultural studies can still be ‘a project for interrupting politics as usual, but aimed at the contemporary challenges to democracy and using intellectual means suited to those challenges, not the challenges of the past’. Crucially, this updating would mean a cultural studies that pays attention to ‘first, the challenge to any practice of democratic participation meted out by neoliberal discourses that prioritize market functioning over values such as voice (on which more shortly); and, second, the challenge to all accounts of the scale and means of politics that derives from globalization’ (Couldry 2011, p. 11). Grossberg, meanwhile, in a lengthy study, proposes the notion of ‘Cultural Studies as radical contextuality’ (Grossberg 2010, p. 20) as a way of doing cultural studies in the contemporary era. After setting out a case for cultural studies as concerned with ‘describing and intervening in the ways cultural practices are produced within, inserted into, and operate in the everyday life of human beings and social formations, so as to reproduce, struggle against, and perhaps transform the existing structures of power’ (Grossberg 2010, p.  8; my emphasis), Grossberg then proposes that such an undertaking requires a project of ‘radical contextualism’. For Grossberg, this means an articulation which combines ‘both the basic processes of the production of reality, of the production of contexts and power (i.e., determination or effectivity), and the analytic practice of cultural studies. It is the transformative practice or work of making, unmaking, and remaking relations and contexts, of establishing new relations out of old relations or non-relations, of drawing lines and mapping connections’ (Grossberg 2010, p.  21). Grossberg thus proposes maintaining attention to both discursive and nondiscursive realities, and argues that cultural and discursive practices matter, since it is these practices that ‘build and transform the simultaneously and intimately interconnected

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discursive and nondiscursive (both material) realities’ (Grossberg 2010, p. 23). Thus, for Grossberg, this means understanding that cultural practices contribute to the organisation of power, and our role must be to pay attention to these practices, not as individual texts, but as part of ‘a structured assemblage of practices—a cultural formation, a discursive regime’, which are ‘located in overlapping formations of everyday life (as an organized plane of modern power) and social and institutional structures’ (Grossberg 2010, p. 25). Thus, in a variety of senses, the project of cultural studies, albeit fraught with tensions, is not dead. Bearing this in mind, I now—building on the arguments of Trigo and others—suggest ways in which a Latin American critical digital culture studies can be one such response, and can be formulated as one way of doing cultural studies with a radical edge. I share the concerns of Larsen and Beasley-Murray for the need to assess critically, rather than reflect existing class relations. But just as digital cultural objects can provide a critical stance on, rather than simply reflect the existing class relations underpinning them, so too digital cultural studies can also undertake a critical analysis of the dominant order and the class relations that underpin, or that are normalised through, the cultural products that are its objects of study. Indeed, informing my position here is a strong tradition of Latin American cultural studies that has advocated the task of unmasking social relations. There is, thus, a real need to reclaim cultural studies for the left, and what Latin American cultural studies can bring is a leftist-­ informed stance, and an attention to the close textual detail for which cultural studies, from the outset, advocated. Abril Trigo, in her introduction to the major volume that she co-edited with Ana del Sarto and Alicia Ríos, The Latin American Cultural Studies Reader, contends that there is a critical edge to cultural studies. Trigo argues that ‘in this operation, which has a cognitive (heuristic, hermeneutical, explicative, analytical) and practical (prospective, critical, strategic, synthetic) value lies their strongly political thrust. Latin American cultural studies focus on the analysis of institutions, experiences, and symbolic production as intricately connected to social, political, and material relations’ (Trigo 2004, p.  4). Crucial in Trigo’s formulation is that, firstly, Latin American cultural studies combines the cognitive with the practical; and secondly, that Latin American cultural studies understands cultural production as linked in complex ways to material relations. Latin American cultural studies thus has a strongly political thrust in that it pays attention to—and has the capacity to protest against—the material conditions in which cultural expression arises.

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Significantly, Trigo identifies this critical edge as coming, at least in part, through the origins of Latin American cultural studies. For Trigo, Latin American cultural studies also originated as a hermeneutical and critical response to the economic, social, political and cultural transformations of Latin American countries and societies under the impact of transnational finance capitalism and the globalization of culture experienced since the early 1970s. (Trigo 2004, pp. 6–7)

I emphasise here Trigo’s notion of Latin American cultural studies as a critical response to these transformations: for Trigo, the project of Latin American cultural studies is not about reproducing the conditions of late capitalism, but critiquing them; hence, there is room for an oppositional stance in Latin American cultural studies. This would involve paying particular attention to the way in which Latin America has been at the receiving end of neoliberal policies, and charting, in the cultural artefacts we study, the way in which these policies are resisted. Mabel Moraña reminds us of the fact that Latin American cultural studies also has its own trajectory and history, informed by Latin American essayists, scholars and theorists, who were undertaking cultural studies often avant la lettre; indeed, she criticises the fact that the widespread explosion of cultural studies in US academia in the 1980s largely ignored the significant work that had already been undertaken in Latin America (Moraña 2006, p. 32). Moraña then advocates for a cultural studies that is attuned to aesthetics, arguing that ‘every time that we explore the aesthetic we are approaching, by sometimes mediated, sometimes oblique fashions, the political (the processes of cultural institutionalization, the twists and turns of official history, the problems of textual truth, the cultural politics and the material conditions from which the texts are produced and read in different contexts)’ (Moraña 2006, p. 35). Moraña’s call for a focus on the aesthetic and the political can indeed be about doing politics, and that an attention to textual detail, as much as the processes by which that text is circulated and consumed, is necessary. John Beverley, meanwhile, has advocated a Latin American cultural studies which would involve recuperating cultural studies for the left. Highlighting what he sees as a key paradox faced by all who work in the field of Latin American cultural studies, Beverley notes that scholars are motivated by a shared desire for ‘cultural democratization and social justice’, but points out that ‘today we find ourselves in a situation in which

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what we do can be complicit with precisely that which we want to resist: the deconstructive force of the market and neoliberal ideology’ (Beverley 2011, p.  21). Beverley then argues that the necessary task facing Latin American cultural studies is, therefore, ‘recovering for the discourse of the Left the space of cultural dehierarchization ceded to the market and to neoliberalism’ (Beverley 2011, p.  23). Beverley’s proposition here is, I argue, particularly suggestive, with its focus on cultural de-­hierarchisation— which was, of course, an integral part of the impetus behind Williams’s and others’ conceptualisation of cultural studies in the Britain of the 1950s and 1960s. Now, this once radical gesture has been co-opted by the market, it is our task as cultural studies scholars to reclaim it: that is, we must maintain our study of popular cultural forms, but include within this a leftist-informed analysis of their imbrication in (and their resistance to) the neoliberal order. Thus, to conclude this section, my stance is informed by the various scholars of cultural studies, and of Latin American cultural studies, who have proposed the need for a renewed cultural studies, and for the recuperation of cultural studies for the left—and I suggest, by extension, of digital cultural studies for the Left. It is certainly true, as Beasley-Murray, Larsen, and others have argued, that cultural studies in recent decades has developed an ambivalent relationship to populism and to the conditions of late capital. However, I propose that digital culture studies, notwithstanding its ambiguous positionality as regards the popular, and as regards late capitalism, can be the space for the formation of temporary alliances, and for a critical and constructive discourse of the digital. Digital culture studies is inevitably caught up in the debates around cultural studies, yet an engagement with culture is not always necessarily value-free, and to study a cultural format is not always to uncritically celebrate that cultural format. I propose, as a framework, to approach this a critical digital cultural studies that can and should combine an attention to the close textual; to the digital; and to the larger structural. My tripartite approach of aesthetics, technologics, and ethics, on which I ended the previous section of this Introduction, offers, I propose, a way of negotiating this. This attention to both the textual and the contextual is what, for many, has always characterised cultural studies from its inception—witness Hoggart’s application of the techniques of close literary analysis to popular culture—and it also returns to, or retains, the dedication to the unmasking of the ways in which certain cultural formats may embody values promoted by capitalist mass culture. To study digital culture is by no means to always affirm the

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values embodied by the dominant digital cultural products of our day and, indeed, as a later section will advocate, building on the writings of Christian Fuchs and others, there is a renewed need for Marxist-influenced analysis in the era of technocapitalism.

Intertextual Dialogues and Metatextual Play Where I ended the previous section on advocating the importance of combining, in a resistant Latin American digital cultural studies, attention to the aesthetics (the close textual analysis), to the technologics (the digital platforms employed), and to the structural (the material conditions of late capitalism), in this section I now proceed to scrutinise the first two of these features as they manifest themselves in the authors studied in this volume. I argue that one of the hallmarks of the work of the specific authors studied in this book is how, in their different ways, they make sustained intertextual references to prior generations of literary experimentation at the same time as making frequent metatextual references to the process of their works’ own (digital) creation. Their works thus undertake both a negotiation of prior literary genres, along with a negotiation of the possibilities of the digital. Regarding firstly intertextual reference, the authors studied in this volume all make knowing and sustained references to their literary predecessors, whether these be specific individual texts or authors, or particular genres that are the subject of their extensive reworking. The (new) literary genres that these authors develop exist in a constant dialogue with an established tradition of literary experimentation in the Hispanic world and beyond; rather than existing as entirely new, free-floating aesthetic objects, these works dialogue with their literary precursors, such as Baroque excess, concrete poetry, caligrammes, and many others. The fact that digital formats continue some of the affordances of prior, pre-digital formats is of course not in itself a new observation, and has been noted by other digital literature scholars, who have pointed out in passing some print predecessors to contemporary digital forms. Bolter lists modernism, fututurism, dada, surrealism, lettrism, the nouveau roman, and concrete poetry as potential literary forerunners of interactive fiction (Bolter 1991, p.  130), as well as making short comparisons to Stern, Joyce, and Borges, and giving a brief mention of the Choose Your Own Adventure series of books (Bolter 1991, p. 140); Moulthrop gives a list of literary affiliations of hypertextual fiction, suggesting connections with

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contemporary experimental writers Robbe-Grillet, Marc Saporta, Milorad Pavic, and Julio Cortázar, as well as paying particular attention to Jorge Luis Borges’s ‘The Garden of Forking Paths’ (Moulthrop 1991); Glazier gives a brief analysis of Borges (Glazier 2002, pp.  19–21), Apollinaire (Glazier 2002, pp. 26–27), and fluxus (Glazier 2002, pp. 27–28) as precursors to electronic poetics; Funkhouser explores modernist writers as the precursors to digital poetics (Funkhouser 2007).11 Whilst these have been noted in passing, as a short observation, or as a chapter within a wider project addressing other issues, what I carry out in this book is a detailed analysis of electronic literature that takes into account the dialogue that such literature makes with extensive pre-digital movements, and with works that undertook literary experimentation in print (or pre-print) form. In the chapters that follow, I undertake a detailed scrutiny of the wide range of literary intertexts that are mobilised by the writers I study, intertexts coming from a variety of linguistic and geographical contexts, including French, German, and Irish writers and literary movements, as well as more often overlooked Hispanic and Lusophone literary movements. Ranging from the Baroque techniques of Góngora, with his stylistic excess, overturning of the norms of syntax, use of catachresis and neologisms, through to the typographical innovations of the caligramas of Huidobro, the authors studied in this volume dialogue with a rich tradition of experimental formats and movements that have attempted to expand the norms of literary structure, textuality, and the notions of the author and reader, amongst others. As I elucidate in this book, a variety of literary predecessors are mobilised by these authors. In some cases, this takes the form of specific named texts that provide the explicit dialogue for the author; in other cases, they are particular genres or genre conventions. So, Carlos Labbé dialogues with Cubist practices of papier collé, the genre conventions of the epistolary novel, and the Latin American nota roja; in his practice, it is genre conventions and practices which are mobilised, rather than any one specific intertext. By contrast, for Zerbarini, it is one named text—the James 11  There have also been some studies which have undertaken the opposite dynamic: that is, works which trace a particular literary genre or feature, and include digital works as one manifestation of this feature. This is the case, for instance, with Eduardo Ledesma’s recent book, Radical Poetry (2016), in which he sets out the trajectory of poetry in Spain and Latin America from the twentieth century to the present day, and in which he proposes digital poetry as the third of the three manifestations of the avant-garde (with the historical avantgarde of 1900–1930s, and the neo-avant-garde of the 1950s–1970s being the first two).

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Joyce short story, ‘Eveline’—which provides the initial intertext, although this serves as a springboard to engage with Joycean modernist techniques more broadly. For Jaime Alejandro Rodríguez, the surrealist heritage of the cadavre exquis and the genre of the detective novel are his primary intertexts, whereas for Belén Gache, a specific work, Soledades by Baroque poet Luis de Góngora, is mobilised, as well as the generic format of karaoke. Navas’s approach combines the reworking of the genre of conduct literature with attention to one particular text—Adorno’s Minima moralia—whilst finally, Doménico Chiappe’s work engages in a reworking of the classical myth of the Minotaur, as well as returning to epistolary fiction as a genre. In all of these examples, we witness both an experimental use of new digital technologies to create new expressive structures and to push the boundaries of existing literary norms, coupled with, all the while, a continuing and often explicit dialogue with print literary genres and a long literary tradition in the Hispanic world and beyond. This is not to say that these authors simply repeat what their print precursors did; their works do not merely reproduce a print text in electronic form. Nor, just as importantly, is it to suggest that their digital experimentations are somehow the teleological end point of literary experimentations undertaken by their predecessors; I am not proposing a digital literary determinism, in which these authors actualise the dreams of their predecessors, who were hampered or thwarted by the limitations of the printed page. Equally, I take on board the numerous exhortations by digital literary scholars, noted above, that we cannot treat electronic literature in the same as print literature. Rather, what I am arguing for is the need to pay attention to a long history of literary experimentation that informs contemporary digital practice, and that this rich tradition of literary experimentation goes well beyond the Anglophone. I am, thus, proposing an understanding of these authors and their digital literary works in terms of the complex negotiations they undertake with earlier literary experimentation and that, as such, our understanding of their works must be informed not only by their use of digital technologies and platforms (of which more is discussed below), but also in terms of how these digital literary forms speak to this (pre-digital) literary heritage and how they dialogue with their predecessors and contemporaries. In understanding this complex dialogue, it is also worth noting that the engagement that these authors undertake with existing print literary forms does not privilege any one genre, style, movement, or even either side of

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the (problematic) binary of ‘high’ and ‘low’ art. The authors studied engage just as frequently with ‘low’ as with ‘high’ culture; they rework high modernist techniques at the same time as they make use of popular fiction tropes; they make intertextual references to key works of canonical authors, just as they acknowledge their debt to the conventions of genre fiction. The intertextual play that they carry out means neither an exclusive attention to high-art techniques such as modernist stream-of-­ consciousness, nor to low art conventions such as those popular genres, but rather, they mobilise literary precedents from both, moving between and destabilising the boundaries between high and low. Thus, for example, Carlos Labbé’s work, as mentioned above, builds on the long-standing literary genre of epistolary fiction, references the historical avant-garde practices of papier collé, at the same time as reworking to the popular Latin American newspaper feature of the nota roja. Or, for instance, Belén Gache engages both with the highly complex literary allusiveness of Góngora, acknowledged canonical author of Spain’s Golden Age, and with the popular format of karaoke. Or, similarly, Jaime Alejandro Rodríguez mobilises the historical avant-garde techniques of the surrealist cadavre exquis alongside the popular fiction format of the crime novel. In this way, their works engage with popular genres (crime fiction, karaoke, and others) as much as with non-popular, highbrow genres (modernist stream-of-consciousness, Baroque literary allusiveness, and so forth). In so doing, these authors demonstrate a cultural eclecticism, and pay equal attention to popular culture as to high culture. We can thus identify, to an extent, some of the impulses of the early Birmingham School, such as William’s and Hoggart’s exhortation to give value to popular culture as noted above, not to mention a large trajectory of literary currents that have attempted to integrate popular culture into literary works, such as, of course, the Latin American post-Boom.12 Yet, this destabilising is not inherently radical; as noted above, the moment of the Birmingham school’s championing of popular culture was historically contingent; it took place in the context of mid-twentieth-century Britain, and its established values, which included the hierarchical division between elite and 12  Numerous studies on the Latin American post-Boom have identified as one of its notable features the integration of, and often exaltation of, popular cultural formats, such as soap operas, B movies, popular music, youth culture, and many more, and examine how the postBoom authors attempted to undo the dualism of high and low culture (see, for instance, Swanson 1995; Shaw 1998).

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popular.13 In our present era, to champion the popular in the twenty-first century is not in and of itself radical because popular culture, and the act of de-hierarchisation of the high/low binary itself, has been recuperated by the markets. Rather, I argue that the significance of these authors’ undertaking lies not in an indiscriminate mixing of high and low, but in the fact that they trouble some of the assumptions of each, that their doing so is accompanied by a denunciation of the material conditions in which culture is produced (on which more is discussed below). This, I argue, could constitute one such example of the potential recuperation of the de-hierarchisation of culture for the left that Beverley has yearned for. It is not, thus, the combination of high and low genres together per se that is important, or that makes their literary practice radical: it is the fact of combining this de-hierarchisation with a critical assessment of the conditions of late capitalism. Thus, the various writers analysed in this book share a common interest in the reworking of literary precedents, and envisage their works as part of a longer, pre-digital heritage of literary-artistic experimentation, yet they do not do so merely to praise uncritically the works of their predecessors. The authors studied in this volume take up these precursor texts or genres, both in homage to them, but also to push some of their experimentations to the limit. So, for example, Zerbarini takes up Joycean traits such as textual gaps, unresolved endings, and stream-of-consciousness, but yet troubles some of these notions, through, for example, her questioning of the possibility to represent the associative leaps of the mind free from restraints. Or, for example, Rodríguez’s use of the novela negra format attempts both to disrupt some of the stable features inherent to the genre, such as the fixity of character, and to reveal the systemic as much as individual violence that is often masked by the enigma-driven novela negra structure. In this way, the authors maintain an intertextual dialogue with literary precedents that is both self-aware, with constant references to the literary paradigms within the works themselves and, at times, critical. 13  Indeed, similar criticisms to those levelled against ‘celebratory’ cultural studies have been levelled against the Latin American post-Boom, with scholars pointing out the inherent contradictions in, and limitations of, the endeavour to integrate mass media narratives into the novel. Calling this ‘playing with the popular’, Swanson asks, rhetorically: ‘is the liberation of the popular really a triumphant blow against fixed bourgeois traditional models? Is the dissolution of the boundary between the serious and the useful, on the one hand, and the popular and the playful, on the other, really an effective attack on the utilitarian ethic of productivity which underlies western and capitalist thought?’ (Swanson 1995, p. 11).

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Moving onto the second of the two, intertwined traits—the metatextual references—these authors also engage in a complex metatextual play which problematises the hype of digital technology as it pertains to literary potential. Each author manipulates digital technologies in a variety of ways within their works, and also engages in a sustained metatextual discussion of the uses of these same technologies. That is, the authors studied in this volume often make sustained references to the very digital platforms they are mobilising, within their works themselves, and they make frequent metatextual references to their own means of creation. There are frequent references to digital platforms, to linking, to hypertext, and other technological features within the actual content of their works: they thematise the very technologies that they employ, as these technologies become referents within the storyworlds. Thus, we witness, for example, characters who embody traits of digital technologies; locales that overtly mimic the hypertextual structure of the web; visuals that deliberately encourage us to draw parallels between the storyworld and the very platform itself that is employed to construct that world. In a variety of ways, these authors comment on the same technologies that they employ, such that the storyworlds engage in a self-aware dialogue with their processes of creation. Yet they do not do so in a utopian gesture to praise the potentials of digital technologies for creating new literary genres, or for providing liberatory experiments with literary form; rather, these authors, in their different ways, highlight the problems with, and limitations of, the digital tools with which they work. For, as these authors make knowing references to the digital technologies that they employ, they also deliberately point out the failings or limitations of digital technologies. Their metatextual references to digital technologies themselves often play with, and yet question or thwart, key notions of interactive literature. The authors often make implicit or explicit reference to some of the key debates in electronic literature, including the earlier, utopian pronouncements by scholars such as Bolter or Landow noted above, about hypertextual writing as offering radical rethinkings of the conventional form of the text, the author, and writing systems. Yet in so doing, they often bring us up against the impossibility of the realisation of these pronouncements. For instance, Gache’s Góngora Word Toys employs digital technologies to animate Baroque poetry, all the while bringing us face to face with the limitations of those technologies to truly transcend the boundaries of the printed page. Or, Chiappe’s multiple references to hypertextual terminology in the story of his character, the Minotaur, serve to alert us to the limi-

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tations of these technologies. In their metatextual references and musings, therefore, these authors do not uncritically celebrate digital technologies as offering radically new tools for literary experimentation. Rather, they often warn us against falling into the trap of technological determinism and of seeing digital technology, as of necessity, emancipatory or experimental. In other words, it is not that these authors posit digital technologies as the culmination of literary experimentation, and as the answers to the limitations of the printed page; instead, they simultaneously use and problematise the potentials of these technologies. What we see in their works, therefore, are multiple examples of the complex negotiations between literary precedents and technological tools, and this complex negotiation is often overtly thematised in these works. The authors engage in varied strategies of negotiation that combine a re-­ activation of prior print experimentations, and yet also a critique of the digital technologies they employ.

Critiques of Material Conditions of Technologies If, therefore, these authors critique the digital tools they employ as regards their potential for radical or revolutionary literary experimentation, it is important to note that this critique extends beyond the issue of the use of these tools for literary experimentation only. For all of the authors studied here, in their different ways, draw our attention to some of the shortcomings of the digital tools not just in terms of their technological-literary limitations, but also in terms of the material conditions that underpin them. That is, in their different ways, the authors undertake a (Marxist) unmasking of the conditions of production of digital technologies, and attempt to unveil the common sense and seemingly ‘natural’ ideas that underpin our contemporary power relations.14 They attempt to unveil or unmask the real social relations, the conditions of labour and life that lie behind the production of (digital) commodities, the corporate colonisation of our social relations, and the imbrication of the digital tools that they employ in contemporary technocapitalism. Their works alert us to, 14  I am here using the term ‘common sense’ in the Gramscian sense of the term to mean ‘a conception which [is] in conformity with the social and cultural position of those masses whose philosophy it is’ (Gramsci 1971, p. 419); in other words, to refer to the norms of the hegemonic class which uphold the status quo, and that become so reified that they are usually not even questioned.

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and encourage us to be on our guard against, the contemporary forms of colonisation of the lifeworld by corporate capitalism: thus, in their works, they unmask for us such phenomena as commodity fetishism of the digital age, the alienation of the individual in informational capitalism, the immaterial labour of late capitalism, the faceless representatives of corporate power, the economy of online social capital, the commodification of the online self, or the economies of labour underpinning the circulation of images on the internet, amongst many others. Through a variety of tactics which encourage us to question the technologies as much as accept them blindly, they undertake a process of de-fetishisation, aiming to denaturalise the hegemonic discourses of corporate capital and strip away the fetishistic aura of technology. In this way, the focus of their concern is two-fold: they question the potentials of digital technologies for literary experimentation, as noted above; and they provide a critical analysis of the material conditions that underpin these technologies. I argue that we can, thus, read their works as an attempt to do ‘the politics of politics’ that Couldry argues we should still call for, precisely because they undertake that process of enquiry (still) required of by cultural studies; that is, their works ask questions of the political, questioning the democratic deficit that is produced by the corporate colonisation of social life. If, in classical Marxist thought, power is concentrated in the state, which is controlled by the capitalist class, then for the authors of these works in the era of late capitalism, power is diffuse, and in the hands of corporate capital which transcends the nation-state. It is precisely this nexus that comes under scrutiny in their works, as they focus their attention on late capitalism and, crucially, on the potential complicity of digital technologies with it. My reading of their works here is influenced by scholars who have explored the relations between digital technologies and late capitalism, and have argued for a complex understanding of the ways in which digital technologies are closely allied with (although not always of necessity determined by) the conditions of late capitalism. The seeds of this approach can be seen in David Harvey’s early yet still hugely influential work, The Condition of Postmodernity (1990),15 which proposed late capitalism as the ‘regime of flexible accumulation’, which is based, in part, on technological innovation, because it: 15  Some of these ideas are developed further in Harvey’s subsequent books, in particular his recent work, The Enigma of Capital (2011), although again the focus is not strictly on technology, but on late capitalism in general.

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Rests on flexibility with respect to labour processes, labour markets, products, and patterns of consumption. It is characterized by the emergence of entirely new sectors of production, new ways of providing financial services, new markets, and above all, greatly intensified rates of commercial, technological, and organizational innovation. (Harvey 1990, p. 147)

Whilst Harvey’s statements came in the context of a larger study focusing on postmodernism, and the transformations of time and space, subsequently, others have focused in detail on the specific relationship of technology with late capitalism, which has variously been termed the ‘informational economy’ (Hardt and Negri), ‘technocapitalism’ (Luis Suárez-Villa), ‘informational capitalism’ (Christian Fuchs), ‘digital capitalism’ (Michael Betancourt), and ‘communicative capitalism (Ulises Mejia), terms which enable us to explore the relations between technological advances and late capitalist logic. Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri developed in their monumental book, Empire, a theorisation of the era of global capitalism and, within this, of the relationship between late capitalism and network technologies. Terming this the ‘informational economy’, Hardt and Negri argue that it is predicated on networks, since ‘the assembly line has been replaced by the network as the organizational model of production’ (Hardt and Negri 2000, p.  295). Central to this, they argue, is immaterial labour, or the ‘labour of informational production’ (Hardt and Negri 2000, p.  296), which involves the manipulation of knowledge and information, and produces immaterial goods, such as services, knowledge, or communication. Such a model of network production, for Hardt and Negri, subtends late capitalism and its regime of flexible accumulation, decentralisation of production, and tendency towards de-territorialisation. For Suárez-Villa, ‘technocapitalism’ is a new form of capitalism that is heavily grounded in corporate power and its exploitation of technological creativity. Arguing that corporatism colonises human society, converting knowledge and creativity into commodities, Suárez-Villa argues that ‘our creativity, our knowledge, and our learning thus become not qualities that emancipate but commodities that bind us to our alienation from the human condition, from society, and from nature. This degradation of human values is not grounded in technology, in and of itself. It is grounded in the character of a new kind of corporatism and its authoritarian control over technology’ (Suárez-Villa 2009, p. 2). For Suárez-Villa, thus, corporate power and profit depend on the commodification of ideas, and the

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values of corporatism are embedded in the design of technology. Drawing a parallel between the factory system of the earlier version of Fordist capitalism, and the technological regimes of today, Suárez-Villa then argues that: These regimes and the corporate apparatus in which they are embedded are to technocapitalism what the factory system and its production regimes were to industrial capitalism. The tangible resources of industrial capitalism, in the form of raw materials, production hardware, capital, and physical labor routines are thus replaced by intangibles, research hardware, experimental designs, and talented individuals with creative aptitudes. (Suárez-­ Villa 2009, pp. 3–4)

Thus, Suárez-Villa draws our attention to the potentially negative aspects of technological apparatus, but does not suggest a deterministic relationship; it is not the fact that technology in and of itself is late capitalist but, rather, that we need to be on our guard against a particular type of exploitation of technology in the interests of corporate capitalism. In a similar vein, although with a different focus, Christian Fuchs has written extensively on what he terms ‘transnational informational capitalism’. For Fuchs, this type of capitalism is characteristic of our globalised, post-Fordist era, and is underpinned by technological systems and transnational institutions that enable ‘global flows of capital, power and ideology that create and permanently re-create a new transnational regime of domination’ (Fuchs 2008, p. 113). In this new regime, digital technologies—including, although not limited to, information technologies and networks—transform the means of production and the relations of production, since they become a fundamental part of the way in which transnational capitalism produces commodities, and engages in capital accumulation, as well as in themselves creating new forms of commodities. Fuchs argues that to understand this new form of capitalism, we need the notion of ‘transnational informational capitalism’, which ‘conceptualizes contemporary capitalism based on the rise of cognitive, communicative, and co-operative labour that is interconnected with the rise of technologies and goods that objectify human cognition, communication, and co-­ operation’ (Fuchs 2013, p.  419). Fuchs then proposes that an understanding of the functioning of this transnational informational capitalism requires an updating of concepts such as those of surplus value, exchange value, capital, commodities, and competition, amongst others.

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Reminding us that the ways in which these forms manifest themselves is always historically contingent, in various of his works, Fuchs has updated, variously, the notion of capital accumulation in order to take into account how these manifest themselves in symbolic, immaterial commodities (Fuchs 2013); theories of labour and labour time for understanding the various forms of labour within the ICT industries (Fuchs 2014); and perhaps most persuasively, the notions of surplus value and profit rate to account for social media platforms (Fuchs 2010). With regard to this latter, Fuchs has demonstrated how social media giants exploit not only the productive labour time of their employees, but also, crucially, the time of all their users; in so doing, Fuchs encourages us to be wary of the discourse around ‘produsers’ which, in contemporary hype, tends to laud the capacity of users to produce for themselves as a democratic gesture. Instead, Fuchs warns us that ‘capitalist Internet produsage is an extreme form of exploitation, in which the produsers work completely for free and are therefore infinitely exploited’ (Fuchs 2010, p. 191). In this way, as in many other examples in his work, Fuchs encourages us to understand the ways in which digital technologies are often put to the service of global corporate capital, and warns us against accepting some of the contemporary hype about digital technologies being, through their design, democratising or participatory. Similarly, Michael Betancourt’s writings have also undertaken an updating of terms of Marxist analysis in his sustained analysis of what he terms ‘digital capitalism’, which, for Betancourt, is ‘capitalism as it has been adapted/transformed by the invention of digital technologies, most especially the new forms of production specific to the automated and autonomous systems that technology makes possible’ (Betancourt 2015, p. i). For Betancourt, thus, digital capitalism refers to the contemporary era of late capitalism, which is built upon and supported by the capacities of digital technologies, and he, like Fuchs, develops a number of key terms through which to understand the workings of this new regime, including the notion of ‘immaterial commodities’, and of ‘aura of the digital’. Regarding the first of these, Betancourt, in a similar way to Suárez-Villa, and chiming with Hardt and Negri’s notions of immaterial labour, notes how the colonisation of the lifeworld by corporatism involves the desire to turn all informational possibilities into a commodity in themselves, this leading to the creation of what are purportedly immaterial commodities. Just as, for Marx, in a prior era of capitalism, exchange value and the commodity fetish obscured the real conditions of the workers who produced

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the commodity, so, for Betancourt, in digital capitalism, ‘the technical capabilities of this computer technology obscure the nexus of capital, human agency, social reproduction, and physical production; thus, the denial of physicality that is specific to the aura of the digital, and apparent in the evolution from hand-labor to the automation characteristic of “digital capitalism,” is inherent in how this technology has been deployed’ (Betancourt 2015, pp. iii–iv). Regarding the second of these terms, Betancourt urges us to undertake a materialist examination of ‘the ways that digital technology has “magical” properties, seemingly allowing production without consumption of resources’. This, for Betancourt, is the ‘aura of the digital’, which is firmly embedded within the ideology of digital capitalism, and is based on the ‘illusion of production-without-­ consumption enabled by digital technology and automation’ (Betancourt 2015, p. i). This aura of the digital, for Betancourt, is precisely an illusion—we might say, one of the modern-day equivalents of the common sense, naturalised notions of which Gramsci spoke, and warned us to deconstruct—for, Betancourt argues, the aura of the digital enables the disavowal of the material conditions underpinning the digital, allowing for ‘the occlusion of the real conditions of physicality from considerations of the apparently immaterial realm of the digital’ (Betancourt 2015, pp. 53–54), and deliberately obscuring the fact that ‘digital technology, its development, deployment, production and access all demand a large expenditure of capital both to create and to maintain’ (Betancourt 2015, p. 58).16 Meanwhile, Mejias, building on Jodi Dean, calls for an understanding of ‘communicative capitalism’ in which networked participation itself is ‘an expression of the spirit of capitalism’, and ‘the more we participate in digital communication networks, the more this ideology is reinforced’ 16  Although Betancourt does not go into the issue of production in detail, it is worth noting a range of scholars who have undertaken a sustained analysis of the material conditions required to sustain digital technologies. See for instance, Sean Cubitt, who has provided an extensive critique of what he terms ‘the myth of immateriality’ from an ecocritical perspective (Cubitt 2017, p. 14). Bringing to our attention a range of phenomena, including the huge energy requirements to maintain digital resources and server farms, the toxicity of technological waste, the devastating environmental destruction associated with lithium extraction needed to form batteries, amongst many other such examples, Cubitt reveals the environmental footprint of purportedly ‘immaterial’ digital technologies, and warns us that ‘indigenous people have borne the brunt of the digital boom, and gained least from it. The global poor suffer far more from pollution and environmental loss than the global rich’ (Cubitt 2017, p. 14).

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(Mejias 2013, p. 21). For Mejias, communicative capitalism is embodied in particular in the network, and is linked to privatisation and to the ‘neoliberal impulse to subsume all social communication and participation to market forces’ (Mejias 2013, p. 21). Mejias focuses in particular on the ways in which digital networks provide purportedly ‘free’ participation, but in fact, work through the exploitation of the labour of the participants, and turn that participation into a commodity. Mejias thus warns that ‘while it is true that the technologies of communicative capitalism embody practices of inclusion, they also perpetuate the ideology of capitalism and obstruct any resistance to it […]. Particularly, they increase inequality through commodification, the transformation of social activity into a commodity that can be bought or sold’ (Mejias 2013, p. 22). These various theorists of the imbrications of digital technologies with late capitalism have all, in their different ways, alerted us to the ways in which our contemporary capitalist restructuring is predicated on digital technologies. They demonstrate the need for a historicising approach, understanding the configuration of capitalism as historically contingent, and call for an updating of Marxist terms of analysis in the light of contemporary forms of late capitalism. At the same time, they also resist technological determinism: it is not the case that digital technologies are per se tainted with global corporate capital, more that the ways in which certain technologies can and are being employed currently serve the interest of capital. In their analyses, they urge us to undertake a materialist analysis of these technologies, contest the common-sense notions about their functioning, and, ultimately, resist this employment. My reading of the authors studied in this volume takes on board these theories, as I demonstrate how these authors attempt to uncover the hidden histories of the digital technologies that they employ, and draw our attention to the material conditions underpinning these technologies. So, for instance, Labbé’s partial celebration of the collage practices of the historical avant-garde, analysed in Chap. 2, also cautions us about the potential recuperation of these practices in the interests of corporate capital of the present day, drawing parallels with the cut-and-paste techniques of corporate media giants. Or, for example, Belén Gache’s use of a wide range of digitally enabled techniques, including algorithms, search engines, visualisations, and interactive platforms in her Radikal Karaoke is accompanied by a blistering attack on the colonisation of the lifeworld by corporate capital, through her frequent references to exploitation and corporate greed, and an exhortation to the reader-viewer to see themselves as impli-

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cated in this colonisation. Or, to cite another example, Eduardo Navas’s use of the blog format in his Minima Moralia Redux both makes use of the recombinant potentials of social media, and yet also protests about the imbrication of social media in late capitalism, alerting us to the fact that capitalist accumulation in the twenty-first century is based, in part, on data mining made possible by these same social media platforms, and that social media alienates its produsers in the same way as Fordist capitalism did its workers in a previous era of capitalist accumulation. Or, Doménico Chiappe’s hypermedia narrative Minotaur Hotel overtly borrows from the social media tropes of images and links to denounce the functioning of social media and the commodification of the online self. In these various ways, the authors make use of the affordances of digital technologies, all the while maintaining an awareness of, and encouraging us to challenge, the ways in which these technologies are made to serve the interests of late capital. The metatextual references to the very technologies they use are undertaken not only to make comment on the potentials for literary experimentation, but also to take an oppositional stance against the contemporary conditions of late capitalism.

Aesthetics, Technologics, Ethics: Latin(o) American Digital Authors at Work In the chapters that follow, I examine how this dynamic—the combination of intertextual references to genres, texts, and movements, of metatextual commentary on digital platforms, and of a critique of the material conditions of digital technologies—is undertaken in the specific works of each author. I provide a detailed analysis of how each work or work functions, and do not suggest that each author approaches this dynamic in the same way. Rather, I demonstrate how each work or works provide a particular approach to this dynamic; for some authors, for instance, there are moments when intertextual play predominates; in others, it recedes into the background as metatextual commentary comes to the fore, and so forth. I start my analysis of this dynamic in Chap. 2 with a sustained focus on Chilean author Carlos Labbé’s Pentagonal, Including You and Me of 2001—widely seen as one of the first works of hypertext literature to be written in Spanish.17 Paying particular attention to Labbé’s revitalisation  My translation. The title in the original Spanish is Pentagonal: incluidos tú y yo.

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of legacy media, the chapter scrutinises his engagement with the techniques of papier collé and broader literary and artistic experimentation of the cubists and the surrealists, with the Latin American newspaper feature of the nota roja, and with the established genre of epistolary fiction. Arguing that Labbé both updates and expands upon the potentials of these intertexts, the chapter demonstrates that he does so not in order to laud them or suggest that they can be unproblematically transferred to the digital era. This is in particular evidence, the chapter argues, in his updating of cubist and surrealist techniques of collage, since Labbé encourages us to consider the extent to which the radical and oppositional practice of the historical avant-garde is potentially recuperated by corporate media in the interests of late capitalism. The chapter thus demonstrates how Labbé’s hypertext novel functions on several levels: the intertextual, where he draws on a series of legacy media formats to suggest parallels between pre-digital and digital cultural forms; the metatextual, as he provides a commentary on the digital tools that he uses; and the political, in the unmasking that he undertakes of the conditions of digital capitalism. It is arguably in this combination of intertextual, metatextual, and materialist critique where Labbé’s work can find its critical edge; the potentials for resistance lie not in the use of contemporary digital media per se, but in the active and critical reworking of this media, in the metacommentary, and in the questioning of the corporate digital colonisation of the lifeworld. Chapter 3 then moves on to an analysis of Argentine author and artist Marina Zerbarini’s Eveline, Fragments of a Reply (2004).18 In this case, there is one specific named intertext—James Joyce’s short story ‘Eveline’— yet Zerbarini also engages with wider Joycean traits and with modernist techniques more broadly. I elucidate how Zerbarini adopts and dialogues with several Joycean conceits, including narrative gaps, unresolved endings, and stream-of-consciousness. She provides an updated version of these modernist traits for the digital era, where the silences and ellipses of Joyce’s text become fragmentary lexia and images, where the unresolved endings become the randomisation through digital algorithms such that there is no fixed end to Zerbarini’s work, and where the stream-of-­ consciousness becomes the constant linking across lexia and images. However, this chapter argues, Zerbarini does not do so in order to show that digital technologies can actualise Joyce’s aims, but rather that they fail  My translation. The title in the original Spanish is Eveline, fragmentos de una respuesta.

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to do so. This is particularly evident, I argue, in her metatextual commentary and its insistent, obsessive reference to links, tracks, and signals, whereby Zerbarini implies the failings of digital technologies to provide for associative leaps of the mind free from restraints. The chapter also indicates how Zerbarini accompanies this highlighting of the shortcomings of digital technologies for literary experimentation with an attention to some of the neo-colonial impulses underpinning digital technologies, particularly the internet. Establishing visual parallels between the mapping structures of the internet and colonial practices of mapping the Americas, Zerbarini raises questions about mapping, navigation, routes, and pathways, and in so doing, speaks to dominant metaphors of the web and how we interact with it. The chapter ends by considering how the interactive and user input features in the work, through their creation of moments of narrative as well as interactional metalepsis, encourage the reader-viewer to consider their own imbrication in this (neo-colonial) dynamic. Moving on from Zerbarini, Chap. 4 analyses Coup de Grace (2006), a hypermedia narrative by Colombia’s foremost electronic literary author and scholar, Jaime Alejandro Rodríguez.19 The chapter firstly investigates how Rodríguez mobilises two main intertexts in this work: surrealist practices of literary experimentation, particularly the cadavre exquis; and the established genre of the detective novel. These intertexts are both actualised and updated in Coup de Grace—where, for example the mixed-up sentences of the paper version of the cadavre exquis become the mixing of lexia and images through digital means in this work—and yet they are problematised. This problematisation comes, I argue, precisely through the bringing together, and clashing, of these two intertexts, and also through their combination with digital technologies. For Rodríguez undertakes a variety of narrative disruptions, including the blurring of boundaries between narrative levels, moments of narrative metalepsis, and destabilisation of character, amongst others. In so doing, he questions some of the standard features—such as stability of character, or cause-­ effect relationship—that are so central to the whodunnit genre he mobilises. The chapter then proceeds to analyse how these features are complicated further by their embedding with the socio-political context of early twenty-first-century Colombia. Here, the chapter argues that Rodríguez  My translation. The title in the original Spanish is Golpe de gracia.

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revitalises the popular fiction genre of the detective novel in order to provide a critical stance on the socio-economic conditions in which his story is set, and that, in so doing, he places the genre under stress. In Rodríguez’s version, the focus of the crime narrative is not on the criminal individual as in the traditional detective novel, but on the corruption of the system. This systemic critique, I argue, lies in the ludology itself, with the four pillars of the institutional power in Colombia as represented by the four changing faces of the principal character, Amaury. Furthermore, the instability of the avatar becomes, I contend, our collusion in the scenarios we encounter, since we are not permitted to see ourselves as exterior to the narrative game format, but instead, we find ourselves implicated. Thus, through his techniques of narrative metalepsis, shape shifting, and instability of reader positionality, Rodríguez brings into focus systematic violence, as much as individual acts of violence. Through the fluctuating victim, whose roles represent institutions, and whose acts turn out to be those of perpetrator as much as victim, Rodríguez questions the narrative thrust of detective fiction as one focused on identifying the single violent actor, and instead (partially), turns our attention to the violence of the system. Subsequently, in Chap. 5, I proceed to an analysis of two of the works of one of the most prolific authors of electronic literature in the Spanish-­ speaking world: Argentine-Spanish author Belén Gache. I focus firstly on her Góngora Word Toys of 2011, studying its extended intertextual dialogue with the work of the Golden Age poet Luis de Góngora, in particular his famous lengthy poetic work, The Solitudes. The chapter analyses how Gache draws overt parallels between Baroque literary excess and contemporary digital technologies, such as catachresis, which is in Gache’s version updated through multiple hyperlinking, or literary allusiveness becomes an animated, spinning text. That said, the chapter reveals how Gache does not thereby advocate digital technologies as the teleological end point of literary experimentation, but instead demonstrates how many of the much-vaunted features of digital technologies reach their limit, and are bound by their own restrictions. The chapter subsequently moves on to an analysis of her Radikal Karaoke, also of 2011, exploring how this online work recycles platitudes and commonplaces that characterise corporate branding, trademark symbols, slogans, and rhetorical phrases. I demonstrate how, in this work, Gache aims to denounce the encroaching powers of corporate giants, the structures of faceless corporate capitalism, and the status of the individual

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under late capitalism and corporatism. Crucial to this denouncement, I argue, is Gache’s shock tactic of breaking the fourth wall to bring the reader-viewer directly into the work; here, Gache forces us to see—quite literally—ourselves as integrated into the work, and thus encourages us to reflect upon our own complicity with the systems of corporate models and global capital. In this way, Gache attempts to unmask and denaturalise the hegemonic discourses of corporate capital, strip away the fetishistic aura of the brand, and enable her reader-player to see through the spectacle. The chapter concludes that Gache’s intertextual play and metatextual commentary are not merely utopian gestures to praise the potentials of digital technologies for the creation of new literary genres, or to provide for liberatory experiments with literary form. Rather, Gache, on the one hand, questions the potentials that digital technologies have for truly experimental, non-linear literary forms that would really get beyond the confines of the printed page; and on the other, she unmasks the discourses of corporate power that are enabled by these self-same digital technologies. Chapter 6 then moves on to consider the works of US-Salvadoran media artist, critic, theorist, and curator Eduardo Navas, in particular his Minima Moralia Redux (2011 to date). Described by Navas as a ‘selective remix’, this work rewrites the 153 aphorisms of Theodor Adorno’s Minima Moralia, and my analysis in this chapter reveals how Nava’s remixing of this particular intertext creates new reinterpretations of the original for the twenty-first century, updating Adorno to provide a reflection on the workings of neoliberal corporate capitalism. Whereas Adorno’s text provided a biting attack on bourgeois individualism, and attempted to make his readers comprehend their own alienation in the ruling structure of his day—statist capitalism—Navas attempts to update this for our contemporary era of late capitalism. The chapter analyses how Navas’s remix technique, through its insertion of additional material into Adorno’s ­original sentences, produces new, updated aphorisms for the twenty-first century, bringing into focus the minutiae—the minima moralia—of everyday life under late informational capitalism. I demonstrate that a particular significance of Navas’s updating of Adorno is the fact that it is also accompanied by a metatextual commentary on the digital platforms that Navas uses. Navas’s remixing of Adorno relies on a variety of digitally enabled mechanisms—the blog as platform, word clouds as visualisation tools, Google searches, amongst others—yet Navas also takes a critical stance on these same tools that he employs and, in so doing, updates the Adornian impulse of the original. For Adorno’s

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practice included bringing under scrutiny very genre of the conduct book he was employing—a genre designed to ensure conformity with the status quo through the promotion of ‘correct’ conduct—by providing a relentless series of aphorisms which were anything but conformist, and which encouraged not compliance with the status quo, but a questioning of it. So too, Navas now undertakes a detailed scrutiny of the format of the blog and social media more broadly that he uses; Navas’s remixed aphorisms highlight the potentially negative aspects of the use of social media for corporate purposes, put us on our guard against data mining, and encourage us to question the encroachment of corporate capital into private life. In his critical, resistant reworking both of existing literary genres and of social media technologies, Navas makes political comments on corporate (informational) capitalism, encouraging the reader/user to look beneath the commonplace uses of social media, and to acknowledge the political economies that underpin them. The final chapter provides an analysis of the recent hypermedia novel Minotaur Hotel (2013–2015) by Peruvian-Venezuelan author and journalist, Doménico Chiappe.20 The chapter analyses how Chiappe’s principal intertext in this work is the classical myth of the Minotaur, and how he reworks this myth in order to encourage us both to understand the networked functioning of the web, and to question the functioning of online social capital underpinning the circulation of images on the internet. Regarding the first of these, I analyse how Chiappe’s puzzle-like narrative structure situates the reader as investigator, making his/her way through the labyrinthine structure of the hotel and, at the same time, how the lexia we encounter deliberately engage in metatextual commentary, making ­frequent use of terminology used to describe the structure of the internet itself. Chiappe thus draws parallels between the structure of his story and the structure of the internet, where the entry points, multiple paths, loops, and dead ends of the Minotaur’s labyrinth become the entry points, paths, and dead ends (broken links) of the internet. Subsequently, I demonstrate how, in addition to using one feature of the myth of the Minotaur—the feature of the labyrinth—to talk about the hypertextual structure of his work, Chiappe also makes use of another feature of the myth—the figure of Pasiphae, the mother of the Minotaur— in order to discuss female sexuality and online social capital in the internet 20  The title in Spanish is Minotaur Hotel. This work is available in three languages, these being Spanish, English, and French.

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age. Here, in Chiappe’s updated version of the Minotaur myth, women’s bodies are again the subject of control and, in this case, for voyeuristic pleasure for an implied male gaze. Where the ‘red’ as the labyrinth in classical times was employed to contain the shameful offspring of the excessive sexuality of Pasiphae, now, in contemporary times, the ‘red’ as the internet functions as a containment of female sexuality. Chiappe reveals how this is linked to the functioning of social media and the ‘like economy’, drawing our attention to the form of societal conditioning that social media instils in us. Chiappe thus provides a denunciation of the commodification of the online self, and of the functioning of online social capital as an ideological product of the neoliberal era that champions competitive individualism and further alienates its users. In this way, Chiappe forces us to question our own position as voyeur as we surf the web, and to understand the political economy of contemporary regimes of image reproduction and circulation on the web. As with the other authors studied in this volume, Chiappe undertakes a critique of his own practice, in that he questions both the potentials of digital technologies to undertake literary experimentation and the material conditions under which these digital technologies are created. As this introduction has demonstrated, when exploring digital literary works, it is important to recognise a rich, non-Anglophone tradition of literary experimentation that informs contemporary digital practice. It is not the case that digital technology is always the radically new and, in fact, digital literary practice draws on existing (pre-digital) experimentations. The works of the authors to be discussed in the following chapters examine the new possibilities enabled by digital technologies, all the while maintaining close dialogues with prior literary discourses, genres, and traditions. They combine these intertextual references to pre-digital authors, texts, and genres with a metatextual commentary on digital technologies themselves. In their different ways, for each author it is less a case of applauding digital technologies as radically overthrowing literary norms per se, than of examining critically these potentials, and of highlighting their limitations; their works often dramatise these potentials, but at the same time indicate their impossibility in the actual procedural enactment of the work. Similarly, these authors also engage in a detailed scrutiny of the material conditions that underpin these technologies, and provide insights into our contemporary era of late (informational, digital) capitalism. Their works shed light on a range of different phenomena of late capitalism, from the

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disavowed structural violence of late capitalism to the alienation of the individual under informational capital, from the colonisation of the lifeworld by corporatism to the commodification of the online self. In their different ways, their works undertake an unmasking of the commonplace notions with which informational capitalism currently structures our lives, and they strip away the fetishistic aura of technology. Through a three-fold approach, thus, combining attention to aesthetics, technologics, and ethics, I examine in the following chapters how these authors, in their different ways, dialogue with and yet problematise prior literary traditions; experiment with the literary potentials of, but also highlight the limitations, of digital technologies; and build their practice on a series of digital platforms and tools, all the while providing a critique of the contemporary socio-economic conditions that underpin these tools, showing an awareness of their own—and our own—implication in them.

Works Cited Aarseth, Espen. 1997. Cybertext: Perspectives on Ergodic Literature. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. ———. 2003. Nonlinearity and Literary Theory. In The New Media Reader, ed. Noah Wardrip-Fruin and Nick Montfort, 762–780. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Barthes, Roland. 1977. Image, Music, Text. Translated from the French by Stephen Heath. London: Fontana. Beasley-Murray, Jon. 2010. Posthegemony: Political Theory and Latin America. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Bell, Alice. 2010. The Possible Worlds of Hypertext Fiction. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Belsey, Catherine. 2003. From Cultural Studies to Cultural Criticism? In Interrogating Cultural Studies: Theory, Politics, Practice, ed. Paul Bowman, 19–29. London: Pluto Press. Betancourt, Michael. 2015. The Critique of Digital Capitalism: An Analysis of the Political Economy of Digital Culture and Technology. Brooklyn, NY: Punctum Books. Beverley, John. 2011. Latinamericanism After 9/11. Durham: Duke University Press. Bødker, Henrik. 2016. Stuart Hall’s Encoding/Decoding Model and the Circulation of Journalism in the Digital Landscape. Critical Studies in Media Communication 33 (5): 409–423.

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Bolter, Jay David. 1991. Writing Space: The Computer, Hypertext, and the History of Writing. Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum. Bowman, Paul. 2003. Introduction: Interrogating Cultural Studies. In Interrogating Cultural Studies: Theory, Politics and Practice, ed. Paul Bowman, 1–15. London: Pluto Press. Chaney, Joseph R., Judd Ethan Ruggill, and Ken S.  McAllister, eds. 2009. The Computer Culture Reader. Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars Publishing. Charusheela, S. 2011. Where is the “Economy”? Cultural Studies and Narratives of Capitalism. In The Renewal of Cultural Studies, ed. Paul Smith, 177–187. Philadelphia: Temple University Press. Ciccorico, David. 2007. Reading Network Fiction. Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press. Couldry, Nick. 2011. The Project of Cultural Studies: Heretical Doubts, New Horizons. In The Renewal of Cultural Studies, ed. Paul Smith, 9–16. Philadelphia: Temple University Press. Cubitt, Sean. 2017. Finite Media: Environmental Implications of Digital Technologies. Durham: Duke University Press. During, Simon. 2007. The Cultural Studies Reader. 3rd ed. London: Routledge. Fuchs, Christian. 2008. Internet and Society: Social Theory in the Information Age. New York: Routledge. ———. 2010. Labor in Informational Capitalism and on the Internet. The Information Society 26: 179–196. ———. 2013. Capitalism or Information Society? The Fundamental Question of the Present Structure of Society. European Journal of Social Theory 16 (4): 413–434. ———. 2014. Karl Marx and the Study of Media and Culture Today. Culture Unbound: Journal of Current Cultural Research 6: 39–76. Funkhouser, Christopher. 2007. Prehistoric Digital Poetry: An Archaeology of Forms, 1959–1995. Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press. Garnham, Nicholas. 1995. Political Economy and Cultural Studies: Reconciliation or Divorce? Critical Studies in Mass Communication 12 (1): 62–71. Gere, Charlie. 2008. Digital Culture. London: Reaktion Books. Glazier, Loss Pequeño. 2002. Digital Poetics: The Making of E-Poetics. Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press. Gramsci, Antonio. 1971. Selections from the Prison Notebooks of Antonio Gramsci. Edited and translated by Quintin Hoare and Geoffrey Nowell Smith. London: Lawrence and Wishart. Grossberg, Lawrence. 2010. Cultural Studies in the Future Tense. Durham: Duke University Press. Hall, Stuart. 1960. Introducing NLR. New Left Review 1: 1. ———. 2007. Richard Hoggart, The Uses of Literacy and the Cultural Turn. International Journal of Cultural Studies 10 (1): 39–49.

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Hardt, Michael, and Antonio Negri. 2000. Empire. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Hartley, John. 2012. Digital Futures for Cultural and Media Studies. Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell. Harvey, David. 1990. The Condition of Postmodernity. Oxford: Blackwell. ———. 2011. The Enigma of Capital and the Crises of Capitalism. London: Profile Books. Hayles, N.Katherine. 2008. Electronic Literature: New Horizons for the Literary. Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press. Hoggart, Richard. 1957. The Uses of Literacy: Aspects of Working-Class Life. London: Penguin. Ingraham, Chris, and Joshua Reeves. 2016. New Media, New Panics. Critical Studies in Media Communication 33 (5): 455–467. Jameson, Fredric. 1993. On “Cultural Studies”. Social Text 34: 17–52. Landow, George P. 1992. Hypertext: The Convergence of Contemporary Critical Theory and Technology. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. ———. 1997. Hypertext 2.0: The Convergence of Critical Theory and Technology. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. ———. 2006. Hypertext 3.0: Critical Theory and New Media in an Era of Globalization. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. Larsen, Neil. 1995. Reading North by South: On Latin American Literature, Culture and Politics. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Ledesma, Eduardo. 2016. Radical Poetry: Aesthetics, Politics, Technology, and the Ibero-American Avant-Gardes, 1900–2015. New York: SUNY Press. Meehan, Eileen R. 2012. Cultural Studies and Critical Communications Research. Democratic Communiqué 25 (1): 23–32. Mejias, Ulises Ali. 2013. Off the Network: Disrupting the Digital World. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Moraña, Mabel. 2006. Latin American Cultural Studies: When, Where, Why?. Hispanic Issues Online, Special Issue: Debating Hispanic Studies: Reflections on Our Disciplines 1: 31–36. Moulthrop, Stuart. 1991. Reading from the Map: Metonymy and Metaphor in the Fiction of Forking Paths. In Hypermedia and Literary Studies, ed. Paul Delany and George P. Landow, 119–132. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Murray, Janet H. 1997. Hamlet on the Holodeck: The Future of Narrative in Cyberspace. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Norris, Pippa. 2001. Digital Divide: Civic Engagement, Information Poverty, and the Internet Worldwide. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Owen, Sue, ed. 2008. Re-reading Richard Hoggart: Life, Literature, Language, Education. Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars Publishing. Proctor, James. 2004. Stuart Hall. London: Routledge.

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Ritzer, Ivo. 2015. Mapping Global Forms, Local Materials and Digital Culture: Towards a Theory for Comparative Media Studies. Critical Arts: A South-­ North Journal of Cultural & Media Studies 29 (4): 446–459. Shaw, Donald L. 1998. The Post-Boom in Spanish American Fiction. New  York: State University of New York Press. Smith, Paul. 2011. Introduction. In The Renewal of Cultural Studies, ed. Paul Smith, 1–8. Philadelphia: Temple University Press. Suárez-Villa, Luis. 2009. Technocapitalism: A Critical Perspective on Technological Innovation and Corporatism. Philadelphia: Temple University Press. Swanson, Philip. 1995. The New Novel in Latin America: Politics and Popular Culture after the Boom. Manchester: Manchester University Press. Trigo, Abril. 2004. General Introduction. In The Latin American Cultural Studies Reader, ed. Ana del Sarto, Alicia Ríos, and Abril Trigo, 1–14. Durham: Duke University Press. Williams, Raymond. 1958. Culture and Society, 1870–1950. London: Penguin.

CHAPTER 2

Revitalising Legacy Media: Carlos Labbé’s Pentagonal: Including You and Me (2001) (Chile)

In this chapter, I undertake an analysis of Chilean author Carlos Labbé’s Pentagonal: Including You and Me, widely recognised as one of the first works of hypertext literature to be written in Spanish. I focus in particular on Labbé’s deliberate engagement throughout this work with legacy media, and pre-digital forms of assemblage, cutting, and pasting. I demonstrate how his work makes overt reference to the techniques of papier collé, as championed by earlier literary and artistic experimentation in the works of the cubists and others. I also elucidate his use of the nota roja, a standard feature of Latin American newspaper formats, and also the long-­ standing genre of epistolary fiction. In so doing, I analyse how Labbé both updates and expands upon the potentials of these three pre-digital formats. Thus, for example, the selection and arrangement central to papier collé and collage are now updated in the selecting, cutting, and pasting of excerpts as lexia through the various paths that we follow. Similarly, the epistolary communication through letters is now transformed into email chains through which the reader follows the experience of the protagonists. The nota roja, meanwhile, with its focus on criminal acts, becomes the springboard for the story that unfolds. That said, the chapter does not argue that Labbé uncritically reuses these legacy media formats. Rather, as my analysis shows, Labbé simultaneously takes up and yet troubles some of these earlier formats and practices. In particular, the chapter focuses on how Labbé’s engagement with the avant-garde practices of collage raises issues regarding the radical edge © The Author(s) 2019 C. Taylor, Electronic Literature in Latin America, New Directions in Latino American Cultures, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-30988-6_2

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of avant-garde practices in the contemporary digital era, and the extent to which oppositional practices can resist their recuperation by corporate media. Born in 1977 in Santiago de Chile, Labbé is one of the younger generation of Chilean writers who has both published print novels, and been involved in a variety of experimental publishing formats. Labbé’s print novels include Book of Feathers (2004), Navidad & Matanza (2007), Locuela (2009), Secret Pieces against the World (2014), and The Parvá (2015), and he has also published a collection of short stories, White Characters (2010).1 He was also involved in the project Santiago in 100 Words, which initially involved submitting short stories of up to 100 words to post boxes in metro stations in Santiago de Chile and, subsequently, through a digital submission system.2 Nominated one of the best young writers in Spanish by Granta magazine in 2010, Labbé’s work has often been described as being experimental, due to its fragmentary style, multiple narrative voices, and convoluted structure. Forero Quintero has classified Labbé’s works as part of a trend of ‘fragmentary novels’ which, in contradistinction to the novels of prior Boom authors such as Carlos Fuentes or Mario Vargas Llosa, call into question the very category of literature (Forero Quintero 2011, p.  42). In a similar vein to Forero Quintero, Manzi Cembrano groups Labbé amongst a group of writers, including Cristián Barros and Pablo Torche, whose works are defined by what he terms ‘illegibility’, involving literary experimentation that disrupts the expectations of the reader (Manzi Cembrano 2011, p. 197), and argues that works such as Labbé’s are characterised by an ‘opaque, hermetic style of writing’, whilst also giving great importance to the ludic dimension (Manzi Cembrano 2015, pp.  51–52).3 In these and other pieces, scholars have highlighted amongst the key traits of Labbé’s print 1  The titles in the original Spanish are Libro de plumas (2004), Navidad y matanza (2007), Locuela (2009), Piezas secretas contra el mundo, La parvá, and Caracteres blancos. Navidad & Matanza was published in English translation in 2014, even though maintaining the title in Spanish. 2  See Griffin (2016), chapter five for a detailed analysis of the Santiago en 100 palabras project, Schwartz (2016) for an overview of the Santiago en 100 Palabras project, and Schwartz (2015) for an interview with Labbé discussing his contribution to the project in detail. 3  Other critics have also identified literary experimentation as one of the defining features of Labbé’s work; see, for example, Cornejo (2007) and Valencia (2008), who have highlighted the way in which Labbé plays in his novels with narrative levels and makes metaliterary commentaries.

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texts their experimentalism, their illegibility, the presence of characters who change identity, the crossing of ontological levels, and the deliberate disruption of any easy reading experience. As I will demonstrate below, several of these issues also come to the fore in his digital work, Pentagonal.

Legacy Media, from Collage to Cut-and-Paste Labbé’s experimental playing with formats is in evidence from the outset of Pentagonal, with the interface to the narrative taking the format of an image of a newspaper cutting. The image is of grainy quality, with the newsprint slightly blurred and unevenly rendered, and creases are visible in the paper, as well as fluctuations in the darkness of the ink. The image is a photocopied one, displaying all the imperfections of this process, and the cutting of the edges is deliberately rough-edged, such that words are cut in two, and shading is visible along the edges of the cut. What is represented on screen, thus, is not a contemporary electronic newspaper, displaying the high production values, clean lines, and sharpness of text that characterises this new form of electronic communication of news. Instead, Labbé has rendered a reproduction of an older, print media version of news-spreading, one which is resonant of broadcast media. Labbé is thus overtly making reference here to legacy media, that is, to those conventions and organisational features we take for granted, but which in actuality ‘reflect the affordances of analog broadcast or ink on paper and the social and economic arrangements that support them’ (Murray 2012, p. 12). In the case of the example selected by Labbé, the print newspaper format is, in many ways, the classic example of broadcast media. That is, the newspaper is, along with the radio and television, one of the most immediately recognisable formats of mass media of the twentieth century, and represents the one-to-many model that characterised the distribution of news prior to the advent of many-to-many journalism and citizen journalism (see Fig. 2.1). The newspaper page in Labbé’s interface, thus, stands as synecdoche for the print press and for the one-way dissemination of messages, in which one sole output (the newspaper) was disseminated in the same form to many, thus representing the mass media format which involved ‘centralized sources distributing identical content to huge, dispersed audiences’ (Simonson 2010, p. 17). The newspaper is thus representative of a particular model of media dissemination; in their periodisation of the rhetoric of communication media, Balbi and Kittler have argued that this model

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Fig. 2.1  Carlos Labbé, Pentagonal: Including You and Me (2001)

(and its pitting against the one-to-one model) is intrinsically linked to the era in which it arose, contending that ‘the one-to-one and one-to-many dichotomy is a child of the 20th century and consequently reflects both technological advances and structural feelings of the era’ (Balbi and Kittler 2016, p. 1973). Labbé’s choice of this image as the opening for his digital narrative thus reminds us of a prior, print format, and also, drawing on Murray’s and Balbi and Kittler’s notions, encourages us to consider the era in which this format was developed. If Murray argues that legacy media carries with it the traces of the social and economic system that supported this media, and Balbi and Kittler see the one-to-many model as representing ‘the structural feelings’ of the twentieth century, then this is represented in the case of Labbé’s chosen example by the older model of broadcast journalism, with its homogeneous message. The page of the print newspaper is, I argue, thus emblematic of a prior era in which the print press was fundamental in the formation of what Benedict Andersen has termed ‘imagined communities’, by promulgating a message that, although consumed individually, brought each reader together in shared community.4 The print newspaper is thus one such manifestation of the ‘lettered city’ of which Ángel Rama has spoken, in which models of power 4  The print newspaper for Anderson was one of the mechanisms by which the modern nation constituted itself as an imagined community. Consumed individually but replicated simultaneously by thousands (or millions), the newspaper becomes one of the daily ceremonies of the imagined community, as the reader of the newspaper is ‘continually reassured that the imagined world is visibly rooted in everyday life. […] creating that remarkable confi-

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first installed in colonial times, continue into the twentieth century, with the development of the ‘lettered city’ for a mass reading public in Latin America in the twentieth century (Rama 1996). As well as the content of this image being significant—that is, the content displaying this legacy media—the presentation is of this image is also, I argue, highly significant. For Labbé’s presentation of the image in this opening interface also references, I contend, earlier methods of selecting and pasting, which we then see updated in Labbé’s narrative. This interface foregrounds rudimentary, pre-digital processes of the selection and reproduction of material, involving the cutting and pasting of a newspaper extract. Indeed, in this opening interface, the cutting is done in such a way that the surrounding stories are partially visible. For instance, to the top left, we can see a photograph which has been cropped, depicting the legs and arms of a seated woman, and two final paragraphs of an article about a family being attacked by delinquents. To the top right, we can discern part of a concluding paragraph about a woman abandoning her baby, a fragment of a headline for an article about a fire, of which only a partial phrase ‘or dies in the fire’ is visible, and the title for another article starting ‘Family is attacked’.5 This conceit of making reference to other, partially visible stories, and of foregrounding the rough edges and deliberately pasted quality, references the technique of papier collé or collage, championed as an experimental literary and artistic form by, amongst others, the surrealists, the cubists, and the dadaists. Labbé’s interface thus draws our attention to different layers and forms of media, not only in its use of a newspaper extract—an older, linear, one-to-many print form of communication—but also through its reference to an earlier form of recombinatory practice in the shape of collage. It is, thus, I contend, necessary to trace the history of this practice, in its original context and as conceived of by the historical avant-gardes, in order to understand Labbé’s use of cut-and-paste in Pentagonal, and I propose, there are three particular features of collage as practised by avant-­ garde artists and writers that must inform our reading of Labbé: firstly, collage as conceived of as a challenge to high-art values of originality; secondly, as a disruption of artistic norms of high and low art; and thirdly, dence of community in anonymity which is the hallmark of modern nations’ (Anderson 2006, pp. 35–36). 5  My translation. In the original Spanish, these phrases read ‘o muere en incendio’ and ‘Asaltan a familia’.

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as revealing the cracks in bourgeois rhetoric.6 Regarding the first of these, the surrealists and their contemporaries conceived of the practice of collage as forming one tactic in their challenge to artistic and literary norms of originality and genius that subtended the art market and the commodification of art. In examples such as Braque’s papiers collés, and Picasso’s integration of rope and oilcloth into his canvases, the practices of collage were intended to disrupt artistic norms through their integration of previously existing elements into the art work. Peter Bürger, in his hugely influential Theory of the Avant-Garde saw the cult of genius as part of the detachment of art from the praxis of life, and the ‘obscuring of the historical conditions of this process’ (Bürger 1984, p.  40). If the concept of genius underpins the notion of the autonomous work of art, then historical avant-gardes attempted, through techniques such as collage and others like them, a ‘radical negation of the category of individual creation’ (Bürger 1984, p. 51), since the integration of the varied elements was an attempt to disrupt the established norm of the ‘lone genius’, or originality of the artist that marked out the work. Secondly, the practice of collage led to new artistic and literary norms, since it involved the bringing together of disparate elements. The layering of media into a single object through collage was envisaged as disrupting conventional artistic values through juxtaposition, by means of the integration of ‘low’ elements into the purported ‘high’ art of the painting, and through the insertion of reality fragments into the work of art. As Sierra summarises this, ‘the Dadaists and surrealists continued to test conventions of “high” and “low” subject matter through collage, integrating found objects and playing with the meaning of words when placed out of context’ (Sierra 2013, p. 157). In collage, thus, the emphasis is no longer on the subjectivity of the creator, but on the disruption of the unity of the painting by the insertion of reality fragments. In the words of Adamowicz, ‘collage creates new narrative forms from the (re-)editing of ready-made sequences, or the simple “bumping together” of incongruous pictorial or poetic elements’ (Adamowicz 1998, p.  99). Surrealist collage, thus, enacted important disruptions on conventional artistic and literary norms, since it provided the opportunity to create new narratives through 6  It is worth noting that, in his landmark study, Bürger sees montage and collage as foundational to the concept of the avant-garde, claiming that ‘A theory of the avant-garde must begin with the concept of montage that is suggested by the early cubist collages’ (Bürger 1984, p. 77).

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i­ncongruity and through shock juxtaposition, thereby disrupting the norms of syntax and chronological progression. Thirdly, and perhaps more importantly, the techniques of collage and cut-and-paste formed part of a radical gesture of challenging bourgeois values. The challenge to high-art values of originality, and the challenge to artistic and literary norms as described above were all, for the avant-garde artists, intricately linked to the critique of bourgeois norms. For the avant-­ garde artists, the concept of the autonomous, organic work of art which is separate from social life is a bourgeois institution. If the autonomous work of art, which ‘seeks to make unrecognizable the fact that it has been made’ is the epitome of bourgeois norms, by contrast, practices such as collage and montage deliberately challenge this notion of the autonomous work of art, as they draw attention to their own constructedness. Thus, as Bürger has argued, the avant-garde work of art such as collage or montage ‘proclaims itself an artificial construct, an artifact’, and ‘calls attention to the fact that it is made up of reality fragments; it breaks through the appearance (Schein) of totality’ (Bürger 1984, p. 72). Bürger then goes on to argue, drawing on Adorno, for an understanding of the practices of montage and collage as fundamentally disrupting this norm of the man-­ made organic work of art: Adorno notes the revolutionary quality of the new procedure [montage]; “The semblance (Schein) of art being reconciled with a heterogeneous reality because it portrays it is to disintegrate as the work admits actual fragments (Scheinlose Triimmer) of empirical reality, thus acknowledging the break, and transforming it into aesthetic effect” (AT, p. 232). The man-made organic work of art that pretends to be like nature projects an image of the reconciliation of man and nature. According to Adorno, it is the characteristic of the nonorganic work using the principle of montage that it no longer creates the semblance (Schein) of reconciliation. (Bürger 1984, p. 78)

As a nonorganic work of art, then, collage represents a revolutionary resistance to bourgeois norms, since it integrates elements of empirical reality, thus refusing the bourgeois norm of the organic work of art. Indeed, Adamowicz, writing about surrealist collage, argues that: ‘collage effectively anchors surrealist activities in the real, thanks to the “reality effect” of its processes, which unmask, critique and renew the perception of utili-

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tarian reality and modes of representation and expression. Disrupting the accepted order of reality, it constitutes a critique of artistic and social codes’ (Adamowicz 1998, p. 11). Collage is thus a material practice that destabilises traditional modes of representation and bourgeois values, not only through its strategies of displacement and contrast, but also through the unmasking that it undertakes. Collage, thus, for the historical avant-garde, was an oppositional practice that involved an unmasking of the bourgeois norms of the autonomous work of art, deliberately subverting traditional modes of bourgeois representation through cut-and-paste, displacement, and perversion. In this way, collage, in its original formulation by the surrealists and their contemporaries, was conceived of as a revolutionary practice that challenged originality and the aura of the work of art, that disrupted boundaries between high and low art, and that challenged the norms of bourgeois representation. Labbe’s use of the cut-and-paste technique in his interface, I argue, thus clearly references these prior practices, but also encourages us to reflect upon the changing configurations of cut-and-paste in our contemporary era. With regard to this issue, some scholars have suggested that there are parallels between cut-and-paste and contemporary digital technologies of late capitalism, with some suggesting we can trace those parallels between paper-based cut-and-paste techniques and digital remixing. William Gibson’s 2005 piece in Wired Magazine, for instance, proposed that there were similarities between contemporary digital remix and prior techniques of cut-and-paste in the works of William Burroughs (cited in Edwards 2014, p. 31). Russo and Coppa have also identified forerunners of contemporary remix in the earlier phenomena of pop art, surrealist films of the 1930s, and even as far back as copying and overpainting in the Renaissance, and note in its contemporary form, in particular its ‘repudiation of artistic principles like originality, authenticity, or aura’ (Russo and Coppa 2012, n.p.). Similarly, Edwards encourages us to consider the ‘historical backstory’ of remix in digital culture, and identifies innovative movements such as ‘ready-mades, dada, and surrealism; and practices like collage, bricolage, pastiche’ as forerunners to contemporary digital remix practices (Edwards 2014, p. 32). There are, thus, some suggestive parallels between contemporary digital practices of remix that enable the selection and remixing of materials, and earlier practices of cut-and-paste or collage. However, what is ­important to draw out in regard to these parallels is the differences in

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dynamics as regards the dominant logic of the time. For, I contend, it is important to note that these practices are now embedded in computer design and, therefore, to consider the implications of this as regards oppositional practice. Regarding the ways in which collage now becomes a standard feature of computer interfaces, Lev Manovich has highlighted the ways in which the aesthetics of collage and cut-and-paste have now been subsumed into contemporary digital culture. Talking about new media, Manovich notes that: One general effect of the digital revolution is that avant-garde aesthetic strategies came to be embedded in the commands and interface metaphors of computer software. In short, the avant-garde became materialized in a computer […]. The avant-garde strategy of collage reemerged as the ‘cut-­ and-­paste’ command, the most basic operation one can perform on digital data. (Manovich 2002, p. 15)

In a similar vein, Edwards, in his identification of the similarities between digital remix and prior practices of collage, notes how these practices are embedded into computer design: today’s remix sensibility is reinforced by the nature of digital logics and computer-based practices. Cut-and-paste is not an avant-garde technique anymore; it is a feature baked into software interfaces like Adobe’s PhotoShop, Microsoft’s Word, and Apple’s Final Cut Pro. Collage is no longer reliant on the assemblage of fragmented analog materials onto a new fixed medium; it is literally at the heart of what we mean by ‘multimedia’. Once any form of media enters into a digital form, whether it is born digital or converted, it is readily available for new assemblages, new combinations. (Edwards 2014, p. 32)

The comments of both these scholars indicate, I contend, an ambiguity in the practices of cutting, pasting, and assemblage in today’s corporate multimedia world, which has yet to be explored. As noted above, for the historical avant-garde, the practice of collage was envisaged as a radical disruption of the ruling norms of their time—those of bourgeois society. However, what may once have been radical techniques of cutting and assemblage which strove to resist commodification of the work of art, disrupt artistic norms, and critique bourgeois, Fordist capitalism, are no longer a (solely) resistant gesture. What both Manovich and Edwards touch on, but do not fully draw out, is the fact that the embedding of cut-­

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and-­paste into the interface of computer software has removed much of the avant-garde leftist thrust of collage as practice. Manovich is more concerned with (utopianly) finding a place for software creators as artists— and thus, somewhat paradoxically, reinforcing the hierarchies of art by wanting to claim a place for software creators within art history.7 What neither of these scholars delve into, however, is how this process implies a recuperation of leftist practices by corporate giants, and they do not address the issue of the potential loss of oppositional stance. Drawing on Manovich and Edwards and yet departing from them, I would like to draw out two particular issues that arise when the terms ‘cutting’, ‘copying’, and ‘pasting’ have moved into our contemporary lexicon, and are nowadays taken to mean the use of computer technologies. Firstly, I propose, of particular importance is the fact that these terms have lost their original sense of materiality: that is, their original sense of cutting with scissors, and pasting with glue; of inserting bits of the ‘real’ into the work of art. Contemporary cut-and-paste has thus lost the radical sense of the insertion of the ‘real debris of human life, something poor, soiled, despised’ into the painting (Aragon, cited in Kelly 2008, p. 24). The contemporary practice of digital cut-and-paste through the commands of computer software has become dematerialised; whereas the historical avant-garde was concerned with the messy, disruptive intrusion of elements of the real into the work of art, now, the process of cut-and-paste is dematerialised by what Betancourt has termed the ‘aura of the digital’, or what Cubitt has named the ‘myth of immaterial media’. As noted in the Introduction to this volume, Betancourt proposed the term the ‘aura of the digital’ to argue that the immateriality of the digital is in fact illusion, since ‘the technical capabilities of this computer technology obscure the nexus of capital, human agency, social reproduction, and physical production’ (Betancourt 2015, p. iii). The aura of the digital, thus, involves a denial of physicality, as it involves the ‘occlusion of the real conditions of physicality from considerations of the apparently immaterial realm of the digital’ (Betancourt 2015, p. iv). From an ecocritical perspective, Cubitt 7  See, for instance, Manovich’s exhortation in his Introduction to The New Media Reader that ‘computer scientists who invented these technologies—J.C.  Licklider, Douglas Engelbart, Ivan Sutherland, Ted Nelson, Seymor Papert, Tim Berners-Lee, and others—are the important artists of our time—maybe the only artists who are truly important and who will be remembered from this historical period’ (Manovich 2003). For Manovich, thus, computer scientists in and of themselves are artists, regardless of the utilitarian nature of the code, or the use to which it was put.

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has attacked what he calls the ‘myth of immaterial media’, noting that such a notion obscures the huge environmental impact of the physical infrastructure of digital media, citing, as one example amongst many, the fact that ‘ostensibly weightless and friction-free, computing had already in 2008 outstripped the carbon emissions of the airline business and was growing, at conservative estimates, by at least 15 percent a year’ (Cubitt 2017, p. 13). Drawing from both these scholars, what I argue in relation to cut-and-paste specifically is that its embedding in computer commands functions as one such example of the dematerialisation and disavowal of the very real material conditions, of which Cubitt and others speak. Secondly, a key issue that arises when contemplating contemporary practices of cut-and-paste is that these terms have also lost their oppositional edge. That these terms have become recuperated into everyday parlance, and have become embedded in the interface metaphors of computer software, indicates just how efficiently these practices have been recuperated by late capitalism. What may once have been radical techniques of cutting and assemblage, which aimed to resist conventional notions of artistic originality, propose new artistic and narrative structures, and resist bourgeois norms have now been colonised by late capitalism. This is not to say that the traces of some of these avant-garde impulses cannot be seen today, but rather that cut-and-paste in and of itself is not oppositional. Where the avant-garde artists directed their attack against bourgeois capitalism—the ruling system of their day—we now live in an era in which bourgeois Fordist capitalism has given way to transnational late capitalism, and the resistant gestures of a prior era have now, to an extent, become recuperated by transnational capital. Collage is no longer, then, a (solely) resistant gesture. In this sense, I disagree with those such as Eduardo Ledesma who have argued that collage techniques are given a new cutting edge solely through their deployment in a new medium. Talking about digital poetry, Ledesma argues that: Digital poetry, like its predecessors, draws on mass communication systems, on television, magazines, and advertising billboards, and deploys well-­ established avant-garde techniques such as collage and montage. Arguably, these techniques, which had lost their ‘cutting-edge’ status on account of their (relative) canonization and institutionalization, are, once again, fresh and innovative by virtue of their reposting in a different medium. (Ledesma 2017, p. 258)

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Ledesma’s proposal that reposting in a digital medium returns the cutting-­ edge status to avant-garde techniques of collage and montage, is, I argue, misguided. In my view, the digital medium in itself does not signal a new ‘cutting edge’ for, as has been shown above, these practices of collage and montage have already been recuperated by the digital medium in the service of corporate computer packages. Thus, in my reading, if these terms have been recuperated by computer software, cut-and-paste cannot be purely cutting edge because of its use in new media. Rather, if new media technologies are imbricated in late capitalism, solely by virtue of reposting in a different medium, their cutting edge cannot be revived; where the cutting edge can be enacted is in the use to which these practices are put. In this way, through his reference to legacy media, and legacy practices, Labbé refers to these earlier, resistant, practices in his interface, and in so doing, highlights the need to historicise these practices. He makes deliberate reference to pre-existing practices of cut-and-paste, and thus re-­ semanticises the contemporary notion of cut-and-paste, reminding us of its origins in the real, material practices of cut-and-paste of an earlier generation. Moreover, his interface raises a fundamental question of the extent to which contemporary cut-and-paste processes can be resistant or not. This reference to cut-and-paste is also, I argue, metatextual, since this process is fundamental to Pentagonal itself. As a hypertext novel that offers recombinatory narratives, structurally Pentagonal has parallels with cut-and-paste. That is, Labbé’s narrative is created through the selecting, cutting, and pasting of excerpts as lexia through the various paths that we follow. Labbé’s interface thus draws out the implications of these cut-and-­ paste practices in our contemporary digital culture of the era of late capitalism, as well as implications for the strategies of Pentagonal itself. If such is the importance of this interface as regards the technique that it references (that of collage), of equal importance is the content, which displays features of another literary precedent. Although only partially visible in all but one case, from the various headlines, the image, and the available text, we can discern a clear common focus in these stories on crime, violence, and accidents. The language employed to tell the stories also shares common traits, with an emphasis on the bodily and gory detail (‘ended up with stab wounds all over their body’ ‘the body of the tiny victim’), and on the emotive (‘Christmas for their three children was ruined’ ‘wept’).8 From these features, we can surmise that this extract is 8  The original Spanish reads: ‘terminó con puñaladas en todo el cuerpo’, ‘el cuerpo de la pequeña víctima’, ‘la navidad de sus tres hijos fue arruinada’, and ‘lloró’.

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taken from the nota roja of a newspaper, commonly seen as a subgenre of the wider prensa amarrillista, and characterised by a ‘graphic and assertive style’ with headlines that typically ‘played with words, conveyed moral outrage, and summarized crimes in brutally direct terms’ (Piccato 2014, p. 195 and p. 199).9 The nota roja is, then, traditionally a sensationalist form of reporting and of narrating events, and it focuses on violent actors and victims of violence. As we shall see, Labbé borrows from some of the elements of the nota roja as regards the story of a disappearance and possible crime that forms one strand of his narrative. However, what is important is that Labbé does not comply with the sensationalist, moralising tone of the prensa amarrilla, but instead, through his picking apart of the norms of narrative coherence, of teleological progression, and of character continuity which underpins the moralising stories of the nota roja, does not allow us to be swept away by the sensationalism. Labbé’s story instead encourages us to contemplate the structural norms that subtend such storytelling, as he makes metacritical commentary throughout on these norms. This, I argue, is where Labbé’s radical gesture lies. If cut-and-paste has now been recuperated into the computer interface architecture of late capitalism, then a radical stance is not possible through the simple reproduction of those practices. Rather, Labbé’s resistance gesture lies in the self-conscious reworkings of that very procedure (cut-and-paste) that he undertakes through a variety of means. Firstly, this is carried out through the very structure of Pentagonal itself, which, as a recombinatory narrative, functions through the cutting and pasting of lexia. Secondly, this is undertaken through a metacommentary on the process of writing a hypertext narrative which runs throughout Pentagonal, as we shall see below. Thirdly, this reworking also takes place through the insertion of fragments of the ‘real’ into the work of art, as will be discussed below. If, for the surrealists and cubists, the ‘real’ consisted of elements of real objects (rope, string, fragments of paper), now the elements of the ‘real’, I argue, consist of the fragments of computer architecture in the form of email header conventions, as will be discussed below. In this way, the possibility of recu9  The ‘nota roja’ is most often used with reference to the Mexican press specifically, and forms a feature of the wider genre of prensa amarrillista, which refers to sensationalist journalism (often known in English as tabloid journalism). The most prominent of these prensa amarrillista publications in Chile is La Cuarta, in whose pages, ‘debido al carácter sensacionalista […], se desprenden frases o palabras coloquiales, tales como la utilización de conceptos discriminatorios y diminutivos impuestos en la “memoria imaginaria”’ (Browne Sartori et al. 2011, p. 275).

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perating the radical gesture of the avant-garde lies in Labbé’s creation of a narrative that thematises hypertext narrative, and that also inserts into its lexia fragments of the detritus of the digital age. In a modern-day equivalent of avant-garde collage practice, if the ‘real’ for Labbé is the digital architecture and fragments of the digital infrastructure, then the use of email structure conventions, as seen below, performs a digital collage. Returning to the content of this interface, amongst these half-visible stories lies the main story, which is the springboard for Labbé’s work. This takes the form of a short, one-paragraph report entitled ‘Accident leaves two dead and one injured’, which describes the failing of a car’s brakes, its crashing into a bank in the centre of Santiago, and the subsequent death of two people, these being Miranda Vera, an astronomer, and an as yet unidentified student, whilst a third, the caretaker of a nearby building, was injured.10 Five words or phrases in this short text have been rendered in bold—these being ‘main door’, ‘Miranda Vera’, ‘non-identified’, ‘dog’, and ‘wounds’—which is not a feature of the original article as it appeared in the newspaper, but has been added by Labbé.11 If we play around on this interface, we come to realise that these words in bold are hyperlinks, and that clicking on them loads the content of Labbé’s hypertext narrative. Each of these words in this main interface thus opens up a lexia when we click on it, meaning we have five different starting points from this main interface, representing the five-shaped figure of the pentagon as referenced in the title of the work. Each word or phrase in bold is thus a particular starting point for a narrative path that we trace, and however many times we open the work, the lexia opened by these five opening phrases remains the same. That said, this does not mean that what we access are five distinct stories which run on from each of these five phrases; instead, within each subsequent lexia, there are also multiple words which are hotlinked, and some of these link to the same lexia as words within other paths. In other words, there exist different pathways within the story that we can take to reach the same content, and we eventually end up accessing the same material, irrespective of which of the five opening paths we selected. This branching tree design thus makes Labbe’s narrative more properly multisequential rather than multiform, as distinguished by Murray. Murray identifies as ‘multiform’ works which have ‘more than one configuration  In the original Spanish, this reads ‘Accidente causa dos muertos y un herido’.  In the original Spanish, this reads ‘puerta principal’, ‘Miranda Vera’, ‘no identificada’, ‘perro’, and ‘heridas’. 10 11

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based on the same general components’, such as games, which ‘dynamically generat[e] variant instances of a character type, place, or event […] or assembl[e] variant combinations’ (Murray 2012, p. 430). In contrast, a ‘multisequential’ work is one in which ‘there is more than one valid, coherent path through a set of segments’ (Murray 2012, p.  430). Pentagonal, thus, classifies as multisequential, because the paths linking each lexia are not generated at random, and there are not dynamically generated pathways each time we enter the work.12 In this sense, I disagree with Carolina Gainza, who classifies Pentagonal, along with works such as Carlos Cociña’s Poesía cero and A veces cubierto por las aguas, as pieces in which ‘azar juega un rol central en la construcción de sentido así como en la experiencia estética del lector’ (Gainza 2016, p.  239). Whilst I agree that there is a limited element of chance since the story unfolds according to how the reader chooses which route to follow, there is no chance mechanism within the enactment of the work itself, and there are no chance reworkings of each path every time we open the work. The element of chance is not embedded in the system, but in the reader in his/her interactions with the text. In terms of the content of the lexia comprising this work, we encounter not a single narrative voice nor a linear story, but several plotlines, different styles, and voices. Several of the lexia are narrated in the first person, and in informal style, whilst others are narrated in the third person, with differing degrees of formality. Some are presented in the format of an email, some in the format of a dialogue or script, and others in the format of brief paragraphs. Some are quotations already existing sources, including the Bible, chronicles of key moments of Chile’s history, textbook sources, and fictional texts, including Jeannette Winterson’s Gut Symmetries (1997), whilst others are fictional creations written by Labbé himself.13 These lexia are not linked in a linear fashion, since they do not 12  It is worth noting that this is in contradistinction to Zerbarini’s short story discussed in the subsequent chapter of this book, in which the branching paths of Eveline are generated at random each time we open the work, and each new interface remixes the content in different ways. Following Murray’s distinction, this makes Eveline multiform, whereas Pentagonal is multisequential. 13  Whilst I am here distinguishing different types of lexia within Pentagonal, I do not by this mean to suggest that there are clearly demarcated storylines which do not interact. In fact, as we see in some of the lexia, what might appear to be distinct storylines at times merge, and the ontological levels trouble each other. This is the case, for instance, with one lexia which combines the email conceit (common to the Estela story), with a mention of the

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tell a story in chronological or teleological order, from start to finish. Rather, the relation between the lexia is connotative, with a semantic chain leading from the first bolded word of the article, through to the next lexia by association. In this way, the relationship between signifiers becomes the structuring principle of this work, rather than the conventional narrative arc, with lexia linked semantically rather than chronologically. Given that our access to this work is not linear, how we piece together the narrative takes place through the similarities that emerge as we access the lexia. As we navigate this lexia, certain lexical fields begin to emerge. Thematically, many of the lexia refer back to the main themes or ideas that were covered in the original news article. We encounter, for instance, several lexia mentioning stars, the sky, the sun, the moon, night-time, and so forth—all lexia which, although taking place within different storylines and often written in different narrative voices, can be seen to be related to the profession of the astronomer, who was the driver of the car that crashed in the interface story. Similarly, there is an abundance of lexia mentioning doors, entranceways, and gates, which is related to the car crashing into the door of the bank in the interface story. Regarding this latter field, it is worth noting that one of the hotlinked terms in the opening interface was the phrase ‘puerta principal’, meaning that this phrase is one of the five entryways into the work. The door in this interface is thus both diegetic (the car crashing into the door of the bank, and hence part of the story world), and also metadiegetic (an entranceway into the structure of the story, and hence a commentary on its workings).14 The doorway is thus both content and structure, and this dual meaning of the doorway is repeated in other lexia within Pentagonal, in which images of doors, portals, or entrances function as much as a metatextual commentary on the functioning of h ­ ypertext narrative as part of the storyline itself. For example, we encounter instances of this semantic field in the hotlink ‘a circle’, which leads us to the following lexia:

national flag (a reference to the lexia about the coat of arms), and a mention of Miranda (the Miranda storyline). 14  This conceit—of a doorway being both diegetic (within the storyworld) and extradiegetic (part of the procedural enactment by which we enter the storyworld)—is also notable in other works analysed in this volume; see also how this conceit is mobilised in Jaime Alejandro Rodríguez’s Coup de Grace (Chap. 4) and Doménico Chiappe’s Minotaur Hotel (Chap. 7).

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30 September 1811 In the highest part of the main façade one could see a high hill or mountain range depicted, above which there were many rays of sunlight with an inscription in the upper part that read: AURORA LIBERTATES CHILENSIS; and in the lower part: UMBRAE ET NOCTI LIBERTAS SUCCEDUNT15

This lexia, although unreferenced, is an extract taken from Franciscan missionary and chronicler Fray Melchor Martínez’s Historical Memoire of the Revolution of Chile, first published in 1848.16 One of the few surviving testimonies of the early independence period of Chile’s history, Martínez’s work documented the events that led up to the proclamation of the Primera Junta Nacional de Gobierno, and which would eventually lead up to the Wars of Independence in the 1820s.17 This particular extract is taken from Martínez’s description of the first coat of arms of Chile as an independent nation, when he saw it presented on 30 September 1812 by then president of the Junta Provisional, José Miguel Carrera during a celebration in the Plaza de Armas in Santiago. The Latin phrases in the extract proclaim the dawn of Chile’s freedom (‘aurora libertates chilensis’) and that ‘light and freedom follow on from darkness and night’ (‘umbrae et nocti libertas succedunt’). Martínez’s text here thus makes reference to a formative moment in Chile’s history, recognised as the first autonomous form of government in 15  In the original Spanish, this reads: ‘30 de septiembre de 1811. “En lo más alto de la portada principal se veía figurado un alto monte o cordillera sobre cuya inscripción aparecían muchos rayos de luz con una inscripción en la parte superior que decía: AURORA LIBERTATES CHILENSIS; y en la inferior lo siguiente: UMBRAE ET NOCTI LIBERTAS SUCCEDUNT.”’ 16  Born in 1762  in the Viceroyalty of Peru, Martínez later moved to Chile, and found himself in Santiago at the time of the 1810 proclamation of the assembly; like the majority of the clergy at the time, he was hostile to the juntista movement. After their defeat in 1814, Martínez subsequently became the confessor and personal advisor of the new governor, Mariano de Ossorio, and on 31 July 1815, he was given a licence by royal decree to write a testimony of the events that had led to revolution. This eventually resulted in his Historical Memoire of the Revolution of Chile, widely seen as one of the most complete documentary records of the time. 17  As Ossa Santa Cruz argues, despite some continuities with the old regime, the creation of the Santiago Junta brought about major political changes in the country, since the expulsion of the governor in 1810 caused a ‘peaceful yet decisive break with the authorities that governed Spain after Napoleon’s invasion’. It was, thus, according to Ossa Santa Cruz, ‘an irreversible blow to the colonial regime’ (Ossa Santa Cruz 2014, p. 11).

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Chile, widely seen as marking the beginning of the independence process of Chile, and commemorated as one of Chile’s fiestas patrias.18 Labbé is thus clearly drawing our attention to this foundational moment, yet its use in Labbé is less for the historical facts per se, and more for the structural issues and metatextual issues that it raises. For Labbé has deliberately chosen an extract from Martínez’s chronicle that does not depict the historical event themselves, but depicts artifice, since the description offered by Martínez here is not of events, but of the coat of arms. There is no actual ‘high hill’ that Martínez is viewing, nor any real ‘rays of sunlight’—neither of these features is part of the landscape, but is part of the artifice of the coat of arms. This extract is, thus, about the self-conscious construction of national identity and national narrative, epitomised by both the doorway and the image of the aurora, or dawn, this latter being a hugely influential metaphor in the transition to and establishment of the early independence period of Chile. The potency of the ‘aurora’ metaphor in the period of transition towards independence can be witnessed in the fact that the first Chilean weekly newspaper, published between February 1812 and April 1813, took the name Aurora de Chile. Aurora de Chile was seen as disseminating the new mentality that had arisen in the wake of the decline of the colonial societies (Franco Figueroa 2010, p.  129) and in which the emerging criollo elite started to identify its own identity and sense of nationhood (Ayala Pérez 2010, p. 54). Aurora de Chile, and other newspapers like it, served to disseminate new ideas about the emergent Chilean identity, and were an instrument that created a national consciousness about the need for liberation (Fernández 2016, p. 208). In this way, the ‘aurora’ metaphor mentioned in the extract here was central to national self-fashioning. Thus the aurora of this extract stands for the dawn of a new era, but is, crucially, not a real dawn, but part of a self-conscious project of fashioning. This lexia, thus, abounds with references to artificial creation, in which are combined the constructed coat of arms; the cod Latin slogans (since, of course, ‘chilenis’ is a neologism, with Chile not being a known entity in the time of the Roman empire, and thus not existing in the Latin lexicon); the construction of imagined communities through metaphors of nationhood. All of these elements in this lexia, repurposed here by Labbé, com18  For more on the import of this date as patriotic symbol, and as forming part of a discourse of national identity, see Grez Toso (2011).

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ment on the project of the consolidation of national identity and on the constructed project of the creation of a national narrative. Similarly, through another lexía, we encounter the hotlink ‘imposing door’, which leads to the following lexia: 30 September 1811 The whole of the frontage of the sumptuous building and its two main interior patios was illuminated by more than 800 lights, and these were in symmetry and keeping with the lights that were found on the external part of the front of the building.19

Again, taken from Fray Melchor Martínez’s chronicle, this extract is a continuation of the description of the ceremony when the coat of arms was presented. Particularly notable in this chosen extract is the focus on the façade. Again, Labbé’s technique of updating legacy media in a new context, which we saw in his opening interface, is apparent here as now, Labbé is encouraging us to read this extract as a commentary on the structure of hypertext narrative. In this way, Labbé’s cut-and-paste technique here, when he takes up a pre-existing text and remixes it in the context of his novel, functions to re-semanticise the text, where the references to the façade, to symmetry and connections, become metatextual references to the construction of his hypertext narrative. The ambiguity of the term ‘correspondencia’—which, in its original use in the extract, refers to reciprocity or harmony of design—now comes to mean, through its hyperlinking, ‘correspondence’, as it links to another lexia in the narrative. In addition to these thematic links across lexia, there are also character-­ based links that emerge once we explore the lexia. As we play around in the story, following different paths, we start to piece together from what are at first seemingly disconnected lexia, a set of storylines. There are multiple storylines with recurring characters, whose story we start to piece together as we take our paths through the lexia. Several of the lexia tell the (fictional) story of a character named ‘Miranda’. Miranda Vera is, in the newspaper cutting that we see in the interface, a real-life person involved in the car accident, who is an astronomer, driver of the vehicle, and who died in the crash. Here, in Labbé’s narrative, Miranda becomes a fictional 19  The original Spanish reads: ‘30 de septiembre de 1811. “Todo el frontis del suntuoso edificio con sus dos principales patios interiores se veían iluminados con más de ocho mil luces, y con éstas guardaban correspondencia y simetría las que se hallaban a la parte exterior del frente.”’

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character, and once we have identified the fact that her name appears several times, we assume that Miranda must be one of the protagonists, and we can start to piece together her story across the lexia. For example, from the main interface of the newspaper cutting, ‘Miranda Vera’ is a hotlinked term, and links to: When I was seven years old, I found out that evil predominated on Earth. It was night-time, in the summer, dad. I was weeping silently. You felt sorry for me, do you remember? You took my hand and we went out into the garden. We stretched out on the grass, face up. There was a full moon. You said ‘Miranda, the night isn’t always black’.20

In this lexia, and in others relating to Miranda, the story is narrated in first person, with frequent interjections from this first-person narrator to a second person. In this lexia, we build up a picture of the character, through reference to the father, the reference to childhood (via the temporal marker of ‘seven years old’), and vocabulary associated with astronomy. The other lexia about this character, as with this one, demonstrate a predominance of childhood memories, her relationship with her father, and an early interest in astronomy. As regards the process by which we build up a picture of this character, it is worth noting that we can reach this lexia from other trees, hence this will be the ‘start’ of the story if we happen to select this hotlink from the opening interface, but middle of story elsewhere. Depending on the path we have followed, we may encounter this lexia after a lexia in which the narrator has said she stopped crying, thus meaning that there is a chronological disjuncture. Thus, according to which link we have selected, this may be a flashback, or a foreshadowing. Similarly, we do not know what incident caused her to believe that ‘evil predominated on earth’, and need to make assumptions, but the lexia themselves do not spell this out. If we select the first of the hotlinks—‘I was weeping silently’—the following lexia is loaded: I asked you if God had made holes in the sky so that we could look beyond it. You didn’t reply. You were snoring, as ever. I had stopped crying. A little 20  The original Spanish reads: ‘A los siete años, supe que en la Tierra dominaba el mal. Era de noche, en verano, papá. Yo lloraba en silencio. Tú te compadeciste, ¿recuerdas? Me tomaste de la mano y fuimos al jardín. Nos tendimos en el pasto, boca arriba. Había luna llena. Dijiste: -Miranda, no siempre la noche es negra’.

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while later, you woke up, took my face in your big hand, and showed me the moon: ‘Some nights, he cuts a huge hole in the darkness. Look. We can see that there’s light out there’21

Again, as with the portals lexia analysed above, the semantic links found in this lexia with the outer-level story are notable. We can note, for instance, the vocabulary related to the profession of the real-life Miranda Vera in the newspaper cutting, with the words ‘holes in the sky’, ‘moon’, and ‘light’, all establishing a relation between her childhood memories as depicted in this lexia, and what we know about her adult life as an astronomer from the interface story.22 Secondly, what is notable in the lexia relating to the character Miranda is how we build up a picture of her, a fact which raises an important question as regards structure and characterisation. The hyperlinked structure of Labbé’s narrative and its multiple pathways that the reader can select means that the conventional build-up of characterisation is disrupted. Crucial here is that we make our assumptions about characterisation on the basis of links followed; if we look closely at this second lexia, the name ‘Miranda’ does not appear, and so this lexia could equally relate to an entirely different character. Thus, we make assumptions based on the links that we selected at random; hence, depending on the routes we follow, we build up the character differently and, also, potentially create different characters, depending upon which unnamed lexia we follow. The structure chosen by Labbé thus foregrounds the difficulties of establishing and maintaining character continuity in hypertext fiction. Alice Bell, in her recent book, The Possible Worlds of Hypertext Fiction, comes up with the suggestive term ‘piecing together the protagonist’ (Bell 2010, p. 109) for the process by which, in hypertext fictions, ‘the building of a character, lexia by lexia, is the responsibility of the reader’ (Bell 2010, 21  The original Spanish reads ‘Te pregunté si Dios había hecho agujeros en la noche para que pudiéramos mirar detrás del cerco. No me respondiste. Roncabas, como siempre. Yo había dejado de llorar. Un rato después, te despertaste, pusiste tu manota sobre mi cara e indicaste la luna: -Algunas noches, se preocupa de recortar un inmenso hoyo en la oscuridad. Mira. Podemos ver que allá afuera hay luz.’ 22  It is worth noting that there is a predominance of lexia relating to the profession of the real-life Miranda Vera in other sources within Pentagonal, not just in the fictional lexia about this character. As well as those lexia which are patently about the fictional character Miranda, there is also a notable number of lexia which reproduce factual sources or scientific definitions of astronomical bodies.

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p. 111). This is brought to the fore in Pentagonal, whereby the lexia are not presented in chronological fashion, and each lexia is not clearly marked out according to character. Indeed, if Murray reminds us that ‘in any literary medium, characters are illusions’ (Murray 2012, p. 214), this fact is particularly brought to the fore in Pentagonal, in that we create the illusion of a character through our piecing together of disparate lexia. Moreover, I argue that the fact that Miranda is initially a factual person who becomes fictional is one way in which Labbé draws our attention to the artificiality of character construction. Labbé’s choice of a newspaper extract as his starting point—rather than, say, a short story or other fictional intertext—means that the relationship between factual and fictional content is highlighted from the outset. Labbé’s story thus sets in train an interplay between fact and fiction, which draws attention to the constructedness of this character.

From Epistolary Novel to Hypertext Fiction If such is the case with one character, there is another set of characters within this novel whose lexia even more overtly foreground issues of structure, media, and mediation. This is the storyline that emerges from several lexia concerning an unnamed male protagonist, who, writing in the first person, tells of his search for his missing girlfriend, named Estela. In the various lexia where these characters appear, we learn that she has disappeared, that he is desperately searching for her, and that she is writing a hypertext novel. Again, his story is not given to us in linear fashion, and it is only after noticing the same names cropping up in different lexia that we become aware we are piecing together his story. In the case of this storyline, the genre format which is mobilised is also highly significant, since the story of Estela is told through the conceit of email messages, with each lexia starting with the headings ‘To:… Cc:… Bcc:… Subject’. In these lexia, Labbé makes use of the conventions of email, one of the digitally mediated forms of communication of our contemporary era, to tell the story in epistolary fashion, structuring these lexia as an email novel for us to piece together. In this storyline, thus, Labbé mobilises the established literary genre of the epistolary novel, as well as engaging with the more recent email novel. Regarding the first of these precedents, having a long literary history, but gaining in popularity particularly in the eighteenth century, the epistolary novel is associated with a variety of canonical works, including

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Rousseau’s Julie, ou la nouvelle Héloïse, Laclos’s Les Liaisons dangereuses (1782), and Goethe’s Die Leiden des jungen Werthers (1774), amongst others.23 It is worth noting that in the epistolary novel, the letter format is far from incidental, and is, instead a fundamental feature of the work. Janet Gurkin Altman’s leading study on the genre argued that ‘the basic formal and functional characteristics of the letter, far from being merely ornamental, significantly influence the way meaning is consciously and unconsciously constructed by writers and readers of epistolary works’ (Altman 1982, p. 4), and she then went on to demonstrate how the epistolary novel, through its foregrounding of its own internal publication within the world of the narrative, ‘portrays the story of its own publication’ (Altman 1982, p. 111). More recently, Whyman has argued that we must understand the rise of the novel as a genre in itself in terms of ‘epistolary literacy’, which comprised ‘a dynamic set of practices that involves letter writing, reading, interpretation, and response by networks of individuals with shared conventions and norms’ (Whyman 2007, p. 578). In this way, the epistolary novel is self-referential, in that it thematises the process of writing and publication, and these processes are reflective of the literacy practices at the time of its apogee—that is, the practices of letter writing as the dominant form of written communication between individuals at that time. The epistolary novel has also been seen as playing an important part in literary developments in the representation of consciousness. Bray has highlighted how the epistolary novel is ‘fundamental to the novel’s development of increasingly sophisticated ways of representing individual psychology’ (Bray 2003, p.  2), since it demonstrates the ‘fluctuating relationship between the narrating self and the experiencing self’ and because ‘the representation of consciousness in this type of novel involves more than an unproblematic, uncensored transcription of thoughts on paper as they occur’ (Bray 2003, p. 20). If such is the long-standing literary tradition upon which Labbé draws in this storyline, the more recent developments of the email novel are clearly referenced by Labbé in his citation of the email header conven23  This is not to say that the genre started in the eighteenth century; scholars have long noted an established tradition of epistles which the epistolary novel builds upon, stretching as far back as classical times. See, for instance, Singer who identified the precursors of the epistolary form in Cicero, and in Egyptian cuneiform tablets that date as far back as the fifteenth century BC (Singer 1933, p. 1).

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tions. Seen by some as a modern version of the epistolary novel, the email novel employs a modern form of communication, yet builds on the prior literary tradition of its print predecessors. Defined as novels that ‘present a narrative as a collection of emails written between characters in the story’ (Rettberg 2014), the email novel genre is seen to encompass both digital literature, such as online archives or live performances in which the narrative is constructed through email messages sent to readers, and print literature, these being print novels which mimic the form of the email. Some scholars have even coined the neologism ‘e-pistolary novel’, to describe epistolary novels that use email as their platform (Gheorghiu 2014). Rettberg points out that, like epistolary novels, ‘email novels are a serial form of narrative that makes use of the conventions of a familiar genre and expects the reader to piece together the context’ (Rettberg 2014). Rettberg’s comments here highlight a continuity with its print predecessor which, as noted above, mobilised the conventions of the predominant form of communication of its time: that of letter writing. In the case of the email novel, the format takes those of email messages, and the medium itself is overtly referenced. Moreover, as Rettberg briefly indicates here, the email novel, through its serial format, obliges the reader to ‘piece together’ the content. The reader of an email novel must, therefore, work harder to piece together a coherent narrative, and I contend, this is even more the case in Pentagonal, since Labbé has disrupted even further the conventions of the email novel. In Labbé’s version, it is not just that we read one email followed by another, and have to piece together the story by making assumptions about what happens between the sending of one email and the next. Rather, in Pentagonal, Labbé further complicates the work of the reader in three main ways. Firstly, the email messages themselves are not presented sequentially: instead of a sequential story, the emails appear in different orders, depending on which route we select. Secondly, the email messages in Pentagonal are interspersed with other lexia and other storylines, meaning that we do not have any one clear narrative line to follow. And thirdly, the email metadata itself is incomplete, meaning that the authorship of the emails, the addressee, and the content of the emails are unconfirmed, thus robbing the reader of one of the ­conventional features of the email format. In each of these aspects, Labbé forces his reader to take an even more active role, negotiating multiple lexia, styles, and sources, and filling in many more blanks than the reader of the sequential email novel.

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In his reuse of the email format, thus, I argue that Labbé encourages us to question the format itself, in the same way that the writers of the prior generation of the epistolary novel self-consciously highlighted the process of publication of the narrative through letters. If the epistolary novel reflected the economic conditions and affordances of its time—the postal service, in the context of the industrial revolution and the rise of capitalism—then the email format too must reflect the conditions of its enablement. Amanda Gilroy and W. M. Verhoeven, writing about the epistolary novel in the time of postal mail, argue that the post office constituted a ‘coordinated system of national communication and surveillance’, and citing Favret, that the postal service was ‘an ideological vehicle of “progress” for both political economy and national education’ (Gilroy and Verhoeven 2000, p. 12). The letter format and the postal system of prior generations of the epistolary novel, thus, reflected the political economy in which those formats circulated. In the case of the email novel, I contend, this takes the format of one of the most easily recognisable forms of communication of the era of late capitalism and is an integral component of what Mejias has termed ‘communicative capitalism’. Mejias, noting Google’s aggressive practice of offering its email services ‘for free’, in order to ‘scan[…] our e-mails and documents to collect more information about us’, and thereby sell that information to marketers to target adverts to us, argues that ‘the hegemony of networks is insidiously evident in examples such as this one in which participation is presented as a fait accompli, in the absence of options and alternatives, and as an almost naturalized form of commodification in which a social act (sending e- mail to students and colleagues) is almost invisibly transformed into a revenue- creating opportunity for a corporation’ (Mejias 2013, p. 7). Building on Mejias, I contend that the email novel format, like its predecessor the epistolary novel of the postal era, is intricately linked to the socio-political conditions that the communicative format represents. The overt use of email conventions by Labbé thus functions as a commentary upon the contemporary communicative regime in which email stands. Moreover, in this regard, I argue that Labbé’s removal of the data in the email header is significant. The fact that the email headers are blank functions, I argue, as the contemporary equivalents of the fragments of the real, which were such a central feature of the surrealist challenge to artistic norms in earlier practices of collage. Here re-enacted through Labbé’s use of the architectural fragments of email, these fragments are the detritus of the digital age. In a similar way to the use of digital detritus

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in the work of other writers and artists (see, for example, Brian Mackern’s work with ‘found objects’ on his computer), Labbé’s updated collage inserts elements of the digital ‘real’ into his work of art.24 Returning to Cubitt’s critique of the immateriality of the digital as mentioned above, Labbé’s use of these digital fragments is an attempt to highlight the disavowed materiality of the digital. The digital is no less immaterial, as Cubitt and others have argued, and Labbé’s foregrounding of these remnants constitutes an insistence upon the materiality of digital technologies. Moreover, a further feature of epistolary novels is mobilised by Labbé in his presentation of the characters through these email messages. Writing about the email novel, Rotunno concurs with Bray in arguing that the epistolary novel is far from a ‘relatively unsophisticated and transparent version of subjectivity’, and argues that, in fact, email novels ‘belong to the postmodern epistolary tradition that can use letters to highlight crises of language and identity’ (Rotunno 2006, p. 78). We will see these postmodern traits come to the fore in Labbé’s novel, as Labbé both updates and expands upon the potentials of these pre-digital formats. As we shall see below, Labbé takes to a new level the ‘fluctuating relationship between the narrating self and the experiencing self’ that is the hallmark of epistolary fiction where now, the fluctuating relationship between the various narrating selves is constructed in a multisequential way. In the case of Pentagonal, the messages within the email chain remain unanswered, we assume, since we never encounter any replies from Estela in any of the lexia, irrespective of which paths we follow. Instead, we have to piece together what has happened to her through what the boyfriend writes. For example, from main newspaper cutting interface, if we select the link ‘unidentified’, the following lexia is loaded: From: To: Date: Subject: Where are you, where are you, where are you, where are you, where are you. Please let this be one of your little games. Where have you got to, Estela, tell me. I don’t mind where, just give me an indication that you are 24  See, for example, Uruguayan artist Brian Mackern’s work with ‘found objects’ in his Galería de objetos encontrados, in which the ‘objects’ in question are the temporary files saved on his computer—the remnants of the digital age—and also the work of Marina Zerbarini, analysed in the following chapter in this volume, which integrates post-digital sound.

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somewhere. Nobody disappears just like that. Or do they? I don’t want to think the worst, Exquisa, but what am I going to do if two whole days have gone by since I found the door to your apartment wide open, and inside it, nothing?25

This lexia, as with all of the others which take the format of email correspondence from the unnamed man, is presented as white text on black background, and lacks any key data in the email header. As noted above, this constitutes Labbé’s playing with the conventions of the email format, and here, I argue, one important feature comes to the fore. Rotunno notes that epistolary fiction often exposes ‘the manipulative potential of letters’, and argues that email novels take this exposure to a new level since, ‘while such exposes are common in eighteenth and nineteenth-­ century novels, email novels have complicated them, undertaking further exploration of the connection (or lack thereof) between one’s “true” self and what appears in one’s correspondence’ (Rotunno 2006, p.  71). Rotunno argues that this is due to two factors: first, the concern that email novels show with the conventions of correspondence; and secondly, email’s capacity to keep a person’s identity secret. What we see in Labbé’s version, I argue, is an extended version of this dynamic. For, it is striking that Labbé apes the conventions of email correspondence but inserts blanks in the ‘to/from’ lines. The capacity of the email format to keep a person’s identity secret is thus deliberately foregrounded in Pentagonal through Labbé’s use of these fragments of email architecture, which also raises issues of the instability of the (writing) subject. Structurally, it is worth noting that the links within this lexia lead us to a variety of forms of content. For example, if we click on the first link within the lexia, ‘somewhere’, the new lexia loaded is a different genre of text—a short, factual piece about an exploding star. It is only the second hotlink, ‘disappears’, which continues with the email chain, meaning that structurally, our continuing access to Estela’s story is not necessarily sequential. 25  The original Spanish reads: ‘Dónde estás, dónde estás, dónde estás, dónde estás, dónde estás. Por favor que sea otro de tus jugueteos. Dónde te has metido, Estela, dímelo. No me importa dónde, sólo dame un aviso de que estás en algún lugar. Nadie se desvanece de este modo. ¿O sí? No quiero pensar lo peor, Exquisa, ¿pero qué voy a hacer si ya van a pasar dos días enteros desde que encontré la puerta de tu departamento abierta de par en par y, adentro, el vacío?’

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If such is the structure of this epistolary novel-within-a-novel, in terms of style and content, Labbé’s version here is a mixture of thriller techniques, with metafictional commentaries on the genre. The thriller elements—including the trope of the missing person, the build-up of suspense, and the sense of impending doom—are of course heightened by the epistolary format, and the disjointed lexia format, since the traditional cliff-hanger at the end of each chapter or episode of the thriller is postponed even more in Labbé’s version, as the email ends. Yet, alongside these thriller techniques—which would conventionally point to a mystery to be resolved, and a truth to be found—this lexia also carries within it the vocabulary of artifice. The fact that the unnamed writer muses on whether this may be one of Estela’s elaborate ruses or jugueteos puts us on our guard. His messages suggest that her disappearance may be part of an elaborate scene-setting that she herself has built up, and indeed, references to artifice abound in all the lexia related to this character and storyline. For example, other lexia within this storyline include terms such as ‘awful plan’, ‘annoying joke’, ‘your acting’, ‘characters in your story’, ‘don’t play with me, and many other such expressions that refer to artifice or performance.26 Linked to this is the fact that the questions that the writer of the email asks could also be addressed to the literary structure itself of Pentagonal. His anxiety demonstrated in the repeated phrase ‘Where are you, where are you, where are you, where are you, where are you’ functions within the storyworld itself, but also functions as a metaliterary commentary on hypertext fiction, and on the role of the reader.27 The reader finds herself in a parallel situation, as we are searching through the lexia, attempting to find characters, and trying to trace paths through lexia to make a coherent story. These destabilisations, and the sense of artifice, come to the fore even more strongly in other lexia of this type, in which the deliberate artifice becomes clearer. For instance, the following lexia is an example of an email message from the unnamed narrator, which foregrounds artifice: To: Cc: Bcc: Subject:  In the original Spanish, these read: ‘horroroso plan’, ‘broma más aburrida’, ‘tu actuación’, ‘personajes en tu historia’ ‘no juegues conmigo’. 27  In the original Spanish, these read: ‘Dónde estás, dónde estás, dónde estás, dónde estás, dónde estás’. 26

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What is this. Another chapter of the electronic novel. That’s enough. Appear. Appear. Appear. There’s a spelling mistake: ‘lucero’ is written with a ‘c’. I’m getting nervous, Estela. You should be resting, the doctor forbade you from moving too much. Don’t be so stupid. A hypernovel about the importance of chance in our lives, you said, and now the most macabre possibilities come to my mind. Please don’t let anything have happened to you. This is what you said when you sat down to write: I’m going to take five characters who had never met before, and crash them together.28

This individual lexia continues with the story of the unnamed character and Estela, but also has some notable other features, for, in this individual lexia, it is clear that someone is sending him chapters of an electronic novel, and that Estela herself is writing an electronic novel. These epistolary lexia within Pentagonal, thus, are significant in that they also engage in metaliterary commentary. Much of the content of the unnamed protagonist’s emails deals not only with Estela’s disappearance, but also with the fact that she is in the process of writing an electronic novel. In this way, the content of this email itself refers, in a mise-en-­ abîme, to the content of the hypertext novel that Estela is writing, and deliberates upon some of the central features of hypertext as a medium. For example, the discussion about how the novel will deal with ‘the importance of chance in our lives’ is easily interpretable as a reflection of the hypertextual structure of this work, which allows the reader to choose different paths, and so, depending on their choices, happens to take a different route through the lexia. Similarly, the line ‘take five characters who had never met before, and crash them together’ refers to the clashing storylines of the various lexia in this hypertext novel, as well as, of course, referring back semantically to the opening interface and the literal crash that took place, and which formed the springboard for the story. In this way, the epistolary lexia within Pentagonal are significant not just for the story they tell, but also for their metacritical commentary. Indeed, some of the most striking cases of this commentary occur when 28  In the original Spanish, this reads: ‘Qué es esto. Otro capítulo de la novela electrónica. Ya está bueno. Aparece. Aparece. Aparece. Hay una falta ortográfica: se escribe “lucero”, con c. Me estoy poniendo nervioso, Estela. Tú tienes que estar reposando, el doctor te prohibió moverte demasiado. No seas tan tonta. Una hipernovela sobre la importancia de lo accidental en nuestras vidas, me dijiste, y ahora se me vienen todas las posibilidades más macabras a la cabeza. Por favor que no te haya pasado nada. Esto me decías cuando te sentaste a escribir: voy a tomar cinco personajes que nunca se han visto y los haré colisionar.’

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the unnamed narrator starts to question his own ontological status, as can be seen in the following lexia: From: To: Date: Subject: I’m worried, tell me you’re ok, you’ve managed to scare me. You said that you and I were going to be characters in your story, stop playing, it’s only a novel, why the big mystery, Estélida, because fragments of the hypernovel keep being sent to me.29

This particular lexia undertakes a play with ontological levels, in addition to the mise-en-abîme and metacritical commentary we witness in the other epistolary lexia. The unnamed narrator’s comment that ‘tú y yo íbamos a ser personajes en tu historia’ disrupts the ontological levels or storyworlds that are normally kept distinct in conventional, realist fiction. We thus witness in this lexia not only the mise-en-abîme of the levels within levels, but also the troubling of these very levels. In a vertiginous mise-en-abîme, we encounter the world of the overall hypertext novel; within that, the fictional emails that are presented as real forms of communication; within these email lexia, we read a discussion about the construction of the fictional novel; and within this, there is a potential mixing of ontological levels, where the author of the emails doubts as to whether he is becoming one of the characters within the fictional storyworld of Estela’s hypertext novel. This contamination between the levels of the stories, involving the ‘transgression of a line of demarcation that authors usually do not touch’ (Cohn 2012, pp.  105–106) leads to a troubling of ontological levels through this moment of metalepsis.30 Throughout this and other email 29  The original Spanish reads: ‘Estoy asustado, dime que estás bien, lograste que me dé el miedo. Dijiste que tú y yo íbamos a ser personajes en tu historia, no juegues, es sólo una novela, para qué hacerse la misteriosa además, Estélida, porque me siguen llegando trozos de la hipernovela.’ 30  This use of metalepsis and the troubling of ontological levels will also be seen in several of the other authors whose work is studied in this volume, including Marina Zerbarini’s Eveline, Belén Gache’s Radikal Karoke, and Jaime Alejandro Rodríguez’s Golpe de gracia. Crucially, here in Labbé’s Pentagonal, this metalepsis remains inter-diegetic: that is, it exists within the context of the story, even if characters transgress the levels across these stories. As we shall see in the case of Zerbarini and Gache, some of the most disconcerting of the instances of metalepsis come when the reader him/herself transgresses these levels.

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lexia, Labbé thus disturbs the levels between stories, and leads his characters to question their own ontological status. In these and many other ways, Labbé’s novel plays with literary precedents, negotiating a range of media, sources, and genres, whilst also drawing our attention to the artifice of his own creation. Drawing on a heritage that goes well beyond the Anglophone, Labbé’s work encourages us both to question prior literary norms and question their radical potential in the digital age. His use of legacy media raises a series of issues regarding prior moments of literary and artistic experimentation, and their relationship or otherwise to contemporary digital media. In particular, his reference to collage practices draws out for us the heritage of contemporary cut-and-­ paste, highlighting the avant-garde impulses of the former, whilst also cautioning about the potential recuperation of these practices by corporate media. His reworking of excepts from pre-existing texts, as they are repurposed and repositioned in his novel, draws out for us their relevance for our contemporary era, and their metaphorical links to the structure of his own novel. Similarly, his employment of the email conceit provides an updated version of the epistolary novel, taking the troubling of the identity that these novels enact to new levels, and also undertaking an implicit critique of the digital. Just as the prior version of the epistolary novel, enacted through letters, functioned to comment on the communicative practices of its time, so too, Labbé encourages us to understand the email format as representative of the communicative capitalism of our present day. In Labbé’s work, thus, the radical and innovative potentials of his practice lie not in the use of contemporary digital media per se, but in the active and critical reworking of this media, in his constant metacommentary, and in the reworking of digital media conventions.

Works Cited Adamowicz, Elza. 1998. Surrealist Collage in Text and Image: Dissecting the Exquisite Corpse. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Altman, Janet Gurkin. 1982. Epistolarity: Approaches to a Form. Columbus: Ohio State University Press. Anderson, Benedict. 2006. Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism. London: Verso. Ayala Pérez, Teresa. 2010. Textos periodísticos chilenos en el período de la Independencia. Boletin de Filología 45 (1): 43–74. Balbi, Gabriele, and Juraj Kittler. 2016. The One-to-One and One-to-Many Dichotomy: Grand Theories, Periodization, and Historical Narratives in

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Communication Studies. International Journal of Communication Studies 10: 1971–1990. Bell, Alice. 2010. The Possible Worlds of Hypertext Fiction. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Betancourt, Michael. 2015. The Critique of Digital Capitalism: An Analysis of the Political Economy of Digital Culture and Technology. Brooklyn, NY: Punctum Books. Bray, Joe. 2003. The Epistolary Novel: Representations of Consciousness. London: Routledge. Browne Sartori, Rodrigo, Julio Carvajal Rivera, and Rocío Salinas Oyarzo. 2011. Análisis crítico del discurso: la prensa sensacionalista en contextos culturales colindantes: el caso de Ajá en Perú y La Cuarta en Chile. Correspondencias y Análisis 1: 263–277. Bürger, Peter. 1984. Theory of the Avant-Garde. Translated by Michael Shaw. Manchester: Manchester University Press. Cohn, Dorrit. 2012. Metalepsis and Mise en Abyme. Narrative 20 (1): 105–114. Cornejo, Nicolás. 2007. Navidad y matanza: el desasosiego del juego. Taller de Letras 41: 221–223. Cubitt, Sean. 2017. Finite Media: Environmental Implications of Digital Technologies. Durham: Duke University Press. Edwards, Richard L. 2014. Constraint and Potential in Restrictive Remixes. In Sampling Media, ed. David Laderman and Laurel Westrup, 31–41. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Fernández, Hans. 2016. Spectators chilenos y convivencia: la Aurora de Chile y El monitor araucano. Romanica Olomucensia 28 (2): 203–212. Forero Quintero, Gustavo. 2011. La novela total o la novela fragmentaria en América Latina y los discursos de globalización y localización. Acta Literaria 42: 33–44. Franco Figueroa, Mariano. 2010. Independencia y su expresión léxica en la Aurora de Chile. Boletin de Filología 45 (1): 127–157. Gainza, Carolina. 2016. Literatura chilena en digital: mapas, estéticas y conceptualizaciones. Revista Chilena de Literatura 94: 233–256. Gheorghiu, Oana Celia. 2014. The E-pistolary Novel: Print Screens of Media-­ driven Thoughts in David Llewellyn’s Eleven. Cultural Intertexts 1 (1): 45–57. Gilroy, Amanda, and W.M. Verhoeven. 2000. Epistolary Histories: Letters, Fiction, Culture. Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia. Granta: The Magazine of New Writing. 2010. Special issue, The Best of Young Spanish-Language Novelists, 113. Grez Toso, Sergio. 2011. Bicentenario en Chile: la celebración de una laboriosa construcción política. Historia y Comunicación Social 16: 69–86. Griffin, Jane D. 2016. The Labor of Literature: Democracy in Literary Culture in Modern Chile. University of Massachusetts Press. Kelly, Julia. 2008. The Anthropology of Assemblage. Art Journal 61 (7): 24–30.

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Labbé, Carlos. 2001. Pentagonal: incluidos tú y yo. Accessed March 10, 2017. http://pendientedemigracion.ucm.es/info/especulo/hipertul/pentagonal/. ———. 2007. Navidad y matanza. Cáceres: Editorial Periférica. Ledesma, Eduardo. 2017. Radical Poetry: Aesthetics, Politics, Technology, and the Ibero-American Avant-Gardes 1900–2015. New York: SUNY Press. Mackern, Brian. n.d. Galería de objetos encontrados. Accessed March 22, 2019. http://www.internet.com.uy/vibri/artefactos/lostnfound/index.htm#. Manovich, Lev. 2002. The Language and New Media. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. ———. 2003. New Media from Borges to HTML. In The New Media Reader, ed. Noah Wardrip-Fruin and Nick Montfort, 13–25. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Manzi Cembrano, Jorge. 2011. Ilegibilidad en la novella: el caso de Cristián Barros. Anales de Literatura Chilena 15: 197–208. ———. 2015. Experimentalismos en la novela chilena reciente: la ilegibilidad como estilo. In Cartografía de la novela chilena reciente: realismos, experimentalismos, hibridaciones y subgéneros, ed. Macarena Areco, 51–73. Santiago de Chile: Ceibo. Martínez, Melchor. 1848. Memoria histórica sobre la revolución de Chile, desde el cautiverio de Fernando VII, hasta 1814. Valparaiso: Europea. Mejias, Ulises Ali. 2013. Off the Network: Disrupting the Digital World. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Murray, Janet H. 2012. Inventing the Medium: Principles of Interaction Design as Cultural Practice. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Ossa Santa Cruz, Juan Luis. 2014. Armies, Polities and Revolution: Chile, 1808– 1826. Liverpool: Liverpool University Press. Piccato, Pablo. 2014. Murders of Nota Roja: Truth and Justice in Mexican Crime News. Past and Present 223: 195–231. Rama, Ángel. 1996. The Lettered City. Duke University Press. Rettberg, Jill Walker. 2014. E-mail Novel. In The Johns Hopkins Guide to Digital Media, ed. Marie-Laure Ryan, Lori Emerson, and Benjamin Robertson. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP. Rotunno, Laura. 2006. User IDs: Email Novels and the Search for Identity. Auto/ Biography Studies 21 (1): 70–82. Russo, Julie Levin, and Franceca Coppa. 2012. Fan/Remix Video (A Remix). Transformative Works and Cultures 9: n.p. Accessed April 20, 2017. https:// doi.org/10.3983/twc.2012.0431. Schwartz, Marcy. 2015. La literatura en el espacio público: un diálogo con Carlos Labbé. Confluencia: Revista Hispánica de Cultura y Literatura 30 (2): 168–178. ———. 2016. Reading on Wheels: Stories of Convivencia in the Latin American City. Latin American Research Review 51 (3): 181–201. Sierra, Nicole. 2013. Surrealist Histories of Language, Image, Media: Donald Barthelme’s “Collage Stories”. European Journal of American Culture 32 (2): 153–171.

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Simonson, Peter. 2010. Refiguring Mass Communication: A History. Urbana: University of Illinois Press. Singer, Godfrey Frank. 1933. The Epistolary Novel: Its Origin, Development, Decline, and Residuary Influence. University of Pennsylvania Press. Valencia, Roberto. 2008. Entrevista (mínima): Carlos Labbé. Quimera: Revista de Literatura. Whyman, Susan E. 2007. Letter Writing and the Rise of the Novel: The Epistolary Literacy of Jane Johnson and Samuel Richardson. Huntingdon Library Quarterly 70 (4): 577–606.

CHAPTER 3

Foregrounding Fragments and Gaps: Marina Zerbarini’s Eveline, Fragments of a Reply (2004) (Argentina)

Moving on from Labbé’s landmark text, this chapter now undertakes a detailed analysis of another early digital literary work, Marina Zerbarini’s hypertext narrative, Eveline, Fragments of a Reply. In this narrative, Zerbarini takes a particular source text—a short story by James Joyce—in order to produce a new digital narrative that, far from simply repeating Joyce’s original, questions some of its premises. As with Labbé’s use of the short newspaper article, Zerbarini does not merely repeat the original story, or provide a sequel, but picks apart the stylistic and structural features of the original, in order to make us ask metaliterary questions about the text and its nature. In this chapter, I demonstrate how Zerbarini takes to an extreme the early modernist practices of Joyce’s original, and that she also problematises some of the notions underpinning both Joyce’s work and the concepts of electronic literature. In particular, I focus on Joycean traits, which are taken up by Zerbarini, but which are then pushed to their limit. Firstly, I elucidate how Zerbarini’s remixed version of Joyce mobilises a variety of technologically enabled ‘gaps’, such as hyperlinking, fragmentary lexia, and images which are partially obscured, to produce for us an updated version of the silences and ellipses which Joyce’s reader had to fill when reading in the early twentieth century. Secondly, Zerbarini adopts Joyce’s technique of unresolved endings, and takes this notion to a new level whereby, through the randomised presentation of its contents, Eveline does indeed have no © The Author(s) 2019 C. Taylor, Electronic Literature in Latin America, New Directions in Latino American Cultures, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-30988-6_3

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ending, since narrative structure is thwarted, and there is no narrative closure. Thirdly, I illustrate how Zerbarini engages with stream of consciousness, suggesting some potential analogies with digital technologies, but then also demonstrate how her repeated use of imagery of signals, tracks, and routes troubles the notion of associative leaps of the mind free from restraints. Subsequently, I investigate how the mapping and routes metaphors that Zerbarini employs also lead us to question the (neo)colonial impulses inherent in the rhetoric and structure of the internet. Finally, the chapter ends on an analysis of the interactive and user-input features of the work, highlighting the implications that this has for the crossing of ontological realms. In this way, the chapter argues that Zerbarini takes up the gauntlet thrown down by Joyce, and yet also problematises some of the modernist techniques that he champions. Marina Zerbarini is a leading digital artist from Argentina who has worked across several media, including photography, painting, objects, and installation art for some decades. Several of her works which fall into the category of electronic literature involve playing with narrative form, such as her Twins/Not-Twins of 2002, which mixes a variety of sources, and to which the reader-viewer can submit their own texts, images, and sounds, or her Don’t_Fall_ Into_the_Trap_Today (2009), a ‘non-linear internet narrative’ (Zerbarini 2009) created using Flickr, consisting of a photograph taken every day of the sediment left in a cup of coffee, alongside short extracts taken from daily predictions from an internet horoscope. Many of her recent works have been installation pieces, including Sound Work in Net Code (2005), an electronic installation combining projections of satellite images of the city of Buenos Aires with audio files and user interaction, and in which ropes suspended across the space function as the interfaces by which the user plays with the work, or Heat, Steam, Humidity: Turner in the 21st Century (2005) comprising a miniature model of a city made up of plants enclosed within a glass globe. Drops of Light of 2010 is an installation consisting of a map of the world displayed on two large disks on which information received by satellite about the climactic variables of rain and humidity is displayed. Her Symbiotic Synthesis Between a Machine and a Living Being (2010) is an installation consisting of an incubator for eggs in which the levels of humidity, air, and temperature are controlled, and texts and images are added, whilst Assisted Nature (2010 onwards) is an electronic installation

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consisting of an automated system of watering that is activated by humidity sensors inserted into plant pots.1 Eveline, Fragments of a Reply, is amongst the most literary of Zerbarini’s works, in that it engages overtly with a specific literary intertext, and it clearly plays with several norms of electronic literature, as will be analysed below. In her retrospective on a decade of her work, Zerbarini has described this work as a ‘narrative project for the internet, based on James Joyce stories, in which the concepts of hypertext, randomness, participation, and the simulation of live and dynamic systems in real time are developed’ (Zerbarini 2004).2 From this short description, it is clear that Zerbarini envisages Joyce’s short stories as springboards to examine the potentials of digital technologies, as she specifically draws out several of what are commonly seen as the key affordances of the digital, namely: hypertext as a mechanism; the possibility for random association; the increased potential for user-reader participation; and the simulation of systems. In the opening blurb to the work, Zerbarini expands upon this more in relation to her chosen intertext, noting both the short story ‘Eveline’ and ‘A Painful Case’ as her inspirations.3 Highlighting several key features of Eveline, and also making explicit the rationale behind her choosing Joyce’s work as her inspiration thematically, Zerbarini draws out ‘emotions, encounters, spaces of transit, the place of the body’ as central themes of Joyce’s stories which intrigue her.4 As we shall see below, these themes are developed in Zerbarini’s version through a variety of techniques, such as the obsessive close-ups of human faces and hands, or the multiple visual references to travel and transit. As well as these themes, Zerbarini also underlines the literary t­ echniques of Joyce’s that she admires in his stories, and she gives particular attention 1  The original titles in Spanish of the works mentioned in this paragraph are, in order: Gemelos/no-gemelos, Hoy_no_caigas_en_la_trampa, Pieza sonora en clave de red, Calor, vapor, humedad: Turner en el S. XXI, Gotas de Luz, Síntesis simbiótica entre una máquina y un ser vivo, and Naturaleza asistida. 2  In the original Spanish, this reads ‘un proyecto narrativo para Internet, basado en cuentos de James Joyce, se desarrollan los conceptos de hipertexto, aleatoriedad, participación, simulación de sistemas vivos y dinámicos en tiempo real’. 3  Both ‘Eveline’, and ‘A Painful Case’ were included in the collection Dubliners (1914). The various short stories in Dubliners were written between 1904 and 1907, but only published together as a collection in 1914. ‘Eveline’ was first published in 1904 in the weekly publication, The Irish Homestead. 4  In the original Spanish, this reads: ‘los afectos, los encuentros, los espacios de tránsito, el lugar del cuerpo’.

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to the feature of endings. Making specific reference to Joyce’s ‘Eveline’, Zerbarini comments on the importance of the ending, mentioning the fact that in this story, the protagonist fantasises about the happy life she could have with the man who will take us to Buenos Aires, and then goes on to note that what interests her here is the unexpectedness of this ending, since ‘the unexpected ending, if we can talk of endings in the writings of Joyce (the main motivation behind this work) opens up the literary play to the interpretative powers of the reader’.5 This particular feature of the ending to ‘Eveline’—an ending which, as scholars have pointed out, is unresolved or unsatisfying—is, in Zerbarini’s version, pushed to its limit. As I will analyse below, Zerbarini’s short story, through its randomised presentation of its contents, does indeed have no ending, since narrative structure is thwarted, and there is no narrative closure. As can be seen from Zerbarini’s comments, Joyce and his modernist techniques are central to her Eveline. In the sections that follow, I shall elucidate the various ways in which Zerbarini takes up Joycean traits in this work, focusing in particular on three traits that have been identified by scholars in these short stories: firstly, textual gaps; secondly, unresolved endings; and thirdly, incipient stream-of-consciousness techniques. As my analysis will reveal, Zerbarini both takes up and yet questions these traits.

From Textual Gaps to Electronic Gaps Regarding the first of these traits, Joyce’s short stories in Dubliners have noted for their textual gaps or omissions, with ‘Eveline’ being a particular case in point. Various scholars have pointed out the fact that Dubliners contains an incipient use of gaps and ellipses that was to characterise the later and much more experimental Ulysses. James Balakier, for instance, highlights in this short story collection what he terms ‘explicit gaps or other elliptical constructions’, and argues that these are ‘an integrated aspect of his [Joyce’s] art from the composition of his earliest fiction in The Dubliners’ (Balakier 2010, p. 237). Balakier identifies as examples of this Joycean experimentation with textual fragmentation the ‘ellipses, dashes, spaced rows of periods, explicit silences and other devices he contrives to engage readers’ (Balakier 2010, p. 239). Similarly, Wright has 5  In the original Spanish, this reads: ‘el inesperado final, si podemos hablar de un final en la escritura de Joyce (principal motor de esta obra), abre el juego a la riqueza interpretativa del lector’.

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also identified the technique of creating narrative gaps as a particular feature of the short stories within Dubliners, and for Wright, the story ‘Eveline’ in particular is paradigmatic of textual gaps within this collection: The story ‘Eveline’ furnishes the first example in the collection and establishes a clear pattern for later cases. Eveline’s musing about Frank that ‘[h]e would save her’ is followed by a line of dots, slightly ominous in context, then by the phrase ‘[s]he stood among the swaying crowd in the station at the North Wall’ (D 40). The gap in the narrative here allows us no chance to observe Eveline’s progress from her home to the station, so all we see of her in the story is concentrated into two scenes in which she barely moves at all. (Wright 2003, p. 154)

A particular feature, then, of ‘Eveline’ and the other short stories within the collection was an experimental use of textual breaks, as Joyce mobilised a variety of devices to attempt to provide gaps in the narrative, a technique that was closely related, as Balakier notes, to the active engagement of the reader. Striking in this short story are the elliptical techniques, which means the reader is allowed no chance to follow Eveline’s progress. This deliberate disruption of our ability to follow Eveline refers both to her literal progress through the streets, but also to narrative progression, since the ellipses prevent the reader from fully following Eveline’s story sequentially. I contend that this technique of narrative gaps is one feature that Zerbarini exploits in her hypertext short story. Zerbarini’s Eveline: fragmentos de una respuesta integrates a series of features which precisely serve to disrupt any linear reading, creating a digital version of the gaps that Joyce’s reader encountered in his stories. In so doing, Zerbarini is making use of the capacities of digital technologies to produce for us the silences and ellipses which Joyce’s reader had to fill when reading in the early twentieth century. Zerbarini achieves this effect of narrative gaps and inconclusive endings through the remixing of content that is randomised and activated in different ways each time the work is opened, and each time the reader interacts with it. On entering the work, an interface loads, which consists of multiple images, often including a close-up of a particular part of the human body—most frequently, part of the face, or the hands. These body parts are not captured in full, but in extreme close-up, with the image pixelated such that the individual pixels are visible. Across these varied

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files, certain thematic or stylistic features emerge. As well as several of the files containing photographic images depicting extreme close-ups of human figures, there is also an abundance of images consisting of graphic or hand-drawn representations of maps, transport, and signals. The sound files, meanwhile, comprise metallic, computer-generated sounds, and excerpts of orchestral music taken from Philip Glass, a composer known for his use of repetitive structures, about more of which below. The text files comprise extracts from the two Joyce source texts, which have either been cut, or in some cases, deliberately blurred so that it is impossible to read them. Strikingly, there is no one, single interface to the work, because the images, sounds, texts, and interactive buttons comprising this work are presented to us at random, such that each time we open the work, we witness a different version. Zerbarini here exploits the potentials of algorithms to generate multiple versions of her narrative. As Zerbarini herself explained in the blurb to this work, the underlying structure is based on randomness, in which the initial organisation of ten different files is created at random, without the user being able to choose, and each of these in themselves contain five or six links, in turn linked to other randomised entry points, that in themselves then produce ten further possibilities, and so forth. As she explains, this ‘double and triple randomness allows for dynamic relationships between the information, through which is virtually impossible that the same relationship between images, textures and sounds will be repeated’ (Zerbarini 2004, n.p.).6 In this way, Eveline, fragmentos de una respuesta undertakes an updating of Joyce and his modernist techniques. Since the chronological order of the files is not pre-set, the reader has to piece together the story from multiple stimuli, as s/he reads disparate blocks of lexia, views images, watches videos, and listens to sounds. Thus, there is no one single introductory page to the work, and in fact different combinations are generated each time we activate the work. Similarly, the subsequent screens we encounter are also randomised, such that there is no one, pre-set order of narrative progression. For instance, in one possible combination, we may open the work to reveal a screen depicting an extreme close-up of part of the human hand, across which four buttons appear to the left: 6  In the original Spanish, this reads ‘doble y triple aleatoriedad permite relaciones dinámicas de la información, en la que difícilmente se vuelva a producir la misma relación de imágenes, tactos y sonidos’ (Zerbarini 2004, n.p.).

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Fig. 3.1  Marina Zerbarini, Eveline, Fragments of a Reply (2004), close-ups

clicking on these buttons then brings up a further grid of small buttons, each of which in turn loads new content (see Fig. 3.1): Several of these buttons—those along the bottom line—load external content, related in one way or another to Joyce, including opinion pieces about his work, a site providing Finnegan’s Wake one page per day, a biographical piece discussing the inspiration for Ulysses, and a discussion board dedicated to the writer. In so doing, Zerbarini integrates external content into her work, making use of the potentials of hyperlinking to go beyond the confines of the work in itself. This is one way in which, I argue, Zerbarini activates the ‘narrative gaps’ that characterised Joyce’s original short story, with the content of these links providing not one linear story, but several, multiple, fragmented ones. The next line of buttons uploads a series of videos and animations. These include an animation in which red and grey circles flash on and off; as we move our mouse over a circle, it disappears, and beneath it is partially revealed a photographic image that moves sideways or downwards, and out of view. We thus are only given brief, tantalising glimpses of a partially visible image, which we can just discern is of a dry, dusty landscape, with what appears to be a tower in the background, and ripples of water. In a similar fashion, the remaining buttons launch moving or still images, including scenes of a waterfront with fence panels; images of leaves moving in the wind; and images of ripples in water. What characterises all of these

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is that they are all only partially visible, since the way they are presented always entails part of the image being obscured; so, for instance, a video of a water scene is only partially visible when we move the cursor over it; or some still photographic images within a circle, depicting what are possibly stones or leaves, again are only partly visible, as constantly moving lines, blocks, and numbers run over the images. In summary, the buttons along this line each load a video or animation which occupies the centre of the screen, and these are all in some way partially obscured, difficult to view in their entirety, or distorted. In each case, there is no overt link made between each video and the next; rather, we establish connections as we explore them, such that, for instance, after playing around with the cursor and viewing the various videos and images, we make a semantic connection of water, and can surmise that we are at a waterfront setting. We are thus likely to associate this locale with Eveline’s story, and particularly the ending, since the waterfront signifies emigration to America, and also, of course, is the setting for the end of the story, with Eveline’s failed attempt to set off across the sea for a new life. Yet we are not told this explicitly, and the immediate relevance to Eveline’s story is not spelled out for us; there are, for instance, no titles for each video, which might relate it to a particular part of the original short story, nor are there any discernible characters who are presented. Instead, we have to establish these thematic connections with the waterfront as the scene of her momentous decision at the end of the story. Moreover, it is significant that we cannot see any of these images in their entirety, and our viewing of them is, in each case, only partial and fragmented. The reader of Zerbarini’s narrative must, indeed, fill a significant number of narrative gaps to discern the story. If these buttons give us access to mostly visual stimuli, others give us access to textual input, with the buttons opening up blocks of lexia taken at random from the text of Joyce’s ‘Eveline’ and ‘A Painful Case’. These lexia appear in the top third and bottom third of the screen, with the top in Spanish and the bottom in English, and are in white font, superimposed over the image of the hand (see Fig. 3.2): It is important to note that we are not given these lexia in the order in which they appear in the original stories, nor is there any indication of which of the two stories they originally belonged to. Zerbarini’s tactic here thus creates very literal textual fragments, in that she has cut up Joyce’s original short stories into individual lexia—blocks of text—and presented these lexia in fragmented fashion, accessed individually through different links. There are, thus, very real textual gaps that have been created.

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Fig. 3.2  Marina Zerbarini, Eveline, Fragments of a Reply (2004), textual fragments

In this way, the interface to Zerbarini’s Eveline draws on and attempts to update the Joycean technique of textual gaps, evident both in the literal textual fragments and in the overall structure of the work. Firstly, as noted above, we encounter throughout Zerbarini’s Eveline excerpts from Joyce’s ‘Eveline’ and ‘A Painful Case’, which are fragmented, cut into pieces, presented with no chronological order, and thus displaying literal textual gaps. Secondly, Zerbarini produces textual gaps in the overall structure of the work, since the randomised combination of the multiple visual, textual, and sonic stimuli that she includes in her work resist linear narrative presentation. Thus, we construct our own narrative arc from the piecing together of the lexia, meaning that in Zerbarini’s story, the classic Formalist distinction between fabula (the story) and sjuzjet (the plot) is further troubled. The distinction between fabula and sjuzhet as conceived of by the Formalists is summarised by Jonathan Culler as between ‘the story as a series of events and the story as reported in the narrative’, thus meaning a distinction between actions or events themselves, and the narrative presentation of those actions (Culler 1981, p. 117).7 If the story or fabula 7  In taking Culler’s gloss of the Formalists’ distinction between fabula (the events) and sjuzhet (the plot) here, I do not mean to say that these terms are in themselves stable. Indeed, as Walsh has demonstrated, there are many theorists who reject the Formalists’ proposition that fabula can be ‘innocent of artifice’; arguing that ‘whatever view we may wish to take upon the actual relations existing between the multitude of real events, the isolation

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conventionally refers to narrative content, and the plot or sjuzhet to the way in which this content is put together or narrated, then Zerbarini’s complex, algorithmically generated narrative troubles this distinction, for her plot is in itself not fixed at all. Rather, than being the set way in which narrative content is present, the plot for Zerbarini’s reader is constantly remixed each time the work is opened and the reader selects different links to follow. Zerbarini, thus, in taking the Joycean technique of narrative gaps to the extreme, troubles the very foundations of narrative form.

Digitally Enhanced Inconclusive Endings Secondly, another of the main traits identified by scholars in Joyce’s short story ‘Eveline’—and also explicitly flagged up by Zerbarini herself in the blurb to this work, as noted above—is the problematic ending to the story. The ending has often been commented on by scholars, and seen as a let-­ down, or as representative of the stifling milieu in which Eveline finds herself. Scholars have noted how, trapped in her middle-class values, at the end of the story, Eveline does not elope with the man she has been dreaming of, but instead, remains in Dublin, reaffirming the conventional values which her middle-class upbringing has instilled into her. Dathalinn O’Dea has argued that Joyce’s emphasis in this story is on the stagnation— or, using Joyce’s own terms the ‘paralysis’—of life in Dublin, and that what resonates with Evelin is a feeling of inertia, and of ‘comfortable familiarity’ (O’Dea 2017, p. 489). In a similar fashion, Jim LeBlanc has suggested that in this story, Eveline embraces a ‘self-imposed rejection of the possibility of escape from Dublin’ and that the ending illustrates ‘the notion of paralysis as an attempt to abdicate the burden of existential freedom’ (LeBlanc 2017, p. 55). However, other scholars have argued that the ending cannot be understood as a simple reaffirmation of stasis. De Voogd has cautioned against any simplistic reading of the ending of this story as simply reinforcing the paralysis of Dublin, arguing that this ending is in fact not stultifying. Reading the phrasing at the end of the story ‘she set her white face to him’ of any particular sequence is already the intervention of narrative artifice’, Walsh contends that ‘fabula must be in some sense storied’ (Walsh 2001, p. 593). Rather, in my reference to fabula and sjuzhet here, I am wishing to highlight the fact that sjuzhet (the plot) is normally understood, within conventional print literature, to be a fixed system, that is, the pre-determined order by which the author has chosen to present the events.

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as an active act of will, de Voogd argues that ‘Eveline’s final refusal to go with Frank has little to do with sudden paralysis or real helplessness’. Instead, de Voogd argues, ‘as the active verbal group “she set to” implies, hers is an almost perverse act of the will, and to force the eyes to be absolutely blank, giving “no sign of love or farewell or recognition”, is rather fine melodramatic acting’ (de Voogd 2000, p. 48). Similarly, but taking a different tack, Katherine Mullin has argued for an understanding of ‘Eveline’ and its ending as ambiguous, in that Joyce manages to produce a work that is in keeping with the Irish Homestead’s nationalist initiative to slow down emigration, and yet subverts these ­discourses of immigration. Mullin claims that Joyce thus creates a story that ‘masquerades as simple antiemigration propagandist fiction’ but which in fact ‘interrogates the terms and function of the nationalist propaganda it supposedly embodies (Mullin 2000, p. 195). In Mullin’s reading, the ending of the novel is not about the paralysis of Dublin per se but, rather, shows that Eveline is ‘a heroine whose paralysis is imposed by her vulnerability to the persuasive fictions of others’ (Mullin 2000, pp. 195– 196). For Mullin, the pausing of the narrative is a way in which ‘Joyce endlessly defers the moment in which Eveline’s story must become conclusively identified with just one of these competing propagandas’ and Eveline’s regret will ‘take the form of the endless redraftings of that conclusion to her story which her paralysis suspends’ (Mullin 2000, p. 197). Crucially, therefore, Eveline is caught up within fictions, and the ‘ending’ to this story is far from a conclusive end; it is, in fact, is about the endless redraftings of endings. The ending in Joyce’s original, then, was highly ambiguous and left the reader in doubt as to Eveline’s motivations for her final actions, suspending the action and suggesting (even if not actually undertaking) endless redraftings. In Joyce’s story, the reader’s expectations are to an extent frustrated, since the narrative thrust prepared the reader for Eveline’s departure, which is then thwarted. If such is the disconcerting ending of Joyce’s original, in that the narrative arc prepares us for a particular ending, which is then taken away from us in these endless (imagined) redraftings, then Zerbarini’s version troubles this narrative arc even further. For Zerbarini’s new version of Eveline problematises even further the notion of the ending, since it refuses narrative closure in its enactment. There is no longer a clear narrative arc that culminates in a satisfying or otherwise conclusion. Indeed, the entry and exit points of Zerbarini’s narrative are not fixed,

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since, as noted above, these are generated at random each time we access the narrative. Thus, the narrative arc itself is disrupted, since there is no fixed sequence to the lexia that we access, and no definitive ending. In addition to this, the sound files that we encounter throughout the various screens of Eveline contribute to this sense of incompletion, and lack of reaching a teleological conclusion. As noted above, many of sound files comprise extracts of music by US composer Philip Glass, one of the most prominent of musicians associated with minimalism, a musical style based on phase and process. Salzman and Desi, talking about Glass’s Einstein on the Beach, note how Glass’s music is based on relatively few elements, and in which the ‘repetition of small modules is organized by additive processes (the slow addition or subtraction of notes to a basic pattern) or cyclical structures (simultaneous rhythmic patterns of different lengths that get out of phase and eventually back in synch)’ (Salzman and Desi 2010, p.  241). Glass’s music therefore works through repetitive structure, producing juxtapositions and variations based on fixed patterns. Marc Botha has argued that the early work of Philip Glass ‘most clearly illustrates the calculative logic of minimalist modularism’, and he highlights features such as incremental repetition, the use of additive and subtractive modules, and supplementation (Botha 2015, p.  762). Glass’s music, structured around additive and subtractive modules, around variation and juxtapositions, has parallels with Zerbarini’s use of algorithms to underpin her narrative, and her choice of the music of Glass is significant in this regard. Yet, more than this, Glass’s music is particularly resonant for its focus on process rather than on finished product. Crucial to minimalism, scholars have argued, is that it is concerned predominantly with process. Johnson, drawing on Mertens, argues that ‘the teleological nature of most Western music—in which goals are established, the music progresses toward these goals, and the listener travels on a journey among and between different musical areas—is absent from minimal music. Thus, pieces focusing primarily on the process alone or pieces that lack goals and motion toward those goals best exemplify the delineation of minimalism as an aesthetic’ (Johnson 1994, p. 745). Glass’s music, and the extracts we hear within Zerbarini’s work, thus resist teleological progression; indeed, as we listen to the extracts, any resolution (the production of final chords, a dramatic ending) is never provided. Thus, the sound files, with their disconcerting effect on the listener, also contribute to the sense of an unresolved ending, since the musical excerpts never reach a satisfying resolution. In a similar way, Zerbarini’s Eveline is concerned as much with

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process as with producing any finished, completed story, and her focus on process, too, functions to disrupt the teleological nature of the narrative arc. Glass’s music is thus particularly apt for Zerbarini’s project, in both its structural composition and its focus on process. Through her integration of extracts of repetitive structures of minimalist music, Zerbarini creates a soundscape that further contributes to the sense of a narrative that never reaches its conclusion. In this way, if in Joyce’s original short stories, endings are unexpected, and questions left unanswered, in Zerbarini’s narrative, this sense of uncertainty, and of searching for meaning, is re-enacted procedurally, as the reader has to undertake a journey through multiple sources to piece together the narrative. For Zerbarini, Eveline never returns to Dublin, but neither does she elope, since there is no final resolution. The Joycean notion of the unresolved ending is thus pushed to its limit, as Zerbarini’s short story, through its randomised presentation of its contents, does indeed have no ending, thwarting teleological structure and refusing narrative closure. In this way, through her use of multiple sources and algorithmic structure, Zerbarni ensures that her narrative is constantly remixed, and has no clear no start or end. Taking the Joycean techniques she identified in the short stories to their extreme, Zerbarini’s hypertext narrative refuses any satisfactory ending, and overtly flags up the predominance of its lack of teleological conclusion.

Towards a Digital Stream of Consciousness? If Zerbarini’s version thus actualises some of the traits of the Joycean original, a third trait—that of stream of consciousness—becomes particularly under scrutiny, and under pressure, in Zerbarini’s work. For Zerbarini’s Eveline is, I argue, on the one hand, an attempt at a stream of consciousness through the affordances of digital media, but yet it also develops and problematises some of its techniques. Stream of consciousness as a literary technique was widely associated with the modernist writers of the early twentieth century, of whom Joyce was a prominent figure. First employed in a literary sense in 1918 by the novelist May Sinclair in her review of Dorothy Richardson’s Pilgrimage series of novels, stream of consciousness attempted to represent the varied and often disjointed thoughts that pass through a character’s mind, with Virginia Woolf’s essay of 1919, ‘Modern Novels’, often cited as setting

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out initial thoughts on stream of consciousness as technique.8 In this essay, Woolf commented on the functionings of the mind, observing that ‘the mind, exposed to the ordinary course of life, receives a myriad impressions— trivial, fantastic, evanescent, or engraved with the sharpness of steel. From all sides they come, an incessant shower of innumerable atoms’. Woolf then rhetorically asked ‘Is it not perhaps the chief task of the novelist to convey this incessantly varying spirit with whatever stress or sudden deviation it may display, and as little admixture of the alien and external as possible?’ (Woolf 1988, p. 33). Although the proponents and techniques of stream of consciousness were varied, scholars have identified several key features and, in particular, have highlighted the way in which stream-of-consciousness writing attempted to represent the thoughts of the character in non-linear, associative ways. Thus, stream of consciousness means that ‘experience is viewed as flux, which entails the countless and complicated associative processes and juxtapositions of ideas and images’ (Ryf 1964, p. 95); it is an attempt to present ‘a more inclusive presentation of a character’s thought’ (Hogan 2013, p. 158); it consists of ‘the project of foregrounding, whether formally or thematically (or both), the nature and scope of the experiences falling within the domain of the mental, including sense impressions, emotions, memories, associative thought patterns, and so on’ (Herman 2011, p. 243); it entails the rendering of ‘human consciousness in all its randomness, disregarding conventional syntax and punctuation in order to convey the flow of myriad impressions and sensations, the spontaneous associations and fragmentary thoughts that constitute consciousness’ (Fernihough 2013, p. 87); it takes as its focus ‘the random flow of thought’ and its ‘illogical, ungrammatical, associative nature’ (Prince 1988, p.  92). Thus, stream-of-consciousness writing is often characterised by associative leaps in thought, a lack of punctuation, a bending of the laws of syntax, and the presentation of fragmented and non-linear narratives. Whilst Joyce himself did not choose to employ the term to describe his writing, scholars widely understand Joyce’s works to be prime examples of stream of consciousness, with his Ulysses being a particular case in point. Herman, for example, sees Joyce’s omission of punctuation as a way of 8  Woolf’s essay was first published in the Times Literary Supplement on 10 April 1919 with the title ‘Modern Novels’, and was later revised and republished with the title ‘Modern Fiction’.

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conveying ‘a raw, unfiltered presentation of the movements of Molly’s mind’ (Herman 2011, p. 248) in Ulysses, whilst Fernihough, contending that Ulysses has ‘mind-wandering’ at the heart of its agenda, argues and that technique thus ‘finds its apotheosis in Molly Bloom’s soliloquy in the final chapter of the novel, where the unbroken flow of words on the page embodies an undiscriminating and unstoppable consciousness; there is no editing out and no hierarchy of thought’ (Fernihough 2013, p. 88). Whilst Ulysses is widely seen as Joyce’s work that is most closely aligned with stream of consciousness, it is worth noting that scholars also identify incipient traits of stream of consciousness in the short stories contained within Dubliners. De Voogd highlights ‘Eveline’ as a particularly significant short story within the collection, noting that ‘the story is the first one in Dubliners to be written in the third person, and the first one to experiment with what has become known as stream of consciousness’ (de Voogd 2000, pp. 45–46). Thus, Zerbarini’s choice of ‘Eveline’—one of the first of Joyce’s experiments with stream of consciousness, which he was to bring to perfection in Ulysses—has particular significance. As I will argue below, Zerbarini’s hypertext narrative draws out the potentials that digital technologies have for depicting stream of consciousness, and I focus specifically on two areas: firstly, the potentials that multimedia has for depicting thought processes and memories that go well beyond the textual, where the mobilisation of images and sounds, as much as text, is employed in Zerbarini’s work to convey the experiences of Eveline; and secondly, the potentials that hyperlinking, algorithms, and database structure have for depicting non-linear thought processes. Thus I argue that some of the modernist techniques of stream of consciousness, such as unbroken flows, associative leaps, and disrupting the norms of syntax, can find their parallels in the affordances of digital technologies. But I caution, this is not to say that hyperlinked structure is per se stream of consciousness, because, as I will demonstrate below, Zerbarini goes to great lengths to remind us that the structures of the hypertext are constructed. Thus, as I argue below, Zerbarini both takes up and yet troubles stream of consciousness. Regarding the first of these, the potentials for a communication of the workings of the mind that goes beyond the verbal are made abundantly clear throughout Eveline. As noted in the screens analysed above, the multiple versions of the stories that we trace each time that we encounter Eveline are told not predominantly verbally—that is, through written or spoken texts—but through a combination of images, sounds, and, in some cases, text. For example, one of the interfaces to Eveline opens on an

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extreme close-up of a human face shown sideways, over which, occupying the centre of the screen, there is a repeated mosaic of a white sheet twisted into cylindrical shape. At the same time, a sound bridge of piano music runs over, taken from works by Philip Glass. In this screen, as in many others that are generated by her algorithmic remixing of her sources, Zerbarini makes use of the affordances of digital technologies to create a narrative that constantly intertwines the visual, the sonic, and the textual. Thus, in this interface, as in many others that are generated in Eveline, we are given access to Eveline and her experiences through non-verbal as much as verbal means. In particular, the predominance of extreme close-up shots of the human face—which is rendered in such detail, and so close up, as to be obscured—places us at close proximity to the body. Such a photographic image works to generate a haptic visuality, a term coined by Laura Marks to refer to a type of ‘visuality that functions like the sense of touch’ and which engages the viewer in a tactile way, inviting the viewer ‘to respond to the image in an intimate, embodied way’ (Marks 2000, p. 2). Here, in Zerbarini’s work, we are brought up close to the image and given this sense of touch through the proximity to the body, and the texture of the skin, which is visible at this resolution. This face is then disrupted by the image running across the central third of the screen, depicting an object shrouded in a sheet, which is indistinct, but looks like it could be a torso of sculpture. In this screen, as in many others, Eveline’s story is told not through verbal means, but through the conjunction of images (both moving and still), and sound. In this way, in Zerbarini’s version, the workings of the mind are as much visual and sonic as verbal, as she weaves a rich variety of visual images and sounds into her narrative. Regarding the second of these traits, Zerbarini’s use of hyperlinking, algorithms, and database structure could also be read as an attempt to render a digital version of stream of consciousness. That is, her constant mixing of content means that there is no pre-set sequence of the fragments that we encounter. The randomised association of the textual, visual, and sonic fragments that are presented to us thus mimics, to an extent, the representation of ‘human consciousness in all its randomness, disregarding conventional syntax and punctuation in order to convey the flow of myriad impressions and sensations, the spontaneous associations and fragmentary thoughts that constitute consciousness’ (Fernihough 2013, p. 87), or the ‘the random flow of thought’ and its ‘illogical, ungrammatical, associative nature’, which have been identified as the key features of stream of consciousness, as noted above.

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Moreover, where we do find instances of text, these are overtly truncated, and displayed in fragmentary fashion. For instance, in several screens that are generated, we encounter excerpts from Joyce’s short stories, but these have been cut up and are no longer presented as linear narratives. We are given, for example, lexia from ‘A Painful Case’ in several of the screens, but these are either presented in fragments and out of context, or as in the following example, deliberately blurred (see Fig. 3.3): In this case, the block of text which is superimposed over the extreme close-up of the human face is rendered deliberately out of focus. We see only a fragment of the text, and the resolution of the image deliberately blurs the outline of the letters on the page. Running over this screen on a continuous loop is a sound file, which consists of a dull clanging, with a periodic tinny ringing. The textual is thus, quite literally disrupted by Zerbarini, as the text is out of focus, and the teleological narrative structure is invaded by, and competing with, sounds and images. It is from these multiple, algorithmically generated combinations of text fragments, sound fragments, and image fragments from which we are expected to piece together the narrative of Eveline. There are striking similarities with Joyce’s stream-of-consciousness techniques here, in that Zerbarini is encouraging us to make sense of, and make a narrative from, these fragments which are not bound by a structured narrative arc, but by associative leaps and non-verbal renderings of Eveline’s mind.

Fig. 3.3  Marina Zerbarini, Eveline, Fragments of a Reply (2004), blurred textual fragments

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In this way, Zerbarini’s narrative is deliberately put together in such a way as to mimic the meanderings of the mind, the associative leaps of memory, and so she potentially creates a stream of consciousness for the digital age. Yet, I argue, this easy association of digital technologies with stream of consciousness is troubled by the sustained metatextual commentary that Zerbarini undertakes throughout Eveline. For Eveline undertakes a detailed commentary on its own process of construction through the frequent images, sounds, and textual fragments that appear throughout the work, and that make reference to signals, codes, and pathways. In all of the cases, these images of signals, codes and pathways are accompanied by interactive and multimedia features, including deliberately erratic animations, and sound files, often of metallic sounds or ringing. Zerbarini’s overt foregrounding of signals, pathways, and routes throughout whichever of the intricate routes we take through Eveline is of course a metapoetic commentary on the branching structure of hypertext itself—the very structure that underpins her work. In this way, these multiple images of signals, train tracks, and routes relate not just to the plot of the short story (that is, Eveline’s thwarted journey), but also recall the routes within a virtual system based on hyperlinking and branching, thus representing the possible tracks or routes within this very hypertext narrative itself. In this way, the abundance of signals, tracks, and lines functions as a metacommentary, and here we might note similarities with Labbé’s techniques as discussed in Chap. 2, in which his use of portals, doors, and entranceways functions as a metatextual commentary on the structures of the internet and hypertext narrative. Yet I argue that in this practice, Zerbarini does not promote a notion of the coming together of stream of consciousness and digital technologies in a seamless way. Rather, as I argue below, Zerbarini’s mobilisation of the metaphor of tracks and lines through her repeated visuals functions to problematise the analogies between hypertext and stream of consciousness. This is evident in the many instances that are generated that display modes of transport, tracks, and signals. One such example is a screen which contains no text, but solely images and sound, displaying the same repeated image of a shape enclosed in a white cloth, which we encounter elsewhere in this work, below which is a line-drawn image of a train. This image is a still image which has subsequently been animated in a deliberately jerky way: the wheels turn, and smoke blows from the train’s chimney, but the animation is clearly not intended to be realistic. This deliberately

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clunky animation flags up the artificiality of the train, and alerts us to the constructedness of the image. Moreover, the train is of course a dated steam train, and so is again a reference to a prior era of transport. The sound file running over this image further contributes to this highlighting of artificiality and construction since is metallic, and not harmonious; it thus implies something mechanistic, and, taken in conjunction with the deliberately jerky animation of the image, indicates that an artificial, mechanical construction is at play here. In this way, the conjunction of components in this screen, comprising still images of signals, animated images of trains, and sound files of harsh, metallic noises, combine to create a visual soundscape of mechanistic signals and pathways. A myriad of other possible configurations throughout Eveline also contain similar images and, although the configuration of these subsequent screens will not be the same, each will share semantically the same metaphor of mapping and signals. For instance, the following screen is one possible combination we could encounter (see Fig. 3.4): Divided horizontally into three sections, the screen displays in the middle section the repeated image that we see elsewhere in this work, whilst the top and bottom images are sketches which demonstrate routes, depicting the signal itself, and then the tracks that these signals affect, with the points marked out. Again, as with many other images in this work, the

Fig. 3.4  Marina Zerbarini, Eveline, Fragments of a Reply (2004), tracks and signals

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image of the signal itself was originally a still image, but it has been animated by Zerbarini, such that the bar of the signal opens and closes in a deliberately jerky way. Running across the screen is a metallic sound, with what appears to be a bell ring over it; semantically, this is the metallic sound of the train wheels moving over the tracks, and the sound of the train signal. Again, as with the other screens within this work that depict signals, this screen is metatextual, and functions as a commentary on the branching structure of hypertext itself. Specifically, the focus here on signals and points; that is, on those elements of the railway network that enable trains to move from one track to another. It is worth noting, again, that Zerbarini has here chosen not only a pre-digital image (a drawing of the signals and points, rather than a contemporary photograph of them, for instance), but also that the points depicted are themselves mechanical, not digital. The points are the mechanical systems that move the switches and allow the train to move from one track to another, and thus take different paths at the point at which a line branches. This image thus foregrounds signals, routes, and pathways, and focuses in particular on the moment of branching, which we can read, I argue, as the branching structure of hypertext. First posited by Ted Nelson in 1965 before the invention of the internet proper, the notion of ‘branching’ as the fundamental structure of hypertext stretches back to the origins of the term itself. Nelson’s now classic definition of hypertext as ‘non-sequential writing—text that branches and allows choices to the reader […] a series of text chunks connected by links, which offer a reader different pathways’ (Nelson, cited in Landow 2006, pp. 2–3) has been hugely influential in hypertext theory, and the notion of branching is seen to underpin the structure of the internet and hyperlinked material. In this screen, thus, as in many others throughout this work, Zerbarini mobilises images of tracks, signals, trains, and branches to mimic the branching structure of hypertext which underpins her work. In so doing, she deliberately foregrounds the constructedness of these tracks and branches, and as a result, I argue, she problematises the possible affinities of digital technologies with stream of consciousness. That is, Zerbarini’s constant, repeated warnings that we are moving down pre-determined, structured, constructed pathways reminds us that, far from taking leaps that are free from constraints, we are, in fact, following but one in a series of pathways that has already been pre-determined. In so doing, I argue that Zerbarini problematises stream of consciousness because, pace

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Pressman, these are constructed tracks, that is, deliberately man-made, artificial lines. Pressman, in a recent volume tracing the histories of contemporary digital poetics back to modernist practices, argues for a point of connection between ‘literary experimentation and database engineering: the ambition to present and represent cognition with and through media’ (Pressman 2014, p. 102). Taking as examples tweets, as well as Judd Morrissey and Lori Talley’s web-based novella, The Jew’s Daughter (2000), Pressman argues that tweets are ‘presented as an immediate transcription of cognition in real time’, and she extrapolates from this to argue that ‘a result, this digital application can be understood as updating an earlier literary practice that represented human cognition in text—stream of consciousness. Twitter distributes this stream of text thoughts to readers via the web’s hypertextual network’ going on to then contend that ‘the web has itself been understood as a structural implementation of associative cognition, a representation of the way the human mind works’ (Pressman 2014, p. 105). Whilst Pressman’s analogies are thought-provoking, I disagree with her contention that the internet represents the way the human mind works, and that Tweets per se are a form of stream of consciousness. Digital technologies such as Tweets and the structure of the internet are no less constructed for their being digital, and there is nothing inherently representative of human consciousness in either of these technologies. Indeed, I argue that this fact is made abundantly clear in Zerbarini’s work for, whilst there are analogies to be drawn between the affordances of digital technologies and the possibility of representing a stream of consciousness, ultimately, these analogies are thwarted. For, Zerbarini foregrounds multiple images of constructed tracks, lines, and signals as a metaphor for the linking and branches of hypertext, but these are emphatically not the associative leaps of the mind free from restraints. Far from representing ‘experience is viewed as flux’, ‘spontaneous associations’ (Fernihough 2013, p. 87), or ‘the random flow of thought’ (Prince 1988, p. 92) that are seen to characterise stream of consciousness, as noted by scholars mentioned above, Zerbarini highlights that these are constructed paths along which trains can flow. By overtly flagging up the constructedness of these pathways, Zerbarini points up the restrictions and constraints, rather than the untrammelled, associative leaps.9 9  I do not, by this, mean to say that the modernist writers in a prior era of experimentation were themselves able to present the untrammelled, associative leaps of the unconscious mind; they, too, were constrained by pre-arranged structures, these being the structures of written

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Fig. 3.5  Marina Zerbarini, Eveline, Fragments of a Reply (2004), map and compass

Whereas these examples analysed so far engage with the notion of branching structures and the internet with no reference to any particular place, there are several other screens within Eveline, Fragments of a Reply which do have geographical specificity. This is the case with the following screen, which continues with the metaphor of journeys and routes that is established in many of the other screens, but which locates this within a particular context of place-based issues and geopolitics (see Fig. 3.5): In this screen, as in many others, we witness Zerbarini’s self-conscious highlighting of pathways and routes, yet here with specific reference to geographical place. The doubled image in the top third of the screen displays a hand-drawn map on yellowing paper, with the words ‘mondo novo’ written across the bottom. Here, the sample of pre-digital cartography chosen by Zerbarini is arguably one of the most iconic and foundational visualisations of the Americas: the image is of the famous map known either as the Zorzi map or the Bartholemew Columbus map, language as a system. There is ‘no direct access to the unconscious’, as Naomi Segal reminds us with reference to the techniques of stream of consciousness (Segal 1990, p. 94), and the modernist writers were attempting to convey the untrammelled thoughts of the mind, all the while being bound, of necessity, by the constraints of written language. Rather, I am suggesting that Zerbarini is indicating that similar constraints may be at play with regard to digital systems, which themselves are just as structured and manufactured.

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purportedly based on Columbian representations of the New World in 1506.10 I argue that the significance of Zerbarini’s use of this map is three-fold: firstly, it functions as an example of legacy practices; secondly, it represents glitches; and thirdly, it raises issues of (neo)colonial mapping. Regarding the first of these—legacy media—Zerbarini makes deliberate use of and reference to prior, pre-digital mapping practices. That the map is hand-­ sketched, on yellowing paper, and clearly out of scale indicates for us immediately that it is a form of legacy media, in this case of navigation. Where the image of the train as discussed above was of a prior (steam-­ based) form of transportation, here, the paper map represents a legacy form of navigation, in that it sets out pre-digital mappings of routes. In a similar fashion to Labbé’s use of legacy media formats discussed in the previous chapter, Zerbarini traces for us the pre-digital heritage of contemporary (high-tech, digital) mapping practices, and the practices of navigating the web. Regarding the second of these issues, it is important to note that Zerbarini has chosen a foundational map founded on a series of unfounded premises. The Bartholomew Columbus/Zorzi map depicted the Americas as a large landmass connected to Asia, and is, we know today, mostly inaccurate and founded on misapprehensions—the Americas are not a part of Asia, and the coastline does not follow the shape which appears on the map. This is a map which is, as well as being immediately recognisable, is immediately recognisable as erroneous; Zerbarini’s chosen map is thus about errors and glitches. This is reinforced, I argue, by Zerbarini’s use of post-digital sound and glitches in this screen, for the sound file, rather than any ambient sounds related to the thematic content of the images (such as, for instance, the sound of waves which might recall the sea, and 10  This sketch map, along with others like it, appears in the Florentine codex, compiled by Alessandro Zorzi. At the end of the nineteenth century, Wieser argued that the map was sketched by Zorzi based on a copy of a letter that Christopher Columbus sent to Spain in 1506 with his brother, Bartholomew, and that it reflects Christopher Columbus’s view of the Americas (Wieser, cited in Bigelow 1935, p. 643). However, subsequently this was called into question, with Biglow arguing that the conceptions in the sketches were not based on exclusively Columbian sources, and that they in fact represent ‘the geographical notions of Alessandro Zorzi about twenty years later, some of them derived from the Columbus brothers’ (Bigelow 1935, p. 656). Whatever the exact relation between this map and Columbus’s letter, what is certain is that the map represents an early cartographic view of the New World, showing the Americas as linked to Asia, and that it maps out the Americas according to the mindset of the European conquerors.

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so link to the compass), consists of an electronic swishing noise, set on a loop. Here, as in elsewhere throughout Eveline, Zerbarini makes use of post-digital sound, since this sound, as with several others like them, are artificially created, being created by the detritus or remnants of the digital.11 Kim Cascone has defined post-digital sound as being sounds such as ‘computer fans whirring, laser printers churning out documents, the sonification of user-interfaces, and the muffled noise of hard drives’ and argues that the significance of post-digital sound lies in the fact that ‘it is from the “failure” of digital technology that this new work has emerged: glitches, bugs, application errors, system crashes, clipping, aliasing, distortion, quantitization noise and even the noise floor of computer sound cards’ (Cascone 2000, p.  13). These by-products or ‘detritus’ of the digital are incorporated into Zerbarini’s work, and accompany a map which evidences its own glitches and errors. Thirdly, it is particularly significant that Zerbarini has chosen this iconic, foundational map, since the Bartholomew Columbus/Zorzi map is immediately recognisable as one of the early sketches that attempted to map out the Americas. It is, thus, a foundational image of the Americas, and is intricately linked with the colonial project of the mapping and conquest of the Americas. The image thus raises significant questions about geopolitics, since it is representative of the colonial practice of mapping out the Americas according to European assumptions. As several scholars have noted, the practice of cartography is never the neutral or objective recording of features on a grid, but is always representative of the power of those who constructed the map.12 Writing about practices of cartography in the Americas, Walter Mignolo has argued that the process of mapping was not a neutral process of the recording of empirical data on the page, but was, in fact, an integral part of the logic of coloniality. Noting that prior to 1492, the Americas ‘were not on anybody’s map’, Mignolo goes on to say that the Americas were subsequently ‘forged in the process of European colonial history and the consolidation and expansion of the Western world view and institutions’ (Mignolo 2005, p. 2). 11  Several of the other sound files in Eveline consist of electronic or metallic sounds, such as crashes that carry on resonating, or electronic beeps. 12  See, for instance, Harley’s early work in the 1980s, which argued for the need to understand cartography as historically continent, and argued that, ‘in the map itself, social structures are often disguised beneath an abstract, instrumental space, or incarcerated in the coordinates (Harley 1989, p.  5), or Crampton, who reminds us that ‘maps are part of a general discourse of power’ (Crampton 2001, p. 236).

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Moreover, regarding the Zorzi map specifically, Michael Palencia-Roth, writing about how Columbus and his men imported their preconceived notions and cultural perceptions of barbarians and monsters to the New World, singles out the Zorzi map, and New World cartography more broadly, as part of this dynamic: At first, reports of cannibals continued to be influenced by the hermeneutical tradition concerning monsters and other fabulous beings. Such reports particularly affected, as will be seen, the history of New World cartography, even from the beginning. […] on the first map we possess of the New World, known as the Zorzi sketch map (dated 1500), which was drawn according to Columbus’s instructions, two of the islands are identified as belonging to cannibals. (Palencia-Roth 1993, p. 35)

Palencia-Roth then argues how this map, and others like it, took on an ‘almost ontological validity’, as the mappings ‘became fact’, given that they were accepted as truth. In this way, the map that Zerbarini has chosen is a map which is imbued with colonial assumptions and impositions, about which more is discussed below. If such is the significance of the top third of this screen, the bottom third, displaying compasses, continues this extended metaphor of navigation. The repeated image of the compass—another still image which has been animated, with the compass point fluctuating—is one the key instruments used in early navigation, and is thus linked symbolically to the map image at the top third of the screen, whilst also opening up wider issues regarding digital technologies and the internet. Semantically, the compass recalls the term navegar in Spanish, which is the metaphor employed to describe trawling through information on the internet, where navegar is the equivalent of ‘to surf’ the web in English. As has been noted, the value-laden term navegar, used to refer to navigating content on the internet, has neo-colonial implications; Pitman has recently argued that, given that the term navegar in its original meaning refers to navigating across the seas, it will ‘always echo with the arrival of the first conquistadors on the shores of what is today Latin America’ (Pitman 2017, n.p.). The term navegar is thus representative of contemporary practices of navigating the internet, but is imbued with a continuing colonialist mindset. Functioning in a similar way to the myth of the ‘electronic frontier’ with all its connotations of territorial and economic expansionism, and of

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individualism,13 the term navegar thus inevitably evokes this founding moment, and the appropriation of the Americas for Europeans. Hence, Zerbarini’s image dialogues with the neo-colonialist metaphors which pervade the discourse about the internet. This image, in conjunction with the map above it, encourages us to draw parallels between navigation, neo-colonialist appropriation, and the naming of the Americas, and the continuation of these practices in the digital era. From the neo-colonial attitudes that are embedded within the electronic frontier formulation (see Sardar 1995) to the ways in which domain name structures of the internet map out the world in a way that reproduces US hegemony (see Steinberg and McDowell 2003, p. 55), a number of scholars have alerted us to the neo-colonialist impulses in the mapping out of the internet. In summary, this particular screen raises important issue of mapping, navigation, routes, and pathways, and in so doing, speaks to dominant metaphors of the web, and how we interact with it. At the same time, the screen also speaks to geopolitics, and the construction of identity of the Americas, through its reuse of iconic map images of the continent. This screen, as with others like it, thus encourages us to contemplate routes and pathways, pathways which are very much constructed ones—including maps constructed on the basis of prior assumptions—and so troubles notions of free-flowing of stream of consciousness.

Ontological Troubling: Realms of Fiction In addition to these components of Zerbarini’s narrative which are constantly remixed and re-structured, a further important element of Eveline is the various interactive elements that require input from the user in different guises. These are triggered at several points from different screens, and the user is given no indication of when they will appear. These interactive sections are structured as a dialogue between the system and us, the user, and we are addressed in the second-person singular (vos) familiar form.14 The sections involve dialogue boxes that we complete, in 13  See Helen McLure for a detailed analysis of the metaphor of the ‘electronic frontier’ to talk about the internet, which, she argues, is ‘particularly rich with images that evoke both the Old and the New West, and also suggests a logical continuity, another phase in an ongoing American experience of technology linked with territorial and/or economic expansion’ (McLure 2000, p. 458). 14  ‘Vos’ is the second-person singular form of address in Argentinean Spanish, denoting an informal relationship between the speaker and addressee.

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response to questions posed to us by the system. One such example is a dialogue which asks our name, and then prompts us to respond with our thoughts on arrivals and departure—linked thematically to Eveline’s unfulfilled departure in the storyline, and metatextually to the abundance of signals and journeys noted above. The final screen ends on the words, ‘I didn’t allow you to give your opinion, did I? I prefer to leave and find you again in another node in the internet. Remember that I’m an illusion’.15 Here, Zerbarini’s tactic engages the reader in a dialogue, but then brings the reader up sharp with the fact that this is a simulation. Another of these interactive dialogues is quite lengthy, with the system posing a series of personal questions to us, asking about our emotions and our secrets in a series of different prompts, with questions including what we do when we are nervous, or what we would say if nobody could hear us, as well as presenting quotations from famous poets, such as Pizarnik or Neruda, at random, and prompting us to respond to them. This interactive section ends with a screen containing the text, ‘this exquisite corpse belongs to you’ with the various responses we have given remixed across the screen.16 Here, the user input, which is entered through the dialogue boxes, now becomes part of the work, as we see our words remixed for us on screen. Significantly, this technique is reframed for us in relation to another literary precedent, that of the cadavre exquis which is, of course, one of the famous pre-digital forms of providing aleatory combinations of textual fragments.17 If this interactive section asked us to input text, another that we encounter invites us to upload images, with instructions on this screen reading, ‘these images belong to Eveline’s friends. To become one of her friends, and so that your images form part of this story, you just have to click here and upload it’.18 This interactive feature, which allows us to upload our own images is a particularly significant element of Zerbarini’s narrative. Firstly, through this feature, user content becomes part of the work, because the images that the user uploads are subsequently integrated into 15  In the original Spanish, this reads: ‘No te dí posibilidad de opinar, no? Es que prefiero irme y encontrarte en algún otro nodo de la red. Recordá que soy una ilusión’. 16  In the original Spanish, this reads: ‘este cadaver exquisito te pertenece’: 17  See Chap. 4 for a more detailed analysis of the surrealist technique of the cadavre exquis as it is employed in Jaime Alejandro Rodríguez’s Golpe de gracia. 18  The original Spanish reads: ‘estas imágenes pertenecen a las/los amigos de Eveline. Para hacerte amiga y que tus imágenes formen parte de esta historia, sólo tenés que hacer CLICK ACÁ y subirla’.

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Eveline, and become visible for future users. In this way, this feature makes the work expandable, and open to change—which is one of the oft-­cited affordances of digital technologies. Secondly, what is also significant is that, in so doing, we ‘become a friend of Eveline’ (my emphasis). Our uploading of our images is, crucially, a moment in which the boundaries between narrative worlds or universes is transgressed, functioning as a moment of narrative metalepsis, involving the breaching of narrative levels. These narrative levels or diegetic realms are conventionally conceived of as self-contained and inviolable, since in the words of Malina, they are ‘conceived as hierarchically ordered’ (Malina 2002, p. 4)—that is, the levels are distinct and cannot be intermingled. Marie-Laure Ryan, in her extensive study of electronic narrative forms, has argued that interactive formats such as computer games offer a particularly favourable environment for metalepsis because ‘as programs that produce fictional worlds, they can play with the levels of world and code; as worlds that invite the player to play the role of a character, they can exploit the contrast between the player’s real and fictional identities; and as fictional worlds, they can resort to many of the metaleptic tricks of standard literary fiction’ (Ryan 2006, p.  24). Interactive formats, for Ryan, thus produce metalepsis because the reader-player is invited to become a character through the assumption of an avatar in order to play. More recently Bell, building on the work of Ryan, has argued that in ergodic fiction, this particular form of metalepsis should be termed ‘interactional metalepsis’, because in the very act of interaction, ‘the reader, or rather a representation of her/him, crosses the ontological boundary between actual world and storyworld’ (Bell 2016, p. 297). For Bell, the fact that the reader/player takes on an avatar in the storyworld represents a moment of interactional metalepsis. Building on Ryan and Bell, I argue that Zerbarini’s technique here in this section, when she deliberately enables a moment of metalepsis, is in fact more than just an interactional metalepsis that ergodic fiction per se enables. The metalepsis in Eveline comes not merely from the crossing of the boundaries of the storyworld that is enabled through the temporary assumption of the identity of a character (avatar) in ergodic fiction. Rather, metalepsis in Zerbarini’s narrative stems from the fact that photographs belonging to us; as the digital traces of our selves, they are indexical, and their referent is the trace of our bodies as they were registered by the

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photons of the digital camera.19 These images are thus indexical, and the fact that they then become intertwined with the fiction is particularly significant, as we are invited to become part of, and friends with, a character in the fiction. Thus, this is an example of what Ryan has noted in some metaleptic texts, in that they make us play with the idea that we are fictional (Ryan 2006, p. 230). In this complex moment, then, Zerbarini invites us to actively cross the ontological borders of the literary text that are normally unassailable. Making use of the potentials of digital technologies to enable user input, Zerbarini transgresses the boundary between different worlds, inviting us to become a character, alongside Eveline, in this story. As I have demonstrated, in this complex and challenging work, Zerbarini develops but also problematises a set of modernist techniques for the digital age. Building on the narrative gaps, inconclusive endings, and stream of consciousness for which Joyce’s work is well known, Zerbarini updates these techniques, revealing, on the one hand, commonalities between modernist literary practices and the affordances of digital technologies. On the other hand, her work also extends and problematises these modernist techniques, a problematisation which is evident, as has been shown, in her foregrounding of constructed and artificial pathways, tracks, and routes, which undercuts any notion of free-­ 19  I am here building on theorisations about the photographic referent and indexicality. Barthes’s notion of the photographic referent was developed in his Camera Lucida (1981), and refers to the fact that unlike symbolic works of art (such as paintings, for instance), the photograph is created by the actual presence of the physical object, whose light rays touch the film negative to generate chemical changes. For Barthes, the photograph is ‘literally an emanation of the referent’ since it is made ‘from a real body, which was there’ and from which proceed radiations touch the film (Barthes 1981, p. 80). Subsequently, scholars have debated whether the move to digital photography occasions a loss of indexicality, with some lamenting the photograph’s immateriality when it becomes digital, whilst others arguing that this is not so clear-cut. Bolter and Grusin have argued that what appears at first to be a ‘simple dichotomy’ in which ‘digital photography is hypermediated, while analog photography is transparent’ (Bolter and Grusin 2000, p. 111) is in fact more complicated, since analogue photographs can be reworked and combined, asking rhetorically ‘how could exposing photographic film to light, developing the negative in a chemical bath, and transferring the result to paper ever constitute an unaltered image?’ (Bolter and Grusin 2000, p. 109). In a similar vein, although taking a different tactic, Seppänen has argued that in both cases—that is, chemical-based and digital photographs—indexicality is still present, because photons create traces, and that, thus, ‘the trace still exists after the digitalization of the analogous signal because the original electronic values of each semiconductor (“pixel”) are possible to retrieve from the digital file’ (Seppänen 2017, p. 116).

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flowing associative leaps of the mind. Her work also, through these multiple images of tracks, routes, and maps, makes metacritical commentary on the structure and algorithms underpinning ergodic literature. At the same time, her association of these routes and systems with specific cases of colonial mapping practices encourages us to consider and critique the geopolitics of the mapping of ‘cyberspace’. Finally, through the interactive features she has enabled in Eveline, Zerbarini enables user input, troubling diegetic realms in moments of narrative and interactional metalepsis.

Works Cited Balakier, James. 2010. “Inevitable Omissions”: The Art of the “Unsaid” in James Joyce’s Dubliners. International Journal of the Humanities 8 (4): 237–246. Barthes, Roland. 1981. Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography. New  York: Hill & Wang. Bell, Alice. 2016. Interactional Metalepsis and Unnatural Narratology. Narrative 24 (3): 294–310. Bigelow, John. 1935. The So-Called Bartholomew Columbus Map of 1506. The Geographical Review 25 (4): 643–656. Bolter, Jay David, and Richard Grusin. 2000. Remediation: Understanding New Media. MIT Press. Botha, Marc. 2015. Why Minimalism Matters: Radical Quantity and the Representation of Immanence. Textual Practice 29 (4): 745–772. Cascone, Kim. 2000. The Aesthetics of Failure: “Post-Digital” Tendencies in Contemporary Computer Music. Computer Music Journal 24 (4): 12–18. Crampton, Jeremy W. 2001. Maps as Social Constructions: Power, Communication and Visualization. Progress in Human Geography 25 (2): 235–252. Culler, Jonathan. 1981. The Pursuit of Signs: Semiotics, Literature, Deconstruction. London: Routledge. de Voogd, Peter. 2000. Imaging Eveline, Visualised Focalisations in James Joyce’s Dubliners. European Journal of English Studies 4 (1): 39–48. Fernihough, Anne. 2013. Freewomen and Supermen: Edwardian Radicals and Literary Modernism. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Harley, J.B. 1989. Deconstructing the Map. Cartographica 26 (2): 1–20. Herman, David. 2011. 1880–1945: Re-minding Modernism. In The Emergence of Mind: Representations of Consciousness in Narrative Discourse in English, ed. David Herman, 243–272. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press. Hogan, Patrick Colm. 2013. Parallel Processing and the Human Mind: Re-understanding Consciousness with James Joyce’s Ulysses. Journal of Literary Semantics 42 (2): 149–164. Johnson, Timothy A. 1994. Minimalism: Aesthetic, Style, or Technique? The Musical Quarterly 78 (4): 742–773.

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Landow, George P. 2006. Hypertext 3.0: Critical Theory and New Media in an Era of Globalization. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. LeBlanc, Jim. 2017. A “Sensation of Freedom” and the Rejection of Possibility in Dubliners. In Rethinking Joyce’s “Dubliners”, ed. Claire A. Culleton and Ellen Scheible, 51–68. Cham, Switzerland: Palgrave Macmillan. Malina, Debra. 2002. Breaking the Frame: Metalepsis and the Construction of the Subject. The Ohio State University Press. Marks, Laura. 2000. The Skin of the Film: Intercultural Cinema, Embodiment, and the Senses. Durham: Duke University Press. McLure, Helen. 2000. The Wild, Wild Web: The Mythic American West and the Electronic Frontier. Western Historical Quarterly 31 (4): 457–476. Mignolo, Walter D. 2005. The Idea of Latin America. Oxford: Blackwell. Mullin, Katherine. 2000. Don’t Cry for Me, Argentina: “Eveline” and the Seductions of Emigration Propaganda. In Semicolonial Joyce, ed. Derek Attridge and Marjorie Howes, 172–200. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. O’Dea, Dathalinn. 2017. James Joyce the Regionalist: the Irish Homestead, Dubliners, and Modernism’s Regional Affect. Modern Fiction Studies 63 (3): 475–501. Palencia-Roth, Michael. 1993. The Cannibal Law of 1503. In Early Images of the Americas: Transfer and Invention, ed. Jerry M.  Williams, 21–63. Tucson: University of Arizona Press. Pitman, Thea. 2017. Modern Languages Research and Digital Cultures: Indigenising the Internet. Language Acts and Worldmaking blog. https://languageacts.org/blog/modern-languages-research-and-digital-culturesindigenising-internet/. Pressman, Jessica. 2014. Digital Modernism: Making it New in New Media. Oxford: OUP. Prince, Gerald. 1988. A Dictionary of Narratology. Aldershot: Scholar Press. Ryan, Marie-Laure. 2006. Avatars of Story. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Ryf, Robert S. 1964. A New Approach to Joyce: the “Portrait of the Artist” as a Guidebook. Berkeley: University of California Press. Salzman, Eric, and Thomas Desi. 2010. The New Music Theater: Seeing the Voice, Hearing the Body. Oxford: OUP. Sardar, Ziauddin. 1995. alt.civilizations.faq: Cyberspace as the Darker Side of the West. Futures 27 (7): 777–794. Segal, Naomi. 1990. Style indirect libre and Stream-of-Consciousness: Flaubert, Joyce, Schnitzler, Woolf. In Modernism and the European Unconscious, ed. Peter J. Collier, 94–114. Cambridge: Polity Press. Seppänen, Janne. 2017. Unruly Representation: Materiality, Indexicality and the Agency of the Photographic Trace. Photographies 10 (1): 113–128.

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Steinberg, Philip, and Stephen D. McDowell. 2003. Mutiny on the Bandwidth: The Semiotics of Statehood in the Internet Domain Name Registries of Pictairn Island and Niue. New Media & Society 5 (1): 47–67. Walsh, Richard. 2001. Fabula and Fictionality in Narrative Theory. Style 35 (4): 592–606. Woolf, Virginia. 1988. Modern Novels. In The Essays of Virginia Woolf, ed. Andrew McNeillie, vol. III, 30–37. London: Hogarth. Wright, David. 2003. Dots Mark the Spot: Textual Gaps in Dubliners. James Joyce Quarterly 41 (1–2): 151–159. Zerbarini, Marina. 2004. Eveline, fragmentos de una respuesta. Accessed April 26, 2018. http://www.marina-zerbarini.com.ar/evy/index.html. ———. 2005. Gemelos. Accessed March 20, 2018. http://www.marina-zerbarini. com.ar/gemelos/principal/index.html. ———. 2009. La borra. Accessed March 20, 2018. http://www.flickr.com/photos/hoy_no_caigas_en_la_trampa/sets/72157616445421266/.

CHAPTER 4

Reanimating the Whodunnit: Jaime Alejandro Rodríguez’s Coup de Grace (2006) (Colombia)

This chapter analyses the work of Colombia’s foremost electronic literary author and scholar, Jaime Alejandro Rodríguez, and offers a detailed analysis of his Coup de Grace, reading this both in terms of his mobilisation of literary types and for his critique of structural violence. The chapter demonstrates how Rodríguez brings together two main literary precedents within this work—the surrealist tradition of literary experimentation and the long-standing genre of the crime fiction novel—in order to raise metatextual questions about the narrative thrust of electronic literature, and to encourage us to consider the structural violence that is often occluded by the detective fiction format. The chapter firstly analyses how a surrealist heritage is constantly evoked throughout Golpe de gracia, with its frequent allusions to the cadavre exquis signalling a long tradition of experimental, ludic practice that informs this work in terms of its structure and procedure, whilst the whodunnit genre is invoked in terms of its plot and characterisation. I contend that it is precisely through the productive bringing together of these two intertexts that Rodríguez engages in his most innovative experimentations, encouraging us to rethink these literary precedents and contemplate structural violence. Making use of the potentialities that digital formats offer to revisit and revitalise these prior literary paradigms, Rodríguez engages in a self-conscious commentary on the whodunnit format that he mobilises. Particularly notable, as I demonstrate, is the way in which digital technologies enable the blurring of boundaries between narrative © The Author(s) 2019 C. Taylor, Electronic Literature in Latin America, New Directions in Latino American Cultures, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-30988-6_4

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l­evels, as Rodríguez engages in narrative metalepsis and questions some of the standard features (such as stability of character or cause-effect relationship) that are so central to the whodunnit genre he mobilises. The chapter also analyses how Rodríguez revitalises the popular fiction genre of the whodunnit in order to effect a socio-political commentary and, in so doing, he places the genre under stress. In Rodríguez’s version, the focus of the crime narrative is not only on the criminal individual as in the traditional detective novel, but on the corruption of the system. This commentary on systemic violence is, I argue, also enacted through the ludology itself, since Rodríguez deliberately creates an unstable avatar, and this instability of the avatar becomes, I contend, our imbrication in the scenarios we encounter. We are not permitted to see ourselves as exterior to the narrative-game format, but instead, we find ourselves implicated, and, in this way, Rodríguez’s narrative undertakes a combination of metacritical commentary and socio-political commentary, making this one of his most powerful works. Rodríguez is one of the pioneers of electronic literature in a Latin American context, and his work ranges from the print to the digital, and the theoretical to the fictional. His print texts include the collections of short stories Album of Stories (1995) and Fiction and Forgetting (2007), and the novels Due Process (2000) and Amaury’s Hell (2006), this latter a print counterpart to Coup de Grace.1 In addition to his print texts, Rodríguez has also been one of the leading figures in hypertext literature in Colombia, both through his developments of platforms such as Narratopedia for creating and sharing digital narratives, and through his authorship of electronic literature himself. His first hypertext novel Infinite Gabriella started out as a print text (1995), was subsequently adapted by Rodríguez into a hypertext novel (1998), and finally became a hypermedia narrative in 2005.2 The resulting work is a complex hypertext narrative, involving a combination of text, images, and audio files which the reader must negotiate in order to assemble the story.3 It is Rodríguez’s subsequent hypermedia narrative Golpe de gracia (2006) that forms the subject of this chapter, a work which again makes 1  The titles of these works in the original Spanish are Album de cuentos, Ficción y olvido Debido proceso, and El infierno de Amaury. 2  The title in the original Spanish is Gabriella infinita. 3  For more on this novel, see Taylor (2010), and chapter three of Taylor and Pitman (2012).

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use of multiple media formats in the telling of the story, as we shall see below. This time, the story takes the format of a whodunnit, with the central character, Amaury Gutiérrez, lying dying in a hospital bed. Our role as readers is to navigate the various components of the narrative and piece together the multiple fragments and clues in order to work out who has attempted to kill him. These fragments appear in a variety of formats including sound files, still images, video files, and text and video games, creating a rich multimedia experience for the reader-user. Awarded the UCM/Microsoft Prize for Hypermedia Literature in Madrid in 2007, Coup de Grace was subsequently included in the second volume of the Electronic Literature Collection (Borràs et al. 2011), published by the Electronic Literature Organization, the largest and most authoritative body in the field. The short introduction to the work within this volume highlights amongst the key features of this novel the fact that it ‘enacts many of the truisms about digital storytelling and its convergence with computer games’ and also that ‘the reader is thus at once a journalist, detective, and explorer of a fictional universe’ (Borràs et  al. 2011). As this brief blurb indicates, a self-reflexive engagement with the discourses of digital storytelling and a repositioning of the role of the reader are central to this work. Yet, as I argue below, these self-reflexive engagements do not remain on the level of textual play, but are in fact mobilised to undertake a critique of power structures, and the complicity of the reader with these same structures. One particular way in which this critique is undertaken is through the creative bringing together of the two main literary precedents informing Golpe de gracia, namely, the detective novel and surrealist play, as will be discussed. This conjunction of the two intertexts, I posit, serves to negotiate a fundamental tension at play between the employment of the detective fiction genre and the undertaking of a socio-political commentary. That is, Rodríguez mobilises a popular fiction genre—with all its implications of bad faith and false consciousness, if we are to follow an Adornian reading—yet employs it to take an oppositional stance against, rather than to uphold the means of, production. Cemented as early as Adorno and Horkheimer’s notion of the culture industry (Kulturindustrie) as expounded in their 1944 book Dialectic of Enlightenment, popular culture, for Adorno and Horkheimer, involved ‘mass deception’, in which the audience is rendered passive and ‘the power of the culture industry resides in its identification with a manufactured need’ (Adorno and Horkheimer 1997, p. 137). In their reading, the culture industry reveals itself to be

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concerned with ‘obedience to the social hierarchy’ (Adorno and Horkheimer 1997, p.  131), with Adorno later expounding on this by claiming that ‘the power of the culture industry’s ideology is that such a conformity has replaced consciousness’ (Adorno 1991, p. 104). Notwithstanding the many ways that writers have used detective fiction as a springboard for literary experimentation that veers into high art,4 the classic genre of detective fiction sits firmly within the realm of popular culture. Classified as a popular fiction genre by Todorov in his typology of the genre (Todorov 1997, p. 43), detective fiction is usually seen as a literary product in which generic conventions predominate,5 is sensationalist,6 is lowbrow, written for mass consumption, geared towards readerly catharsis,7 and is aimed at provoking readerly satisfaction.8 Moreover, ideological readings of crime fiction have stressed the fact that as a genre it 4  There are many modernist or high-brow authors whose works have been identified as drawing features from detective fiction, such as Borges, Cortázar, Robbe-Grillet, Nabakov, Eco, and others. Yet their works are mostly classified by scholars as overturning the genre, or undoing some of its premises; see, for example, Tani, who calls such works the ‘anti-detective novel’ or the ‘metafictional anti-detective novel’, and charts how they use the form of detective fiction as a ‘platform for more ambitious, more “literary” fiction’ (Tani 1984, p. xii); or Merivale and Sweeney, who classify such works under the term ‘metaphysical detective story’, and highlight how they raise profound questions about ‘the narrative interpretation, subjectivity, the nature of reality, and the limits of knowledge’ (Merivale and Sweeney 1999, p. 1). 5  Numerous scholars of the genre have commented on its formulaic nature; see, for instance, Norman, who notes that writers of this genre are ‘overwhelmingly committed to narrative order and the resolution of plotlines so as to ensure the repeatable experience of popular texts’ (Norman 2016, p. 87); Hühn, who describes the arrangement of narrative elements as ‘fundamentally the same in the majority of classical detective novels’, and states that ‘in fact, the genre has been remarkable for the rigidity of its conventional structures— especially during the 1920s and 1930s, when the conventions were frequently canonized as explicit “rules”’ (Hühn 1987, p. 453); and of course Todorov, who set down the norms of the genre and stated that ‘the whodunnit par excellence is not the one which transgresses the rules of the genre, but the one which conforms to them’ (Todorov 1997, p. 43). 6  See Ascari’s (2007) volume which provides a detailed analysis of the sensationalist features of crime fiction, notwithstanding the attempts of writers to deny these sensationalist elements by foregrounding scientific methods of detection. 7  See Klein, who argues that, as a popular fiction genre, detective fiction provides a form of catharsis since it is ‘designed to raise emotions of both fear and pity only to assuage them through the agency of the sleuth who solves the mystery, captures the criminal, and restores order’ (Klein 1995, p. 4). 8  See Catherine Ross Nickerson’s felicitous phrase ‘the satisfactions of murder’ (Ross Nickerson 2010, p. 1) to describe the ways in which such texts structure the reading experience in such a way as to satisfy reader curiosity.

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tends to reinforce bourgeois norms; Stephen Knight’s analysis of the genre has argued that the crime represents a threat to middle-class privilege and that, once the detective uncovers the criminal, social order is preserved and bourgeois worldview validated (Knight 1980). This is not to say that subsequent analyses have not nuanced Knight’s approach, and various scholars have demonstrated how detective fiction can indeed engage in a (partial) problematisation of the social order. Rather, my point here is that there is a notable tension at the heart of detective fiction, and that underlying this tension is one particular feature which renders it especially problematic: the focus on the violent individual. The focus on the violent individual is, I argue, one feature of detective fiction that proves particularly complex in any attempt to provide a systemic critique, given that the classic detective novel focuses on individual acts of violence rather than on the violence of the system. My contention is that the focus on violent actors obscures what has been variously called ‘social murder’ (Engels 2000, p.  168), ‘structural violence’ (Galtung 1969), ‘systemic violence’ (Žižek 2006, p.  566), and the ‘violence of ­economics’ (Mbembe 2001, p. 54). As early as 1845, Engels argued for an understanding of violence not in terms of when ‘one individual inflicts bodily injury upon another’ (Engels 2000, p. 167), but in terms of when one class oppresses another, positing that when society places hundreds of proletarians in such a position that they inevitably meet a too early and an unnatural death, one which is quite as much a death by violence as that by the sword or bullet; when it deprives thousands of the necessaries of life, places them under conditions in which they cannot live—forces them, through the strong arm of the law, to remain in such conditions until that death ensues which is the inevitable consequence—knows that these thousands of victims must perish, and yet permits these conditions to remain, its deed is murder just as surely as the deed of the single individual. (Engels 2000, pp. 167–168)

In Engels’s reading, this type of violence should be termed ‘social murder’ since ‘it has placed the workers under conditions in which they can neither retain health nor live long’ (Engels 2000, p. 168). In this way, ‘murder’ is re-semanticised by Engels to refer to the violence which is inherent within the system of capitalism, rather than carried out by individual actors. More recently, peace researcher Johan Galtung, in his development of the notion of ‘structural violence’, rejected a narrow concept of violence

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as focusing on violent actors and instead advocated an understanding of violence as ‘built into the structure’, which manifests itself as inequality of power, resources, and life opportunities. Galtung argued that ‘if people are starving when this is objectively avoidable, then violence is committed, regardless of whether there is a clear subject-action-object relation (Galtung 1969, p. 171). Developing this notion, Galtung distinguished between individual acts of violence and structural violence: Violence with a clear subject-object relation is manifest because it is visible as action. It corresponds to our ideas of what drama is, and it is personal because there are persons committing the violence. […] Violence without this relation is structural, built into structure. Thus, when one husband beats his wife there is a clear case of personal violence, but when one million husbands keep one million wives in ignorance there is structural violence. Correspondingly, in a society where life expectancy is twice as high in the upper as in the lower classes, violence is exercised even if there are no concrete actors one can point to directly attacking others, as when one person kills another. (Galtung 1969, p. 171)

Of particular importance in Galtung’s formulation is the contract between personal acts of violence which ‘correspond to our idea of what drama is’ (my emphasis) and violence which is structural, and which thus often remains invisible. For it is, of course, the violence that ‘corresponds to our idea of what drama is’ that forms the basis of the detective novel. That is, the detective novel in its conventional form takes as its focus the individual act of violence undertaken by the evil perpetrator. It is this individual act of violence that drives the narrative thrust of the detective novel and, crucially, it is its resolution—the comforting restoration of bourgeois order— that the narrative arc leads us to. More recently, philosopher and political scientist Achile Mbembe has also proposed a new framework for conceptualising violence, in this case from the standpoint of postcolonial theory. Developing his notion of the violence of economics, Mbembe describes this form of violence as resulting from colonial rationality, in which violence is intricately linked with colonial structures, including the law. According to Mbembe, this produced ‘an imaginary capacity converting the founding violence into authorizing authority’, and then, subsequently, a third form of violence, designed to ensure the maintenance, spread, and permanence of colonial authority:

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Falling well short of what is properly called ‘war’, it recurred again and again in the most banal and ordinary situations. It then crystallized, through a gradual accumulation of numerous acts and rituals—in short, played so important a role in everyday life that it ended up constituting the central cultural imaginary that the state shared with society, and thus had an authenticating and reiterating function. (Mbembe 2001, p. 25)

In Mbembe’s schema, there exists a fundamental violence of the very systems, such as law, authority, and so forth, that govern our lives—systems which, we might note, are fundamental to the detective novel—a violence which is naturalised by the systems themselves, and which must therefore be interrogated. Žižek, meanwhile, has argued for an understanding of violence which is ‘no longer attributable to concrete individuals and their “evil” intentions’, but is, instead, what he terms ‘the fundamental systemic violence of capitalism’ (Žižek 2006, p. 566). Systemic violence, for Žižek, is the violence of the capitalist system which pursues the goal of profitability and, in so doing, enacts violence upon whole strata of a population, or even entire countries. What unites these differing theorists is their urge to us to focus on violence of structures and systems, and not on violent actors. That is, acts of individual murder or crimes and a focus on the violent individual draw our attention to isolated incidents, positing the violent criminal as an aberration or as an evil individual out of synch with the ruling order, and so deflect our attention from the overall violence of the system. If such is the case, a particular conundrum arises in the case of detective fiction which seeks to undertake a systemic critique: if the novela negra is precisely the genre which focuses on violent actors, the genre which, to borrow Žižek’s terms, displays violence as ‘attributable to concrete individuals and their “evil” intentions’, or which, to borrow Galtung’s terms, focuses on individual acts of violence that ‘correspond to our idea of what drama is’, then the question arises as to what extent it can enable a scrutiny of structural violence. As I will analyse below, Rodríguez’s complex novel both capitalises on the quest-driven nature of the novela negra with its focus on identifying the individual perpetrator of a crime and encourages us to unpick it by exposing the systemic violence underpinning it. In Golpe de gracia the focus is not (just) on an individual actor, à la traditional detective novel, but on the very system. This systemic critique, I argue, lies in the ludology itself, as we will examine below, whereby the shifting

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i­dentities of the protagonist represent institutional violence, and the instability of the avatar indicates our own imbrication in the scenarios we encounter. In Rodríguez’s novel, we must examine our own stance, and are not allowed to see ourselves as exterior to the systemic violence depicted. As my argument will demonstrate in this chapter, Rodríguez’s hybrid novel, combining elements of the whodunnit, surrealist collage, and the shape-­shiftings enabled by digital technologies, enables him to develop a version of the whodunnit with a social commentary.

The Interface: Shape-Shifting the Crime Victim Our insertion into this hybridised whodunnit takes place right from the outset with an introductory screen in which blue and grey tones predominate. A flashing line appears across the screen, to be replaced by the words of the title, which zoom out towards us, and subsequently a sequence of images of a male human figure, drawn in jagged outlines with little definition, appear in the centre of the screen, depicting the figure as he lies in a hospital bed. Running across this opening montage is a sound file, comprising muffled, indistinguishable voices, over which the beep of a cardiograph monitor periodically appears. All of these features combined set the scene of mystery and of a near-death experience, coupled with the sanitised blue hues of the hospital ward. Instructions to the reader/player appear below the images of the figure in the bed, running across the screen in short blocks of text. These instructions inform us that we will share in the drama of Amaury, a priest whom someone attempted to murder, and inform us of the various ways we will engage with his story, ending by saying we will play the role of the journalist trying to find out who was responsible. From this interface the work itself is launched, opening on another pastel blue screen, visually very similar to the opening one, with the principal difference being that the centre of the screen is empty—there is, here, no image of the man in bed. Along the bottom are three icons of doors, in blue, olive green, and red, each with a round window in the style of hospital doors. These three doors are named, in order, ‘Exquisite Corpse’, ‘Mortal Line’, and ‘Digital Death’; moving the cursor over each makes the doors swing open, whilst clicking on the door itself launches that section.9 These three sections are denominated ‘worlds’ once we click 9  In the original Spanish these read: ‘Cadáver exquisito’, ‘Línea mortal’, and ‘Muerte digital’.

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on them, and here it is interesting to note Rodríguez’s combination—or putting into creative tension—of the visual and textual metaphors.10 The visual metaphor of our entrance to the game is through an architectural metaphor—that of the door—whilst the textual terminology used to describe what we enter is naturalistic—that of the world. In the architectural metaphor, the door represents both the door to the hospital ward (and thus within the narrative) and also our entrance to the game (and so outwith the narrative), with the door thus having both a diegetic and an extra-diegetic function. In this way, an icon within the narrative world is also a procedural element of the interface to this world. These three different worlds, as I will argue below, each undertakes its own critique of the norms of literary genre and of power relations, and, in so doing, disrupts many of the norms of the genres with which Rodríguez engages.11

Exquisite Corpse: Surrealist Game Tactics Disrupting the Whodunnit The first of these worlds is characterised, I argue, by a creative tension that Rodríguez sets up from the outset between two literary precedents. Entitled ‘Exquisite Corpse’, this world clearly references through its title both the long tradition of experimental, ludic practice that informs Rodríguez’s work in terms of its structure and procedure, and the whodunnit genre in which this work sits in terms of its plot. As regards the 10  Although I am here concentrating on the three narrative worlds of Golpe de gracia, it is worth noting that there are also additional features to the novel which sit outside of these narrative worlds proper. In addition to these worlds, there are also four ‘rooms’ that we can visit: these are conceived of by Rodríguez not as integral parts of the narrative itself, but as ‘salas de profundización’ (Rodríguez 2007, p. 109), which offer us additional material and resources. These consist of the Sala de lectura, which provides us with a wealth of reading materials related to Golpe de gracia; Sala de juegos, which gives us access to the games that we already access in the worlds; Sala de estudio, which is set out as office, and links to three blogs about each of the three worlds; and Sala de construcción, which gives us access to two wikis to which users can contribute. 11  In this way, I differentiate my reading of this hypertext novel from that of Romero, who has classified these three worlds of Golpe de gracia as corresponding to three different types of ‘reading’, these being ‘a quasi theatrical performance, a game of skill, and a game of deduction’ (Romero López 2012, p.  312). Although I do not dispute the differences between each of the three worlds, I argue that Rodríguez’s strategies are much more ­complex, and that the very categories noted by Romero—such as that of ‘deduction’—are in fact called into question.

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former, Rodríguez’s choice of title for this section, ‘Exquisite Corpse’, is an obvious reference to the famous surrealist game Le cadavre exquis, first developed by Marcel Duhamel, Jacques Prevert, and Yves Tanguy in 1925. The game involves experimenting with word combinations to form sentences spontaneously, with its title purportedly derived from the first sentence to be created through this technique: ‘the exquisite corpse will drink the new wine’. For the surrealists, the cadavre exquis was one of the preferred techniques in breaking with the normal flow of discourse, and getting beyond the constraints of the rational mind. In André Breton’s words, the cadavre exquis is one ‘infallible method for getting beyond the critical mind and for fully liberating the metaphorical activity of the mind’ (Breton 2008, p. 701).12 The cadavre exquis is thus emblematic of a prior era of literary experimentation, and there are three key elements that, I argue, are central to our understanding of this literary precedent as mobilised by Rodríguez here: firstly, the ludic aspect of this literary practice; secondly, the collaborative aspect, bringing together disparate sources; and thirdly, the tension between constraints and transgression. Regarding the first of these, it is important to note that the practice of the cadavre exquis grew out of the surrealists’ interest in parlour games and children’s games, as well as their engagement with Dadaist wordplay. The cadavre exquis thus involves bringing the ludic into the arena of serious thought; as Kochhar-Lindgren has argued, ‘in locating the site of research in the parlour, André Breton and the other surrealists strove to narrow the gap between the making of art and the everyday—based on the belief that fostering new aesthetic practices based on collective action could lead to new political strategies and social change’ (Kochhar-Lindgren 2002, p.  217). In this way, Rodríguez’s choice of the term ‘cadaver ­exquisito’ makes reference to a prior era of literary experimentation which melded the ludic with the literary in a new aesthetic practice. This integration of the ludic is key to Rodríguez’s own practice in which, as we shall see below, computer game formats are integrated into the narrative, as Rodríguez makes use of the play scenarios for serious purposes. In this way, his invocation of the cadavre exquis allies his practice with that of the earlier surrealist interventions, as well as with contemporary trends in what has been variously termed ‘Serious Games’ (Jahn-Sudmann 2008, 12  In the original French this reads: ‘moyen infaillible de mettre l’esprit critique en vacance et de pleinement libérer l’activité métaphorique de l’esprit’ (Breton 2008, p. 701).

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p.  9), political game-art (Wilson 2006, p.  269), or experimental game projects (Crogan 2007, p. 88), in which games are employed for critical interrogation. Regarding the second key point, it is important to note that the practice of the cadavre exquis involves the technique of creating collectively generated sentences from multiple sources. In the words of Adamowicz, this game is ‘based on the pooling of mental resources and the chance associations of words or images’, and as such ‘deliberately break[s] with the normal flow of discourse […] producing singular analogies and unprecedented associations’ (Adamowicz 1998, p. 55). The cadavre exquis as a composite of multiple sources thus stands, I argue, for the construction of hypertext narrative, which brings together multiple sources in the creation of the story, in the form of what David Ciccoricco has called ‘emergent and recombinatory narratives’ (Ciccoricco 2007, p. 4). In this way, Rodríguez’s collage-effect novel, where multiple images, sound files, videos, and games make up the narrative, is to an extent an updated v­ ersion of the surrealist game.13 Regarding the third key point, it is worth noting that this creation of sentences by means of the conjunction of apparently disparate phrases was the result of an interplay between constraints and transgression. Adamowicz, in her illuminating analysis of the functioning of surrealist games, has explained the particular way in which these games work, in that they enact a compositional rule whilst disrupting semantic ones: The common denominator to all surrealist games is that they articulate a syntactic or compositional rule, and a semantic or iconic transgression. A rigidly mechanical rule is combined with the workings of chance encounters in a paradoxical structure where incongruous statements and images clash within a fixed framework […]. The disorientating effect on the addressee derives from a tension between the euphoric recognition of the formal structure and the dysphoric departure from the familiar in the random semantic filling of syntactic frames. (Adamowicz 1998, pp. 56–57) 13  As a recent edited volume on the cadavre exquis has shown (Kochhar-Lindgren et al. 2010), these notions developed by the surrealists in the first half of the twentieth century have given rise to a wealth of artistic and literary interventions that draw on the key notions of chance operations and collaborative authorship. Indeed, Paul D. Miller has argued that the cadavre exquis anticipated many contemporary digital forms of remixing material, such as database aesthetics, machinima remixing of video game characters, and many other contemporary digital forms of practice based on selection and juxtaposition (Miller 2010, p. xiii).

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Drawing out the analogy here, Rodríguez makes use of the cadavre exquis and its pushing to the limits of the ‘principles of analogy, causality, and consequence, as articulated by syntax’ (Adamowicz 1998, p.  57) in his hypermedia practice. As we shall see below, Rodríguez undertakes a parallel disruption, as he both follows a ‘compositional rule’ and yet creates a ‘semantic or iconic transgression’, to borrow Adamowicz’s terms. In Coup de Grace, the compositional rules of the individual elements of the narrative are followed, but there is a deliberate semantic or, in this case, character-­based transgression. As I shall analyse below, Rodríguez breaks the rules of character coherence that underpin classic narrative formats, and in so doing implicates the reader in the scenarios that he sets out. In Coup de Grace, then, Jaime Alejandro Rodríguez updates the surrealist game of the cadavre exquis for the twenty-first century. Drawing on the surrealists’ impulses—the mobilisation of ludic practices for serious purposes, the creation of literary works from multiple sources, and the interplay between rules and transgressions—Rodríguez creates a multimedia narrative that challenges the generic conventions of the genres it mobilises. There is, thus, a long literary and artistic heritage of the cadavre exquis with which Rodríguez dialogues. Significantly, Rodríguez’s mobilisation of this heritage has important consequences for the other main literary precedent informing Coup de Grace, namely, the genre of detective fiction. The corpse—the central figure and conundrum of the traditional detective novel—has become re-semanticised, where the whodunnit implications of the corpse are now imbued with the surrealist implications of the recombinant game. Given that the title of the original surrealist game made reference to a corpse, it is significant that Rodríguez now makes the corpse—or rather, a near-dead body, dying in hospital—the central feature of his narrative. As will be analysed below, in the classic detective fiction format it is the story of what happened to this cadavre that we are tasked with discovering. This is indeed the springboard for the story, as we shall see. However, what we uncover as we work through the lexia making up this work is not a straightforward narrative leading us to the culprit, but in fact a complex, convoluted narrative world in which we learn as much about systemic violence as about the individual acts of violence. In this way, from the outset of this section, the framing of the whodunnit and of our quest as readers within the terms of the surrealist cadavre exquis means that we are on our guard, and are encouraged not to allow ourselves to be swept away by the quest-driven whodunnit.

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Fig. 4.1  Jaime Alejandro Rodríguez, Coup de Grace (2006), ‘Exquisite Corpse’

From this title, once we access this section proper we are presented with several sound files representing the various visitors to Amaury’s deathbed. The screen opens firstly on instructions, with the layout and colour scheme visually very similar to the introductory screen. Across the central panel, instructions to us as the player/reader tell us that there has been an attempted murder of this man who lies dying in hospital. We are informed that various visitors will come to see him on his deathbed, and that we are to pay attention to what we hear in order to discover why there is such animosity towards him (see Fig. 4.1). Clicking on an arrow loads new content in the centre panel, which zooms in towards the figure of the man, showing him in the hospital bed, from a side angle. A sound file is activated, containing electronic beeps which mimic the hospital equipment keeping him alive, whilst also serving as a metatextual reference to the electronic status of this work. Across the bottom of this panel four icons are visible, each of which depicts a head-­ and-­ shoulders image of four men, named respectively ‘boss’, ‘priest’, ‘teacher’, and ‘father’.14 Each of the four figures differs, with the first ­dark-­skinned and well-built, the second bald with a moustache, the third thin with receding hair and glasses, and the fourth young with a full head  In the original Spanish these read: ‘jefe’, ‘sacerdote’, ‘maestro’, ‘padre’.

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of fair hair. Clicking on each image then merges the identity of that figure with the figure in the bed, as the facial features of the victim morph into those of the figure we have selected. In other words, this interactive feature allows us to alter the victim, swapping one image for another. Here, Rodríguez’s novel plays with one of the central tenets of detective fiction, since an essential feature of conventional detective fiction is the stability of the victim. In Todorov’s classic typology of detective fiction, the whodunnit genre is seen as one in which ‘starting from a certain effect (a corpse and certain clues) we must find its cause (the culprit and his motive)’ (Todorov 1997, p. 47). In the classic conceptualisation of the whodunnit, then, the victim must remain stable, for it is precisely the victim, and the crime that has been effected on him/her, that lies at the heart of the detective’s quest and that drives the narrative structure leading us from effect to cause. Here, by contrast, Rodríguez has challenged this stability, through his enactment of the strategy of the cadavre exquis through digital means. That is, the surrealist strategy of the mixing of phrases or images is transmuted into the fluctuating body of the corpse in Golpe de gracia.15 In this way, Rodríguez’s victim in Golpe de gracia is unstable, and can be swapped at will by the reader-user of this novel. This indicates to us that his use of the detective fiction genre is by no means a conventional one, as he destabilises the fixity of the victim. In so doing, Rodríguez encourages us to unpick the notion of stable identity and the one, individual crime on which the whodunnit works. Moreover, what is particularly striking about these four identities is that they represent not named individuals, since they do not bear proper names, but are generic categories of power structures. That they are termed ‘boss’, ‘priest’, ‘teacher’, and ‘father’ means that they represent, respectively, corporate structures, religious hierarchies, educational institutions, and patriarchal structures.16 In this way, the shape-shifting of the victim here draws our attention to the competing power structures ­represented by this figure, which forms part of Rodríguez’s critique—a

15  It is worth highlighting that, as well as a textual word game, the cadavre exquis also exists in visual format comprised of a collective drawing game, in which figures are drawn collectively, in sections, resulting in a disjointed, distorted body. 16  In interpreting the ‘padre’ here as representing patriarchal structures I do not mean to ignore the religious connotations of the term ‘padre’, and which are present within the story. Rather, I am arguing that Rodríguez’s deliberate use of this term immediately brings to mind patriarchal structures more broadly.

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critique which will subsequently be extended to the reader in the next section of the work, as we will see below. Once we have selected the identity of our victim, a new line of buttons appears over the bottom section of the bed, indicating three unnamed visitors to the bedside. Clicking on each of these buttons launches an image of a silhouette which appears from the bottom left and moves towards the right-hand side of the panel, over the end of the bed. It also launches a sound file, with the voice of an actor reading the part of this character, and the words also appear on the screen. The significance of these characters appearing only as silhouettes is that we are unable to distinguish their facial features, and we do not know exactly who they are in the story. Similarly, the sound files that we hear give us only partial information. In each, the voice of each character tells us of grudges that they hold towards the figure in the bed. For instance, when selecting ‘Boss’ as the identity of the victim, the first visitor is one of the victim’s female employees. Her voice trembling—with rage or fear— she states that she has not come to visit him out of compassion, but of fear that he would sack them all. The second visitor, meanwhile, is male and his voice displays anxiety, stating that he had hoped for some sort of truce, but this is not to be the case. Visitante 3 is a confident male voice who threatens the victim, stating that he had warned him and that the victim had abused his power in some way. In each of these cases, we overhear but a short extract of the words of each visitor, and have to build up our own picture of the context. For instance, we do not have information about what the third visitor warned the victim about; nor do we know what the truce is of which the second visitor talks; nor why the first visitor believes the victim does not merit their pity. In each case, our access to the information is partial, and we do not have the full picture, although what we hear in each case are instances of abuse perpetrated not by the suspects, but by the ‘victim’ himself, in his role as representing a particular institution. This, coupled with the fact that we cannot see the identity of each speaker, means that as readers we have to work hard to piece together the various elements to make a coherent story, and here Rodríguez is further challenging the narrative structures underlying the detective novel. This can be illuminated through the formalist distinction between story and plot, as mentioned in the previous chapter on Zerbarini, and which has, as scholars have argued, particular importance as regards the detective fiction genre. This basic distinction between the signified (the story) and the

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order in which the events appear textually (the plot) has been theorised by Hühn as exemplifying the narrative organisation of the classical detective novel. Arguing that detective fiction thematises narrativity, Hühn has suggested that the narrative organisation of the classic detective novel is as follows: The usual constellation of story and discourse (the abstractable pre-existent sequence of events and acts versus its mediation in a narrative) occurs twice over: the story of the crime is mediated in the discourse of the detective’s investigation; and the story of the detective’s investigation, in its turn, is mediated in the narrator’s discourse (for instance in Dr. Watson’s uninformed written account of Holmes’s detection). In both cases the story is hidden for the most part so that the reader is doubly puzzled—trying to make out the mysterious crime story by way of the almost equally mystifying detection story. (Hühn 1987, p. 452)

If such is the case with classic detective fiction, I argue that Rodríguez has taken this one step further, by imbuing the classic récit of detective fiction with the strategies of the surrealist cadavre exquis. If the classic detective novel functions by means of the mysterious crime story and the mystifying detection story, and yet at the end of the novel all is revealed, in Rodríguez’s version the process of revelation is further troubled. Numerous theorists of the classic detective novel have noted that it involves ‘the solution of a mysterious occurrence’ by rational means (Tani 1984, p. 41), and that ‘no mysteries or ambiguities remain unresolved’ at the novel’s close (Hühn 1987, p. 453). It is, thus, a genre in which the gaps and uncertainties (including the mystifying detection story itself) are all carefully filled at the denouement of the novel. Yet in the case of Golpe de gracia, these norms are subverted, since we are not presented with a stable set of coordinates of which some elements are missing, and that we must fill in as we read the story. Rather, as my analysis reveals, the coordinates themselves are unstable: the identity of the victim mutates; the names of the suspects are not given, nor their faces shown; and the content of the lexia, images, and sound files suggest that the victim may indeed be the perpetrator. We are clearly aligned with the detective figure, in that we are tasked with making sense of the evidence we hear, yet our piecing together of the clues is troubled by the workings of the cadavre exquis which, as noted above, have also troubled the ­stability of the victim. In this way, Rodríguez thwarts the goal-oriented

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­ arrative arc of the conventional detective story since these partial fragn ments of information do not form a coherent whole that the detective can piece together: instead, through the instability of the victim, any stable notion of a coherent whole is troubled.

Mortal Line: Ludic Dreamscape Meets Detective Fiction If such are the destabilisations of the whodunnit format enacted in ‘Exquisite Corpse’, this section of the novel, entitled ‘Mortal Line’, entails a further disruption of these generic norms. This section is the most ludic, as will be discussed below, yet Rodríguez makes use of the video game format—with all its ambiguities, and its ambivalent relationship to global capital17—as a genre which draws us in, makes us want to play (and win the game), in order to demonstrate that we, too, are implicated in the game. That is, Rodríguez here creates a highly ludic experience, building on our desire to play (along), only to then make us question our own role in it. In so doing, Rodríguez is making tactical use of gaming strategies in order to thwart them, and in this tactic, his work allies itself with the trends in experimental game projects as noted above, in which games are employed for critical interrogation. On opening this section, a screen launches with written instructions over the central panel of the screen that address us in the second person and inform us that ‘you are about to enter the second world’ with, again, the spatial, naturalistic metaphor of the world marking our entrance to this section of the narrative.18 We are then told that our mission is to 17  I am here making reference to the fact that scholars have argued that the computer game as cultural artefact is ambiguously positioned in relation to late capital. Some have argued that logic of the global computer games industry tends to reinforce capitalist values. Stephen Kline, Nick Dyer-Witheford, and Greig de Peuter have suggested that computer gaming could be seen to be the ‘ideal commodity’ of post-Fordist, postmodern promotional capitalism (Kline et al. 2003, p. 62), since it ‘powerfully demonstrates the increasingly intensive advertising, promotional, and surveillance strategies practiced by post-Fordist marketers in an era of niche markets’ and ‘displays the global logic of an increasingly transnational capitalism whose production capacities and market strategies are now incessantly calculated and recalculated on a planetary basis’ (Kline et al. 2003, p. 5). That said, others have championed the rise of alternative gaming projects which aim to subvert or thwart the global capital that subtends the commercial computer game industry. 18  In the original Spanish this reads: ‘estás a punto de entrar en el segundo mundo’.

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Help Amaury to retrace his steps, and he will put you in contact with Galician legends and stories, but also with the path of purification prepared by the Aztec gods, and finally with the spine-chilling world beyond death, from which, free of weaknesses and sins, Amaury will return, ready to pay penance.19

Beneath this text, we can see the outline of the man in bed, in grey and blue tones. This text prepares us for the entry into the mysterious world that we are about to enter, as here we are transported from the medical environment of the hospital room of the first world—with all its connotations of clinical precision and science-based rationality—to an other-­ worldly environment in which mythical creatures, monsters, and folk tales lurk. Clicking on an arrow to continue launches an animation, starting with the figure in the hospital bed, into which we zoom, via an extreme close­up, through the man’s eye, as the lines of the iris turn into rings of wood within the trunk of a tree. This, in turn, morphs into a seascape, with the rings turning into the spirals of the waves, and then moves swiftly, vertiginously, along to rest on a cliff along the sea front. I contend that this opening animation is a visual metaphor for the mise-en-abîme that this section undertakes in that, in this animation, we find ourselves spiralling inwards, from the outer story of Amaury and his attempted murder, into the inner story comprised of mythical elements.20 This animation thus prefigures the narrative metalepsis that we will experience within this world, as we will see below. 19  In the original Spanish this reads: ‘ayudarle a recoger los pasos a Amaury y te pondrá en contacto con leyendas y historias gallegas, pero también con el camino de la purificación preparado por los dioses aztecas y finalmente con el escalofriante mundo del más allá, desde donde, libre de debilidades y pecados, Amaury volverá dispuesto a reparar’. 20  Perla Sassón-Henry has analysed the depiction of the locales within this section of Rodríguez’s Golpe de gracia, focusing on the variety of cultures represented in the novel and emphasising how it submerges the reader in ‘un mundo virtual que lo lleva a explorar una gran variedad de perspectivas culturales que van desde los tiempos precolombinos de los aztecas en México a la actualidad’ (Sassón-Henry 2012, p.  316).Whilst not disputing her identification of the various cultural referents, I argue in my reading that, rather than having a didactic aim of being ‘una fuente rica en referencias culturales que no sólo informan al lector sobre la cultura de los aztecas, Galicia, Colombia y Argentina, sino que también despiertan la curiosidad del lector para continuar la investigación de los aspectos culturales presentados’ (Sassón-Henry 2012, p. 320), Golpe de gracia works to trouble didactic readings due to its overturning of narrative norms and levels.

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We subsequently enter a gameworld in this section comprising an oneiric, fantasy landscape inhabited by mythical creatures and monsters which is, we assume, the inner world of Amaury, as he lies in the hospital bed in a coma. Another set of instructions appears across the screen informing us that ‘your dreams have to do with flying over unknown regions that, nevertheless, feel familiar to you’ and that ‘perhaps in a previous life you used to live in these places: the coast of death’.21 We are then invited to stroll through this dreamscape and are informed that in each of the places along the coast, a sailor will narrate a story that contains both the clue to the next point in the journey and a fragment of an image that we must piece together to reveal an image of an event that happened to us. The instructions end on the imperative ‘Retrace your steps, Amaury’.22 Here, in this section and in the paratextual information with which we are provided, there is an important slippage that takes place as regards the grammatical person of the verb. The instructions begin by addressing us in the second person, with our task explicitly framed as aiding the third-­ person character of Amaury (‘help him to…’). Yet, by the time we receive the second screen of instructions, although we are still addressed in second person, we have become Amaury, since the second person—the ‘your dreams’—refers to our dreams as Amaury. Similarly, the instructions as we enter the game, which tell us ‘retrace your steps, Amaury’, make clear that we have now become this character: these are instructions to us as Amaury. In this way, our identity as reader-player has now merged with one of the characters of the narrative, as we are interpellated into the game by this second-person singular form of address. Significantly, what has changed in so doing is that we have now swapped roles within the narrative: we are no longer a detective(esque) figure attempting to solve the mystery of the attempted murder, but the victim himself. Again, this has implications for the whodunnit genre, with the stability of the detective’s identity being one of the tenets of this rational genre: according to the classic genre conventions, the detective cannot inexplicably morph into the victim in the course of the narrative. This erosion of the stability of the victim/detective also has implications for the narrative and the role of the reader, since narrative alignment shifts in this section. 21  The original Spanish reads: ‘tus sueños tienen que ver con sobrevuelos por regiones desconocidas que sin embargo te resultan familiares’ and that ‘tal vez en alguna vida anterior viviste en estos lugares: la costa de la muerte’. 22  The original Spanish reads: ‘Recoge tus pasos, Amaury’.

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The format of this section is also markedly different from the first world, both narratologically and procedurally. Narratalogically, our role within the narrative has shifted, since we move from the first section which positioned us in the role of a static, external bystander who overhears conversations taking place within the narrative world. In the first world, we were positioned as listening to conversations within the narrative world, but could not affect their outcome. Now, in this section, we are firmly embedded within this narrative world, to the extent that we have become a character within it; we are, thus, in the position of the participant in an interactive drama as defined by Mateas, in that ‘the player does not sit above the story, watching it as in a simulation, but is immersed in the story’ (Mateas 2004, p. 20). Procedurally, there is also a significant change in this section, in comparison to ‘Exquisite Corpse’. Although the first world of Coup de Grace was interactive, this interactivity was mostly restricted to the actions of the reader-user in clicking on buttons to launch sound or image files. That is, in this earlier section, we did not have an avatar, and our interaction with the keyboard or the mouse did not move us around the world. This second world, by contrast, is presented in the form of a video game, and positions through an avatar in a gameworld; in order to undertake any activities in this second world, we must use keys to move ourselves through the scene. And indeed, our dexterity, and the swiftness with which we are able to execute the right keys, determines the outcome, in a way that was not the case in the first world. In this way, non-trivial effort is required from the reader of the type that Aarseth has identified (Aarseth 1997, p. 1), such that ‘the cybertext reader is a player, a gambler; the cybertext is a game-world or world-game’ (Aarseth 1997, p. 4). In terms of the presentation of this avatar, the opening screen of the game presents us with our avatar who is male, dressed in a dark suit, standing to the centre-right of the screen in a computer-generated landscape. To the left stands a hut and to the far left, the sea, whilst paths are marked out between boulders, and a signpost in the foreground indicates ‘Malpica’. The landscape is composed of computer-generated graphics that are, particularly around the edges, quite pixelated, with, over this scene, a sound file of crashing waves and seagull runs. In order to navigate this world, we need to negotiate our way through this coastal landscape, entering buildings and avoiding, or destroying, various mythical creatures, such as witches or zombies, who attempt to block our path. We are charged with finding clues as we move around,

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against the clock. Significantly, the terminology employed to convey this navigation borrows from both detective fiction and computer game terminology, since the ‘pista’ in Spanish of the opening instructions is both the ‘pista’ or trail that the detective must follow in his searching for clues, and the ‘pista’ or route that the gamer traces as s/he plays around the gameworld. Rodríguez’s strategy here thus draws parallels between the truth-­ driven quest of the detective story and the goal-driven quest of the computer game. Again, this is another self-reflexive moment but, as we shall see, these parallels are far from straightforward. Most of these clues are hidden in buildings that we encounter on our way, including a tavern and a lighthouse, where we meet a character who gives us verbal information or a written fragment, or we discover a document such as a book. Each time that we successfully do this, we are given one piece in a jigsaw that we must fit together to find out whodunnit. Each piece is just a small fragment such that we cannot discern clearly what is taking place from each individual piece, but need to fit them together to generate the full picture. Significantly, each jigsaw piece relates not to the gameworld narrative in which we are now located, but to the external layer of the narrative. That is, each piece of the jigsaw that we collect shows a fragment of a larger image containing Amaury and the other characters of his world—of the outer narrative layer. For instance, in the Malpica tavern, the story that the sailor tells us is about a shipwreck, but the image that we receive is of part of the back of Amaury’s head, with a figure standing to the left of him. Or, for instance, in the lighthouse where we find a book, and read a chapter within it about the coast, the piece we are given is not related to the content of this book (the nested book within the story of the dreamworld, which is itself a nested story within Amaury’s story), but is a piece of Amaury’s story. In this section, then, as we play we encounter a complex interplay between the narrative levels making up Coup de Grace. That is, although in ‘Mortal Line’ we are players in a gameworld which exists at one level below that of Amaury’s story (the nested story of his oneiric, inner world), as we play we are given pieces relating to this outer story. Thus Rodríguez’s narrative disturbs narrative levels, as the two levels contaminate each other. When we are purportedly participating in Amaury’s inner mindscape, as he lies in a coma, we are given clue as to the outer world. Mortal Line, thus, functions as a nested story, since it is the-story-within-the-story of Amaury, but also turns out to contaminate the outer story, since the evidence that we collect within a purportedly nested story in fact elucidates

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the outer story. The boundaries between the outer story and the inner story become contaminated in this moment of narrative metalepsis, where one level of narrative seeps into the other. Rodríguez’s troubling of narrative levels here can thus be understood through notions of narrative metalepsis, as discussed in the previous chapter in relation to Zerbarini. In the words of Cohn, ‘metalepsis thus designates the transgression of a line of demarcation that authors usually do not touch, namely the “shifting but sacred frontier between two worlds, the world in which one tells, the world of which one tells”’ (Cohn 2012, p.  105). Cohn then goes on to distinguish metalepsis at the discourse level—consisting of ‘the habit of certain narrators interrupting the description of the routine actions of their characters by digressions’, which is light-hearted and playful, and metalepsis that appears ‘at the level of the story’, which is much more shocking and troubling, in that ‘here, the boundary between the primary story (the reader’s story) and the secondary story (the framed novel) is violated, leading to a confusion between distinct ontological levels’ (Cohn 2012, pp. 105–106). It is this second type of metalepsis that we encounter in Coup de Grace here, as Rodríguez violates these narrative boundaries. Such a violation of ontological levels is particularly troubling for the detective novel, in which epistemological certainty is central to the truth-­ driven nature of the narrative. As Lutas has observed, ‘since its essence is the transgression of the boundary between different worlds, metalepsis has ontological implications which seem to make it incompatible with a genre like detective fiction. Detective fiction as a popular genre is interested in providing reassurance and epistemological certainty, whereas metalepsis transgresses boundaries of beings and often destabilises the stability of the word’ (Lutas 2011, p. 42). In this way, Rodríguez’s use of narrative metalepsis serves to undermine the stability of the narrative levels and, by extension, the epistemological certainty at the heart of the detective novel. This feature of narrative metalepsis is also significant due to its enactment through the affordances of digital technologies and its metatextual status. As noted in the previous chapter, Alice Bell, writing on narrative metalepsis and interactive fiction, has argued that narrative metalepsis is a device that is ‘inherently built into ergodic digital fiction’ (Bell 2016, p.  294), terming this ‘interactional metalepsis’, which is related to the interaction between text and reader, and which, for Bell, occurs ‘when the ontological boundary between the reader (in the actual world) and

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the storyworld is crossed. Thus interactional metalepses, while facilitated by interactivity, are, like all forms of metalepses, ontological in nature’ (Bell 2016, p. 296). Bell argues that this metalepsis occurs in the feedback loop that is created when readers are required to interact with the text, and the reader’s movements are visualised on screen. In this way, Bell argues, ‘navigation in ergodic digital fiction produces a visual and ontological manifestation of the reader in the storyworld means that this nontrivial form of reading necessitates interactional metalepsis because the reader, or rather a representation of her/him, crosses the ontological boundary between actual world and storyworld’ (Bell 2016, p. 297). If Bell has argued that narrative metalepsis is an integral part of ergodic fiction (irrespective of whether it narrativises this), Rodríguez’s novel makes this metalepsis explicit. By thematising narrative metalepsis in the mise-en-abîme that he creates, Rodríguez is deliberately drawing the reader-player’s attention to the metalepsis inherent in the ergodic text. Moreover, this metatextual commentary on the workings of ergodic fiction is also, I argue, reinforced by the fact that the information that we collect is rendered to us in the form of pieces of a jigsaw puzzle, which is significant for two reasons. Firstly, the jigsaw format clearly allies the game-narrative we are playing with other ludic formats. Having a long pre-digital history from the eighteenth century to the present, the jigsaw puzzle is an immediately recognisable format that immediately signals play. It thus becomes a synecdoche for play, and indicates to us overtly that in this section we are negotiating both narratology and ludology—a reference to the fact that this is a (digital) game that we are playing. Secondly, and perhaps more importantly, the jigsaw puzzle also stands as a metaphor for experimental, ludic narrative.23 Hypertext narrative has a puzzle-­like structure, which has been observed by many scholars and theorists of electronic literature. On this subject, Marie-Laure Ryan has argued that ‘what hypertext offers is not a story-generating machine but something much closer to the narrative equivalent of a jigsaw puzzle’ (Ryan 2004, p. 342), and she proposes that

23  Indeed, it is worth noting that Rodríguez’s compatriot, Juan B. Gutiérrez, uses the jigsaw format as the interface for his first hypertext novel, The First Flight of the Wright Brothers [El primer vuelo de los hermanos Wright], which was first published in 1997, and in which the pieces of the jigsaw puzzle contained the lexia.

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Readers try to construct a narrative image from fragments that come to them in a more or less random order, by fitting each lexia into a global pattern that slowly takes shape in the mind. Just as we can work for a time on a puzzle, leave it, and come back to it later, readers of hypertext do not start a new story from scratch every time they open the program but, rather, construe a mental representation over many sessions, completing or amending the picture put together so far. (Ryan 2004, p. 342)

Ryan thus proposes the jigsaw puzzle as a metaphor for hypertext but also, crucially, she then goes on to problematise the metaphor of the jigsaw and its ability—or otherwise—to offer true ‘co-authors’. Dialoguing with Landow’s theories of hypertext, Ryan argues as follows: In spite of George Landow’s theory of readers as coauthors, involvement is exploratory, rather than ontological, because readers’ paths of navigation affect not the narrative events themselves but only the way in which the global narrative pattern (if there is one at all) emerges in the mind. Similarly, with a jigsaw puzzle the dynamics of the discovery differ for every player, but they do not affect the structure that is put together. Just as the jigsaw puzzle subordinates the image to the construction process, external/exploratory interactivity de-emphasizes the narrative itself in favor of the game of its discovery. (Ryan 2004, p. 342)24

That is, Landow’s theory of hypertext, as discussed in the Introduction to this book, conceived of hypertext as an ‘infinitely recenterable system whose provisional point of focus depends on the reader, who becomes a truly active reader’ (Landow 1992, p. 36). Ryan here questions Landow’s utopian pronouncement, and argues that the reader does not in actuality become a truly active reader and co-author, since the reader has no ability to change the narrative events themselves. In this way, the jigsaw-puzzle-­ as-hypertext-narrative metaphor is a problematic one that highlights some of the central tensions underlying the construction of narratives through hypertextual means.

24  This is not to say that all scholars are in agreement with Ryan’s use of the jigsaw puzzle analogy to describe hypertext narrative; see, for instance, David Ciccoricco who argues that the applicability of the jigsaw puzzle metaphor is limited, since, ‘while the analogy amounts more or less to a description of a network narrative, it does not account for arborescent narratives with a finite number of possible outcomes’ Ciccoricco (2007, p. 109).

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Rodríguez’s use of the jigsaw puzzle device here thus functions as a metatextual commentary since it represents the piecing together of ­narrative fragments (sound files, texts, images) that the reader must undertake throughout Coup de Grace. Yet at the same time, it is a problematic image, as it is a visual image of the tension between play-driven and plotdriven approaches that have plagued the authors of hypertext fiction. The jigsaw puzzle only gives an illusory sense of agency to the reader, since, to borrow Ryan’s terms, the dynamics of discovery may differ each time, but the picture that emerges at the end is always the same. In this way, I argue that Rodriguez’s mobilisation of the jigsaw puzzle format in this world makes a clear reference to a longer pre-digital heritage of play and is also representative of hypertext narrative, but it is a problematic image that lays bare the tensions between narratology and ludology, and between the purported agency of the reader and their confinement within a fixed ludic structure. This image is therefore a metatextual one, referring to one of the central concerns highlighted by many theorists of electronic fiction, namely, the tension between providing the reader with the possibility of composing the fragments of the narrative themselves on the one hand and maintaining a coherent narrative on the other. Janet Murray, for instance, observes that ‘giving the audience access to the raw materials of creation runs the risk of undermining the narrative experience’ (Murray 1997, p. 139), whilst Ken Perlin has noted that in nonlinear, interactive narrative structures in which there is no acting, it is difficult to create ‘emotional buy-in’ for the character (Perlin 2004, p. 16). More recently Hayles has remarked that ‘how to maintain such conventional narrative devices as rising tension, conflict and denouement in interactive forms where the user determines sequence continues to pose formidable problems for writers of electronic literature, especially narrative fiction’ (Hayles 2008, p.  16). Ryan herself, in another more recent article on the same issue, comments that ‘it is very difficult to achieve a satisfactory balance between gameplay—the kinds of problems that users must solve and the kinds of means at their disposal—and game narrative: if the player is primarily interested in gameplay, the cut scenes that build up the plot may be experienced as an annoying pause in the action (something like the intermission at the theatre); if the player is interested in the plot, the tasks to fulfil in order to get more of the plot may be perceived as annoying roadblocks’ (Ryan 2016, p. 339). In this way, Rodríguez’s image of the jigsaw puzzle functions as a metatextual commentary on the tension between play-driven and plot-driven approaches to hypertext fiction.

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In summary, in this second world, Rodríguez has stretched the boundaries of the detective story in multiple ways. Firstly, the factual, rational environment of the conventional detective story has been replaced with an oneiric landscape of other-worldly creatures and improbable happenings. Scholars have frequently noted that the classic detective story serves to uphold the triumph of reason and rationality (see McHale 1987, p.  9; Borges 1979, p.  73); in the words of Tani, the conventional detective story is that in which ‘an amateur or professional detective tries to discover by rational means the solution of a mysterious occurrence’ (Tani 1984, p. 41; my emphasis). If such is the trajectory of the conventional detective story—from mysterious occurrence (the crime) to its resolution by rational means (the solution)—then Rodríguez’s work troubles this straightforward trajectory, as mysterious, oneiric, and irrational elements form part of the process of deduction. Secondly, the stability of the victim is further undermined, as the user-­ player now becomes the victim (who himself is, as we learnt in the first world, also a perpetrator), challenging further one of the central tenets of the detective fiction genre. The stability of the various actors within the formulaic structure of detective fiction is central to the functioning of this type of narrative since the actors must remain stable in order for the mystery to be resolved. In Rodríguez’s version, the instability of the characters and of our role as reader-player within them further troubles the norms of the genre. Thirdly, the unsettling blurring of narrative layers, whereby the nested story contaminates the outer story is a further way in which narrative stability and genre stability in this world are challenged. The narrative metalepsis undertaken by Rodríguez troubles the detective fiction genre, which would normally not allow for the crossing of such worlds. Finally, this unsettling of the narrative layers enable Rodríguez to make metafictional commentary on the functioning of hypertext narrative, yet he does so not to remain on the level of literary play. Rather, his playing with the stability of the victim, his blurring of narrative layers, and his metafictional commentaries serve to implicate the reader-player within the narrative world. That is, if we too become part of the narrative world, then we too are implicated as villainous and as complicit within this narrative; we thus become part of the violent system against which Rodríguez’s narrative levels its condemnation.

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Digital Death: The Classic Modus Operandi? In the third section, ‘Digital Death’, our role again swaps, and the reader-­ user is explicitly figured in the role of journalist investigating the death of Amaury, with the task of discovering information, finding suspects, and interviewing them. The opening screen displays a backdrop no longer of a hospital room with the bed in the foreground, but instead the outlines of an office with a desk, computer chair, computer, and screen. This opening panorama is of course another of Rodríguez’s metatextual nods, since the scenario we see depicted on-screen is likely to mirror that in which we find ourselves off-screen: sitting at our computer, reading this hypermedia novel (see Fig. 4.2). On-screen instructions inform us that we are entering the third world, and that ‘Within it the enigmas will be resolved. Who tried to kill Amaury? Why did they do it? Find it out; you have now been given the powers of police investigation.’25 Again, we are presented with the

Fig. 4.2  Jaime Alejandro Rodríguez, Coup de Grace (2006), ‘Digital Death’ 25  In the original Spanish this reads: ‘En él se resuelven los enigmas: ¿Quién atentó contra Amaury? ¿Por qué lo hizo? Averígualo, estás dotado ahora del poder de la indagación policíaca’.

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entrance into this section of the work by means of instructions given to us in the second person. After the second world which figured us as Amaury, the victim himself, we now switch roles again, and take on the role of police investigation. Of course, again, these instructions are meta-discursive, since we are explicitly informed that the powers of the detective have now been transferred to us, with ‘powers’ also recalling computer game terminology. Clicking on the arrow to the bottom right of these instructions launches an animation, consisting of a computer-generated video of an office, visually very similar to the opening backdrop. We zoom in and across the office in the animation, coming to rest momentarily on various points of interest, including files, the computer, CD ROMs, and papers that emerge from a pinboard on the wall. Running over this animation is a sound file comprising a police car siren coupled with muffled, indistinguishable voices. As the animation comes to an end, further written instructions appear across the main panel of the screen: Now you are a journalist investigating the crime of priest Amaury Gutiérrez. […]. The modus operandi you have decided to develop is the classic one: reveal the suspects, identify the guilty person, and uncover the criminal plan.26

The instructions given to us again guide us in our entrance to this section of the narrative/game, but are also deliberately self-reflexive. The fact that the modus operandi is classic makes a self-reflexive commentary on the whodunnit. We are, knowingly, taking on the steps as laid down in the classic whodunnit, and, indeed, the list that follows is precisely the steps taken in the formula for this genre. This self-reflexive commentary is once again one of the ways in which Rodríguez encourages us to question the structures of the narrative. Subsequently we are given our first objective: ‘discover the aim of the journalist’ with, again, a slippage in the grammatical person.27 Whereas the earlier instructions had informed us that ‘you are a journalist’, now we are told that we should ‘discover the aim of the journalist’ (my emphasis): that  In the original Spanish this reads: ‘Ahora eres un periodista que investiga el crimen del sacerdote Amaury Gutiérrez. […] el modus operandi que has decidido desarrollar es clásico: delatar a los posibles sospechosos, identificar al culpable, y develar el plan criminal’. 27  In the original Spanish this reads: ‘descubrir el objectivo del periodista’. 26

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is, although we are addressed in the second person in both sets of ­instructions, these fluctuate from positioning us as the journalist to being an external observer of the journalist. The screen is then filled with a static image of the office space, over which a sound file runs, comprised of the sound of typing on a keyboard and a telephone ringing in the background. We are told we need to explore the objects around the office, and have to do this against the clock, with two minutes allocated for each object. In this image of the office, some of the objects are interactive, these being the computer, the filing cabinet, the telephone, and the diary, and we must click on these objects to find out the key information held in each one of them. For example, with regard to the telephone, we are offered the option of five messages that have been left on the answering machine, and we have to identify which is the correct one that will provide us with a clue. For the computer, we have to work out which of the five files that appear is the one that we need to provide us with information about the crime. Similarly, from the filing cabinet, we are offered access to five files, and have to select which will be relevant, whilst for the diary, we have to work out which of the five appointments in the calendar is the one containing the relevant information to help us solve the crime. This self-­referential touch, with the files of the narrative referencing the files that make up this interactive work, is one further instance of Rodríguez’s metatextual commentary, as the elements within the story world that represent information sources (diegetic) become the interactive features by which we progress procedurally through the interface (extra-diegetic). Once we have amassed the correct pieces of information, section two of this world, entitled ‘suspects’, loads. The screen loads with instructions, informing us we are to travel by taxi to the places where the priest lived, and where the suspects are located. The instructions inform us that we have four powers, these being ‘Discard’, ‘Eloquence’, ‘Psychology’, and ‘Identification’, with, along the bottom of the screen, four tabs giving us access to four different locations: ‘priest’s house’ ‘parish house’ ‘church’ ‘classroom’.28 Clicking on each of these locations loads a new screen with a scenario set inside each of those locations.

 In the original Spanish these read: ‘Descarte, Elocuencia, Psicología and Identificación’ and ‘Casa cura/ casa barrio/ iglesia/ salón’. 28

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Once we access these tabs, it is significant that intertextual references are also clear in the composition of the scenes representing these venues, with Rodríguez deliberately aping immediately recognisable visual precedents. For example, the priest’s house opens with a scene depicting a table around which various figures are seated, with a text box providing a profile of each character, giving us their name, background, occupation, and their relationship to Amaury. Our reading of these profiles is sequential, as we progress through them by means of a forward arrow—we cannot choose the order in which we access them. The priest sits at the head of the table, towards the background of the screen and at its vanishing point; around him sit the other characters, who are all outlines, with their facial features, clothing, and other identifiable markers not distinguishable. It is worth noting that the composition of the scene is deliberately set up to ape the famous painting by Leonardo da Vinci, The Last Supper, with the priest as the central figure, at the focal point of the image, and the plates in front of each of the other characters.29 The figures to the left and right of the priest are all the suspects, and our role is to identify the culprit—the Judas figure—who killed him. The other three locales provide us, similarly, with key locations related to Amaury. The parish house is the local meeting place where parish meetings take place, and those seated around the table are various people within the parish. Again, the composition of the scene here positions Amaury in the centre of a dining table, around which the various suspects sit. The next locale depicts the classic décor of a church, with our perspective looking from the main entrance of the church along the nave towards the altar. The suspects are sitting in the pews on either side of the nave, facing forwards, with their backs to us; again, they are outlines, and we cannot see their features. Finally, the classroom is where Amaury teaches at the university, and is seen from a side view, with the students ranged in rows fac It is worth noting that da Vinci’s The Last Supper is one of the most parodied images in popular culture in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. From high-art films such as Luis Bunuel’s Viridiana (1961) which undertook a ‘perverse appropriation’ (Gutiérrez-Albilla 2005) of the Last Supper by recreating it with beggars, or Tomás Gutiérrez Alea’s La última cena (1976) which restaged The Last Supper with a slave plantation owner surrounded by his slaves in order to make ‘a profound statement about the role of Christianity in the history of slavery’ (Sundt 2009, p. 8), through to multiple citations in Hollywood movies and television series, The Last Supper has become one of the most immediately recognisable visual images, remobilised in a variety of contexts. 29

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ing the blackboard. In this scenario, we see Amaury himself represented on the screen, and the students sitting at their desks are the suspects. In each of the four scenarios we encounter, our procedure follows the same pattern—el modos operandi clásico, to paraphrase Rodríguez himself—as, in each case, we read each character profile in turn, and are then offered the ‘discard’ button which appears along the left side of the screen, allowing us to eliminate one suspect from our enquiries. We subsequently interrogate a number of the remaining suspects using the ‘eloquence’ button: this loads a pre-set question-and-answer between us and the character in question, again presented via a text box that appears on the screen. We then, via the ‘psychology’ button, are invited to identify two characters who are lying; and then, finally, this gives us access to the ‘identification’ button where we decide which of the suspects we wish to accuse of the crime. Our path through these sections—described as ‘powers’, using computer game terminology—is linear. For instance, we cannot progress onto interrogating the suspects until we have eliminated one of them from our enquiries; the ‘eloquence’ button does not appear until after we have used the ‘discard’ button. It is, indeed, a ‘classic’ modus operandi in that it is invariable, in the same way in which the detective fiction genre is seen as formulaic, and we are unable to deviate from the set patterns that structure this world. In this way, this third and final world enacts a series of metafictional commentaries that encourage us to question the workings of the detective fiction genre as much as comply with it blindly. Rodríguez both establishes the question-driven nature of detective fiction and, at the same time, positions us ambiguously in relation to it. In addition to this, this world, as with the other three worlds of Coup de Grace, enacts a slippage in the positioning of the reader-user, leading us to question our own role within the narrative—and, by extension, our own role within the perpetuation of violent systems. In summary, in Golpe de gracia it is in the potentials of digital technologies, and at the point of intersection of the whodunnit and the cadavre exquis where Rodríguez engages in innovative experimentations. Rodríguez makes use of the potentialities that digital formats afford in order to revisit and revitalise prior literary paradigms, and engages in a self-conscious commentary on the whodunnit format that he mobilises.

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Particularly notable in Rodríguez’s work is his blurring of boundaries between narrative levels, and his questioning some of the standard f­ eatures, such as stability of character or cause–effect relationship, that are so central to the detective fiction genre that he mobilises. This narrative metalepsis, shape-shifting, and instability of reader positionality enable Rodríguez, I argue, to undertake his critique of systematic violence, as much as maintaining the focus on individual acts of violence. Through the shifting victim, whose roles represent institutions, and whose acts turn out to be those of perpetrator as much as victim, Rodríguez questions the narrative thrust of detective fiction as one focused on identifying the single violent actor. Instead, his metatextual, ludic detective story (partially) turns our attention to institutionalised violence, and also troubles some of the standard features of the genre itself.

Works Cited Aarseth, Espen J. 1997. Cybertext: Perspectives on Ergodic Literature. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. Adamowicz, Elza. 1998. Surrealist Collage in Text and Image: Dissecting the Exquisite Corpse. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Adorno, Theodor W. 1991. The Culture Industry: Selected Essays on Mass Culture. Edited and with introduction by J.M. Bernstein. London: Routledge. Adorno, Theodor W., and Max Horkheimer. 1997. Dialectic of Enlightenment. London: Verso. Ascari, Maurizio. 2007. A Counter-History of Crime Fiction: Supernatural, Gothic, Sensational. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Bell, Alice. 2016. Interactional Metalepsis and Unnatural Narratology. Narrative 24 (3): 294–310. Borges, Jorge Luis. 1979. Oral. Buenos Aires: Emecé Editores. Borràs, Laura, Talan Memmott, Rita Raley, and Brian Stefans, eds. 2011. Electronic Literature Collection. Vol. 2. Cambridge, MA: Electronic Literature Organization. http://collection.eliterature.org/2/. Breton, André. 2008. Le cadavre exquis, son exaltation. In Œuvres complètes, vol. IV, 698–702. Paris: Gallimard. Ciccoricco. 2007. Reading Network Fiction. Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press. Cohn, Dorrit. 2012. Metalepsis and Mise en Abime. Translated by Lewis S. Gleich. Narrative 20 (1): 106–114. Crogan, Patrick. 2007. Playing Through: The Future of Alternative and Critical Game Projects. In Worlds in Play: International Perspectives on Computer

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Games Research, ed. Suzanne de Castell and Jennifer Jenson, 87–100. New York: Peter Lang. Engels, Frederick. 2000. Condition of the Working Class in England. London: ElecBook. Galtung, Johan. 1969. Violence, Peace and Peace Research. Journal of Peace Research 6 (3): 167–191. Gutiérrez, Juan B. 1997. El primer vuelo de los hermanos Wright. Accessed December 5, 2014. http://www.literatronica.com/wright/el_primer_ vuelo.htm. Gutiérrez-Albilla, Julian Daniel. 2005. Picturing the Beggars in Luis Bunuel’s Viridiana: A Perverse Appropriation of Leonardo da Vinci’s Last Supper. Journal of Romance Studies 5 (2): 59–73. Hayles, N. Katherine. 2008. Electronic Literature: New Horizons for the Literary. Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press. Hühn, Peter. 1987. The Detective as Reader: Narrativity and Reading Concepts in Detective Fiction. Modern Fiction Studies 33 (3): 451–466. Jahn-Sudmann, Andreas. 2008. Innovation NOT Opposition the Logic of Distinction of Independent Games. Eludamos: Journal for Computer Game Culture 2: 5–10. Klein, Kathleen Gregory. 1995. The Woman Detective: Genre and Gender. Urbana: University of Illinois Press. Kline, Stephen, Nick Dyer-Witheford, and Greig de Peuter. 2003. Digital Play: The Interaction of Technology, Culture, and Marketing. Montréal: McGillQueen’s University Press. Knight, Stephen. 1980. Form and Ideology in Crime Fiction. London: Macmillan. Kochhar-Lindgren, Kanta. 2002. Towards a Communal Body of Art: The Exquisite Corpse and Augusto Boal’s Theatre. Angelaki: Journal of the Theoretical Humanities 7 (1): 217–226. Kochhar-Lindgren, Kanta, Davis Schneidermann, and Tom Denlinger, eds. 2010. The Exquisite Corpse: Chance and Collaboration in Surrealism’s Parlor Game. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press. Landow, George P. 1992. Hypertext: The Convergence of Contemporary Critical Theory and Technology. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. Lutas, Liviu. 2011. Narrative Metalepsis in Detective Fiction. In Metalepsis in Popular Culture, ed. Karin Kukkonen and Sonja Klimek, 41–64. Berlin: de Gruyter. Mateas, Michael. 2004. A Preliminary Poetics for Interactive Drama and Games. In First Person: New Media as Story, Performance, and Game, ed. Noah Wardrip-­ Fruin and Pat Harrigan, 19–33. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Mbembe, Achile. 2001. On the Postcolony. Berkeley: University of California Press. McHale, Brian. 1987. Postmodernist Fiction, 1987. New York: Methuen.

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Merivale, Patricia, and Susan Elizabeth Sweeney. 1999. The Game’s Afoot: On the Trail of the Metaphysical Detective Story. In Detecting Texts: The Metaphysical Detective Story from Poe to Postmodernism, ed. Patricia Merivale and Susan Elizabeth Sweeney, 1–24. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. Miller, Paul D. 2010. Totems without Taboos: The Exquisite Corpse. In The Exquisite Corpse: Chance and Collaboration in Surrealism’s Parlor Game, ed. Kanta Kochhar-Lindgren, Davis Schneidermann, and Tom Denlinger, ix–xv. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press. Murray, Janet H. 1997. Hamlet on the Holodeck: the Future of Narrative in Cyberspace. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Nickerson, Catherine Ross. 2010. Introduction: The Satisfactions of Murder. In The Cambridge Companion to American Crime Fiction, ed. Catherine Ross Nickerson. Cambridge: CUP. Norman, Taryn. 2016. Gothic Stagings: Surfaces and Subtexts in the Popular Modernism of Agatha Christie’s Hercule Poirot Series. Gothic Studies 18 (1): 85–99. Perlin, Ken. 2004. Can There Be a Form between a Game and a Story? In First Person: New Media as Story, Performance, and Game, ed. Noah Wardrip-Fruin and Pat Harrigan, 12–18. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Rodríguez, Jaime Alejandro. 2005. Gabriella infinita. Accessed December 9, 2014. http://www.javeriana.edu.co/gabriella_infinita/principal.htm. ———. 2006. Golpe de gracia. Accessed October 30, 2017. http://collection. eliterature.org/2/works/rodriguez_golpe_de_gracia/. ———. 2007. Narrativa, juego y conocimiento. La iniciativa digital en acción en Golpe de gracia. Cuadernos de literatura 12: 103–114. Romero López, Dolores. 2012. Poetics of Crisis or Crisis of Poetics in Digital Reading/Writing? The Case of Spanish Digital Literature. Literary and Linguistic Computing 27 (3): 305–320. Ryan, Marie-Laure. 2004. Will New Media Produce New Narratives? In Narrative Across Media: The Languages of Storytelling, ed. Marie-Laure Ryan. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press. ———. 2016. Digital Narrative: Negotiating a Path between Experimental Writing and Popular Culture. Comparative Critical Studies 13 (3): 331–352. Sassón-Henry, Perla. 2012. Golpe de gracia: más allá de la trama. In XVIII Simposio de la SELGYC, ed. Rafael Alemany Ferrer and Francisco Chico Rico, 315–326. Alicante: Universitat d’Alacant. Sundt, Catherine. 2009. Religion and Power: The Appropriation of da Vinci’s The Last Supper in Viridiana and La última cena. Romance Notes 49 (1): 71–79.

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Tani, Stefano. 1984. The Doomed Detective: The Contribution of the Detective Novel to Postmodern American and Italian Fiction. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press. Taylor, Claire. 2010. De Macondo a Macon.doc: Ficción hipermedia hispanoamericana contemporánea. Arizona Journal of Hispanic Cultural Studies 14: 197–215. Taylor, Claire, and Thea Pitman. 2012. Latin American Identity in Online Cultural Production. New York: Routledge. Todorov, Tzvetan. 1997. The Poetics of Prose. Translated by Richard Howard. Ithaca: Cornell. Wilson, Laetitia J. 2006. Encountering the Unexpected: Play Perversion in the Political Art-game and Game-art. In Proceedings of the 2006 International Conference on Game Research and Development, 269–274, Perth. Žižek, Slavoj. 2006. Against the Populist Temptation. Critical Inquiry 32 (3): 551–574.

CHAPTER 5

Animating the Baroque and Resisting the Brand: Belén Gache’s Góngora Word Toys (2011) and Radical Karaoke (2011) (Spain-­ Argentina) This chapter studies the work of one of the most innovative electronic literary authors in the Spanish-speaking world: the Argentine-Spanish author Belén Gache. I undertake a detailed analysis of the negotiations between literary genres and digital technologies in two of her recent electronic poetic pieces, Góngora Word Toys and Radikal Karaoke, both from 2011. Regarding Góngora Word Toys, I firstly demonstrate how the pieces within this collection engage with a particular element of or extracts from Góngora’s Solitudes, and then rework Góngora’s text in a variety of ways, through remixings, visualisations, animations, and interactions with the reader-user. Taking specific individual word toys as examples, I elucidate how her interactive poems engage in a playful and yet creative poetic practice, and I demonstrate how the Gongoran techniques that she identifies and overtly admires find their parallels in contemporary literary-digital experimentation. In so doing, I do not suggest that Gache advocates digital technologies as the teleological end point of literary experimentation; rather, as I illustrate, her poetic play engages in a questioning of the very same technologies she employs, and her poems demonstrate how many of the much-vaunted features of digital technologies not only have their roots in a much longer pre-digital tradition, but also, more importantly, have their own limitations. The chapter subsequently moves on to an analysis of Radikal Karaoke, an online piece combining text, still and moving images, sound files, and user-activated effects. Here, the chapter elucidates how this poetry © The Author(s) 2019 C. Taylor, Electronic Literature in Latin America, New Directions in Latino American Cultures, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-30988-6_5

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c­ollection works via the recycling of platitudes and commonplaces that characterise corporate branding, trademark symbols, slogans, and rhetorical phrases. In my analysis, I demonstrate how this work provides a condemnation of the encroaching powers of corporate giants and of the structures of faceless corporate capitalism. Through a detailed analysis of the features of this work, I reveal how Gache plays with the norms of interactive literature, breaking the fourth wall to bring us directly into the game, and so encouraging us to reflect upon our imbrication not only in the game, but also in the system of global corporatism. I thus contend that Gache undertakes a defetishising process, aiming to unmask and denaturalise the hegemonic discourses of corporate capital, strip away the fetishistic aura of the brand, and enable her reader-player to see through the spectacle. The chapter concludes by arguing for an understanding of Gache’s revitalising pre-digital literary formats by their intermingling with the digital, yet not to posit digital technologies as the culmination and utopian realisation of literary goals, but rather to critique the very workings of these technologies. Belén Gache is one of the leading authors of experimental fiction in the Hispanic world and has published to date a variety of literary works, both print and electronic, that engage in experimental practice. Her oeuvre includes electronic poetry, blog diaries, video poetry, and hypertext fictions, as well as other works that cross generic boundaries. Her print texts include the novels Indian Moon (1994), Divine Anarchy (1999), Electric Moons for Moonless Nights (2004), and the collections of short stories and experimental writings, The Book of the End of the World (2002) and The Universal History Notebook (2009).1 Her literary blogs include Bubble Boy Diary (2004), which comprises 100 blog posts based on images selected at random using an image search engine, and Dream Blog, a blog in which Gache recorded her dreams between 2007 and 2008.2 Her video poetry consists of a series of performances of the work of major poets, whilst her hypertext literature includes Word Toys (2006b), containing fourteen individual short fictions which combine images, text, and sound, and several pieces which defy easy categorisation, such as her recent Word Market 1  Several of the short pieces included in El libro del fin del mundo subsequently reappear as interactive pieces in her online collection, Word Toys (2006b). 2  The titles of these works in the original Spanish are Luna india, Divina anarquía, Lunas eléctricas para las noches sin luna, El libro del fin del mundo, Cuaderno de historia universal, Diario del niño burbuja and El blog de los sueños.

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(2012), an online piece that invites users to buy and sell words over the internet. Gache’s works of electronic poetry include Robot Manifestos (2009), in which audio poems are generated by a system that searches for keywords on the internet and then verbalises them using prerecorded phonemes3; and the two works under consideration in this chapter, Radikal Karaoke (2011b) and Góngora Word Toys (2011a). A founder member of the Fin del mundo net.art group, along with Jorge Haro, Gustavo Romano, and Carlos Triknick, Gache has also been involved in curatorial projects as part of this group, as well as contributing significantly to theoretical writings on experimental literature and digital forms.4 Gache’s oeuvre is frequently characterised by a play with pre-existing literary genres, authors, and texts. From her reworkings of the diary format in her blog-based works to her Word Toys which engage with diverse sources ranging from the poetry of Raymond Queneau to Cervantes’s Don Quijote, Gache’s works engage in intertextual play, dialoguing with and providing meta-literary commentaries on a range of genres and texts. This intertextual play and meta-literary commentary are conceived by Gache as existing in creative parallel with the play with digital technologies that she undertakes throughout her work. In interviews and in her theoretical writings, Gache has often commented on the fruitful connections between the features offered by modern digital technologies, such as hyperlinking or multisequentiality, and prior, pre-digital forms of literary experimentation. For instance, in her book-length study of 2006, Gache focuses on nonlinear writing, and provides multiple examples across the ages of writing that has attempted to negate or disrupt linearity. As an opening premise to this study, Gache sets out the claim that Even if electronic writing devices allow us to reach unforeseen dimensions in writing strategies, such as the non-linearity of plot, interactivity, or the  The title in the original Spanish is Manifiestos Robot.  See, for instance, her 2006 volume, Escrituras nómades, in which she undertakes a detailed survey of experimental literary forms from the renaissance to contemporary digital literature; her 2006 article ‘La poética visual’ (2006c), which sets out visual poetry in its historical context, making particular reference to the avant-garde of the early twentieth century; and her chapter in Romano (2008), entitled ‘De poemas no humanos y cabezas parlantes’, which discusses the development of IP poetry within the context of poetic traditions, identifying a variety of precursors, including the automatons with which Descartes and his contemporaries were so fascinated. 3 4

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possibility of dealing with a union between different semiotic systems (linguistic, visual, and phonic), these types of experiences are not new in the literary field. From the Carmina Figurata to dadaist poems, from Lawrence Sterne’s Tristam Shandy to Raymound Roussel’s African voyages, from Mallarmé’s ‘A Dice Throw’ to the nouveau roman, from Joycean verbal-­ visuality to concretism, from Velemir Khlebnikov’s invented languages to Fluxus’s event scores, many have searched for ways of saying and narrating that escape canonical models and linguistic norms. (Gache 2006a, p. 17)5

Setting out from this premise, Gache’s study then provides a myriad of examples of such experimental writing as, ranging from collage to hieroglyphics, she demonstrates a wealth of pre-digital writing techniques that have provided ways of overturning or experimenting with established literary norms. Throughout this book, thus, Gache reminds us that nonlinear, multisequential narrative formats are not exclusive to the much-vaunted arrival of digital technologies, but have a rich literary heritage. This dual focus—on experimental literary form and on digital technologies—is one which marks Gache’s creative output as much as her theoretical writings. Yet, as this chapter will reveal, this does not mean that Gache posits digital technologies as the culmination of a literary trajectory, or as the utopian answer to the limitations of textual culture. Rather, Gache’s work is marked by a concern for the uses of new media technologies and, I contend, often the most creative moments of Gache’s oeuvre come about in the creative tensions between digital technologies and experimental literary practice. Far from seeing digital technologies as the ultimate realisation of a prior literary tradition, as the answer to the shortcomings and limitations of the printed page, Gache often directs our attention to the failings of digital technologies themselves, and attempts to awaken the reader-viewer to the potential for sinister manipulation of these technologies. 5  In the original Spanish this reads: ‘Si bien los dispositivos electrónicos de escritura permiten alcanzar dimensiones antes no previstas en estrategias escriturales, tales como la no linealidad de las tramas, la interactividad o la posibilidad de abordar la unión entre diferentes sistemas semióticos (lingüístico, visual y fónico), este tipo de experiencias no son nuevas en el campo literario. Desde los Carmina Figurata hasta los poemas dadá, desde el Tristam Shandy de Lawrence Sterne hasta los viajes africanos de Raymond Roussel, desde el Coup de dés de Mallarmé hasta el Nouveau Roman, desde la verbivocovisualidad joyciana hasta el concretismo, desde los lenguajes inventados por Velemir Khlebnikov hasta los event scores de Fluxus, se han buscado formas de decir y de narrar que escapen de los modelos canónicos y automatismos lingüísticos’.

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Góngora Word Toys: Baroque Excess Meets Animation The first of the works under consideration in this chapter, Góngora Word Toys, is described by Gache as interactive digital poetry (Gache 2011a, n.p.), and consists of five individual interactive poems, each of which engages with a particular element of or extracts from Góngora’s Solitudes,6 and which reworks Góngora’s text in a variety of ways, through remixings, visualisations, animations, and interactions with the reader-user. In her brief description of the work on her website, Gache highlights the significance that Góngora has for her and for her poetic practice, stating that ‘in the Baroque period, the balanced classical world gives way to an unstable, decentred world, hidden behind an excess of signs’ (Gache 2011a, n.p.).7 For Gache, then, the value of Góngora’s literary practice lies in its playing with form, in its destabilisation of norms, and in the excess of the signifier, all elements which, as we shall see, come to the fore in Gache’s own poetic practice. The presentation screen of Góngora Word Toys opens on a black background, over which the title appears, with the majority of the screen space occupied by a computer-generated graphic of a tree, composed of large blocks of pixels, with little subtlety and crude outlines. Gache here employs a recognisable retro aesthetic, deliberately aping 1970s-style old computer games in which the hardware restrictions of early game consoles meant that graphical elements had to be created from pixel blocks. I argue that in this interface Gache references this earlier era of video games in a nostalgic nod, but also a deliberate rejection of the latest high-tech graphics.8 6  It is worth noting that Góngora’s Solitudes is, in itself, a work which abounds with rich intertextual references. As Rodrigo Cacho Casal notes, in the Solitudes, Góngora ‘imitate[d] classical, Italian, and Spanish authors, borrowing from their images, topics and leitmotifs’ (Cacho Casal 2007, p.  435), and he identifies Iacopo Sannazaro’s Arcadia of 1504 as a particularly important intertext (which, in its turn, was conceived of as ‘a learned combination of different sources’) (Cacho Casal 2007, p. 436). 7  In the original Spanish this reads: ‘en el período barroco, el equilibrado mundo clásico deja lugar a un mundo inestable, descentrado, escondido tras el abigarramiento de los signos’ (Gache 2011a, n.p.). 8  It is worth noting how this particular aesthetic is immediately recognisable as a reference to a prior era of gaming and is imbued with nostalgia; for more on this aesthetic, see, for example, Gaughen, who analyses the current vogue for vintage video games as offering a ‘nostalgic experience of playing video games from the 1970s and 80s’ (Gaughen 2014, p. 25) and Montfort and Bogost, who argue that the Atari console is ‘a retro fetish object and a focus of nostalgia’ (Montfort and Bogost 2009, p. 6).

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On entering the main interface to the work, we are presented with a background displaying a repeated acanthus wallpaper repeated pattern, which again functions as a nostalgic recourse to a dated format. Here, Gache’s recourse to an outdated style, and also to a particular type of interior design—wallpaper, as opposed to, say, fabrics—immediately has resonances for the work we are about to enter. For, of course, ‘wallpaper’ has now, in modern parlance, become the term used to describe the desktop background images of the graphical user interface on a computer or similar device. Gache’s choice of a wallpaper style with such a long history means that she is reminding us of the original meaning of the term, and also is pointing back towards a long heritage—one of the central concerns of her oeuvre as a whole, and which comes to the fore in the content of Góngora Word Toys. Over this background, we see the image of four books, only one of which is visible in its entirety, with the three partially seen books all apparently the same, bearing the title Lunar Society: Expanded Literature.9 The one book that we can see fully is entitled Góngora Word Toys and is, hence, the ‘book’ we are about to enter. Clicking on the book jacket then opens the work; as we do so, a brief sound file is activated, sounding like the noise as of clicking or flicking forward, establishing a parallel between the clicking of a mouse and the flicking forward of the pages of a book. At the same time, visually, the front cover peels over and the ‘book’ opens. As with Gache’s earlier Word Toys (2006b), the conceit here is as if opening a book, indicating the complex dialogue that this work maintains with print history, and yet at the same time, each individual ‘chapter’ within the book functions in ways which do not follow a conventional reading pattern, as I shall demonstrate below. The first page on which this ‘book’ opens is entitled ‘Dedicatoria espiral’ and launches, as with all other pieces in this collection, an opening page to the work. A repeated icon of a spiral fills the left-hand page whilst the right-hand page carries the title and a sequence of texts in white writing on a black background, presented not in linear format but in a spiral. The spiral begins somewhere beyond screen space, such that we cannot 9  In the original Spanish this reads: Sociedad lunar: Literatura expandida. It is worth noting that the moon is a central image in Gache’s other works, including her collection of short stories Indian Moon (1994), her 2004 novel Electric Moons for Moonless Nights, and the chapter ‘Vampire Women Invade Colonia del Sacremento’ in her Word Toys (2006b), amongst others.

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Fig. 5.1  Belén Gache, Góngora Word Toys (2011a), ‘Spiral Dedication’

see the start of the text, nor, indeed, all of the letters in the outer part of the spiral. As such, both in its direction and in its presentation partially within and partially beyond screen space, the text is deliberately difficult to read, and impossible to grasp in its entirety. In terms of its formal aspects, the presentation of the text is clearly caligramme-esque, in that the arrangement of the letters on the page serves a communicative purpose, conveying, via the image they create, the meaning of the text, and thus dialoguing with a rich Hispanic tradition of caligramas or visual poetry, spearheaded most notably by Chilean poet Vicente Huidobro (see Fig. 5.1).10 Clicking on the image of the spiral of words then loads the introductory page to this piece, which again appears in a pop-up window, and provides a thumbnail image of the same spiral, and an explanatory text. In 10  Huidobro’s poems, composed during the 1910s, 1920s, and 1930s, undertook a process of textual disruption and challenge to typographical norms, in which, in the words of Vásquez, ‘the linguistic and the graphic make the most of the combinatory possibilities offered by the printed page’ (Vásquez 1998–1999, p.  1224)—an analysis which gives an indication of Huidobro’s experimentation with combinatory possibilities, all the while within the confines of the printed page. Interestingly, D’Asprer traces the antecedents of Huidobro’s poemas pintados even further back, and finds traces of them in the Middle Ages and even in ancient Greece, arguing that ‘as a genre, they have remote predecessors that range from the technopaegnia of Ancient Greece, or the Carmina figurata of the Middle Ages, up to modern experiences’ (D’Asprer 2011, p. 97).

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this introductory text, Gache explains that her poem ‘wordtoy’ is based on Góngora’s dedication of the Solitudes to Alonso Diego López de Zúñiga y Sotomayor, and then proceeds to draw out the significance of Góngora for her work. Gache’s predilection for the Baroque and her choice of Góngora as intertext for her work come to the fore when she argues that ‘Baroque art rejects forms that invoke the inert and the permanent, given that its aesthetic is multiform and plural: in the Baroque, open forms replace closed ones that were intrinsic to classicism, and the ellipsis and the spiral displace the circle’ (Gache 2011a, n.p.).11 For Gache, thus, the spiral stands as an image of literary experimentation, for the nonlinear, for the multiple, and for open-endedness: in short, for the characteristics that Gache identifies in electronic literature. The spiral, in its refusal to abide by literary or grammatical norms is representative of Góngora; it is at the same time representative of the spiralling, arabesque style of the opening wallpaper; and it is also, just as importantly, representative of the open-­ endedness and of the experimental potential that is made more possible by digital technologies, but for which Góngora and others had laid the foundations. Subsequently, Gache gives examples of other formats in the works of other authors, painters, and filmmakers, first making reference to Velázquez’s Las meninas (1656), one of the most famous paintings of Spain’s Golden Age. Although she does not elaborate on the spiral format in this painting, I contend that we can understand the spiral in relation to Velázquez from the work of Michel Foucault, whose first chapter of The Order of Things (1966) provided a meticulous analysis of Las meninas. In this chapter, Foucault argued that the entire painting was structured in a spiral format which, in itself, offered the ‘entire cycle of representation’ (Foucault 2002, p. 12). Foucault’s detailed tracing of the spiral allows him to conclude that this painting is a representation of a representation, and that Las meninas is thus a self-reflexive meditation on representation itself. Regarding the second of the literary precedents identified by Gache— Cervantes’s Don Quijote—we can assume that, whilst not explicitly stated by Gache, the spiral in this context refers to the spiralling of authors and texts in this monumental novel. Cervantes’s chain of authors and texts 11  In the original Spanish this reads: ‘el arte barroco rechaza las formas que remitían a lo inerte y lo permanente, siendo su estética multiforme y plural: en el barroco, las formas abiertas reemplazan a las cerradas, propias del clasicismo, y la elipsis y la espiral desplazan al círculo’ (Gache 2011a, n.p.).

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involves the tale of a man who attempted to live his life via the codes of a pre-existing literary genre (that of chivalric literature), whose telling is relayed through the fictional author figure of Cide Hamete Benengeli, which is then problematised by a potentially unreliable (fictional) translator and framed via a metafictional prologue. It is, thus, a novel structured around a recursive chain of fictional author figures and plagued with ‘phantom pre-texts’ (Johnson 2007). This is then followed by references to Alfred Jarry and to Duchamp’s Anemic Cinema, and also to the modernist poet Ezra Pound and his essay ‘Vortex. Pound’. Published in the magazine BLAST in 1914, and largely credited with coining the term ‘Vorticism’, Pound’s essay advocates a new form of poetic creation in which the vortex is conceived of as the ‘point of maximum energy’ (Pound 1914, pp. 153–154), and in which geometric space becomes central to the way in which poetry functions. Interestingly, Pound’s theories here have been analysed as presenting the theoretical grounding for digital poetry avant la lettre, with Lori Emerson arguing that Pound’s early writings on the geometrical theories of space and their relevance for poetic creation provide us with a ‘model for the new “hyperspace poetics” emerging in the early twenty-first [century]’ (Emerson 2009, p. 165). Here, Emerson argues that Pound’s advocation of emergent, flexible poetics that foregrounds spatiality ‘prefigures certain digital poems’ (Emerson 2009, p. 165). Finally, Gache’s mention of pataphysics refers once again to the French writer Jarry, and his invented ‘science’ of pataphysics, defined as the ‘science of imaginary solutions’ (Jarry 1965, p. 86). Characterised by irreverence, puns, and double entendres, Jarry’s pataphysics promoted a rejection of existing laws and norms. From this eclectic mix of literary forebears, Gache draws out the radical potential of the spiral, its ability to challenge accepted norms of linearity, and its symbolic use to convey notions existing beyond the rational mind. With these introductory paragraphs in mind, we then click on the thumbnail image of the spiral, which loads the chapter itself. The full spiral now fills the screen, and, as soon as we move our cursor over the image, the text is animated and starts constantly moving, spinning at a dizzying rate. The visual parallels with the Duchamp film are clear, since Gache’s text is written in a spiral form, and constantly spins inwards and outwards, in the same way that Duchamp’s puns did.12 That said, the innovation in 12  Duchamp’s film Anemic Cinema (1926) was an experimental film depicting animated drawings of spirals, interspersed with puns in French, also written in spiral form and ani-

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Gache’s practice is that she has made user interaction an integral part of her animation since, in Gache’s version, the user moves the cursor to speed up the spinning words. Although we are not provided with any instructions, playing around with the cursor eventually leads us to discover that the closer we place our cursor to the outer edge of the screen, the faster the spiral spins; the closer we place it to the centre, the slower the spinning becomes. The spinning text itself is Góngora’s dedication from the Solitudes, although Gache has played with and deliberately distorted the text in its animation. Firstly, that several of the words in the outer edges of the spiral cannot be seen in their entirety, and the fact that, as they spin around the rectangular screen, they move in and out of view, means that we cannot ever grasp the text in its entirety. Some words are always missing, and thus our access to the text is always only partial. Secondly, the vertiginous spinning of the text disrupts our conventional reading patterns: if we wish to decipher what appears on the screen, we must always tilt our head to an awkward angle, attempting to grasp momentarily what flashes before our eyes in an instant. Thirdly, the order of the lines themselves is reworked. The original dedication starts with the famous lines ‘Steps of a wandering pilgrim are these,/the verses my sweet muse dictated to me’, yet, when we first open Gache’s chapter, these opening lines are hard to find.13 In Gache’s version, these opening lines are to be found, after some searching, not at the start of the spiral but towards its centre. The sequence of the lines, thus, does not follow the original sequence of Góngora’s text, but instead, these lines are moved around to create a new text. These three techniques combined make the reading experience highly challenging for the reader and here, I argue, Gache is attempting to re-­ create for us the vertiginous sensation that the seventeenth-century reader must have had when faced with Góngora’s poetry. Everything is not how mated. Nico Israel, in a book-length study on the image of the whirl in twentieth-century literature and art, notes Duchamp’s fascination with spirals in a large number of his works, including his Rotary Demispheres series, and identifies Anemic Cinema as the work which ‘most directly reveal[s] the function of spirality in Duchamp’s broader project, blending as it does aspects of Dada and Surrealism’, illustrating how this film demonstrates ‘the strategies that Duchamp employs to challenge ‘“retinality” (the way images hit the eye) with language’ (Israel 2015, pp. 115–116). 13  I cite here from the published English translation by Edith Grossman (2011), and I cite from this edition hereafter. The verses in the original Spanish read ‘Pasos de un peregrino son errante,/ cuantos me dictó versos dulce Musa’.

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we expect it to be: the conventional linear reading of the text is disrupted; words are slippery; the text constantly moves off the page, and refuses to be fixed. Góngora’s stylistic excess, his complex metaphors, his overturning of the norms of syntax, his use of catachresis and his neologisms are, I contend, conveyed in Gache’s version by a parallel experimentation with the typographical, visual, and procedural presentation of the words across the screen. If, as Marsha S. Collins has summed up, in Góngora’s deliberately difficult poetic style, ‘the poet saturates the text with rhetorical figures, heaps elaborate conceit upon elaborate conceit, contorts syntax with hyperbata, interrupts narrative flow with ellipses, and bombards his audience nonstop with synesthetic effects and allusions to classical myth’ (Collins 2002, p.  2), then Gache attempts to re-create some of this difficulty, in the twenty-first century, via the digital transformations enacted upon text. Gache’s technique here arguably stands for the poetic style of Góngora: for the constant slippage of the signifier in Góngora, for words that constantly refer, not to an external signified, but to another, slippery, signifier. Following on from this poem, the next in Góngora Word Toys is entitled ‘In a Small Space a Lot of Spring’, taking its title from lines 337–340 of the Second Solitude, the section of the poem that portrays the small island community of fishermen, and describes ‘this spot the six fair sisters/have chosen, violating/ in a small space a large portion of spring/with their tables’.14 Described by John Beverley as one of several phrases in the Second Solitude that ‘emblematize the pastoral ideal of mediocritas’ (Beverley 1980, p. 48), the phrase conveys an ideal that is constantly called into question throughout the poem. As Beverley and others have observed, for Góngora the pastoral is a ‘dream of a refuge from history’, and is but a ‘fiction of psychic wholeness’ (Beverley 2008, p. 32 and p. 34). It is thus a line resonant with fictionality and, as with other word toys in this collection, Gache uses this particular line from Góngora as a starting point, in order to then engage in an exploration of literary allusiveness, the function of the signifier, and the potentials (and limitations) of digital technologies. The opening pages to this poem ‘wordtoy’ comprise on the left a mosaic format with a repeated image of the sun and, on the right, the title, below which lies an image of a computer pop-up window. The browser name ‘Mozilla firefox’ is visible in the top left of the window, whilst to the 14  In the original Spanish this reads: ‘este sitio las seis bellas hermanas/ escogen, agraviando/en breve espacio mucha primavera/con las mesas’.

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top right we see the minimise, maximise, and close buttons. The main part of this window-within-a-window has a yellow background with a short back text, with one of the words in blue and underlined: ‘no less adorned than blooms’.15 These opening pages immediately present us with an indication of the metatextual game that Gache will play within this wordtoy. That the frame of the computer screen we are viewing as we access this work contains the frame of the pages of a book, which itself then contains the frame of a computer pop-up window indicates to us how Gache will be undertaking a metatextual investigation within this piece. The conceit of the frame-­ within-­a frame mirrors the Gongoran technique of the metaphor-within-­ the-metaphor; of the continually allusive textual play; of, in the words of Collins, the ‘elaborate grafting of several systems of connections onto one another and the mixing of their constituent parts in a hybrid metasystem of meaning’ that characterises Góngora’s poetic style (Collins 2002, p. 135). The notion, therefore, of Góngora’s poetry as allusive, as setting up metaphors that refer to other metaphors, and of drawing the reader into a rich web of intertextual allusions is represented here by Gache’s mise-en-abîme. The phrase that sits within this window-within-a-window is derived from Góngora, although crucially, is itself a composite creation of Gache. That is, the phrase itself—‘no menos enramado que florido’—does not actually appear anywhere in the Solitudes (nor, indeed, elsewhere in Góngora’s oeuvre), but appears to be derived from three lines in the First Solitude which read: ‘her mother, no less adorned with blossoms,/ among the flageolets appears, along/ with youths bedecked by blooms’.16 What we see here in Gache’s work, thus, is a further level of literary reworkings and intertextual play, in that she has provided a mash-up of Góngora’s original lines. In the same way as with the first poem ‘wordtoy’, an introductory text again sets out Gache’s motivations in this piece, explaining that, in the works of Góngora: His aim, far from being to clarify the message through paraphrases, is to impress and to confuse with labyrinthine, complex, enigmatic, almost  In the original Spanish in Gache’s work this reads: ‘no menos enramado que florido’.  In the Spanish in Góngora’s original this reads: ‘de su madre, no menos enramada,/ entre albogues se ofrece, acompañada/de juventud florida’. 15 16

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impenetrable expressions. Thus Góngora’s verses are complex, ornate with alliterations, epithets, learned words and metaphors, allusions and elusions, mythological and cultural references. Recalling the Baroque-Leibnizian-­ Deleuzian fold, in a continual Baroque unfolding, signs proliferate into infinity, in an uncontrollable way. Meanwhile, the world itself is lost behind signs, which are excessive, amorphous, obscure, hidden, anamorphic and metaphoric. Everything folds, unfolds and refolds, and the world shatters into the multiplicity of all its possible representations.17

Gache’s introductory paragraph sets out for us here the intertextual and metatextual play that will be undertaken in this wordtoy, again using Góngora as the paradigm for her own twenty-first-century experimental practice. Gache first draws from Góngora’s culterano practice the deliberate attempt not to convey a clear message but instead to ‘confuse with labyrinthine, complex, enigmatic, almost impenetrable expressions’. The image here of the labyrinth will, as we discover, takes on particular importance in this wordtoy, as we negotiate the labyrinthine linkings that make up the work. Gache then relates this Gongoran technique to twentieth-­ century theory and philosophy, establishing a continuum stretching from the Gongoran Baroque through to twentieth-century philosophy by an implicit reference, with her mention of the ‘Baroque-Leibnizian-Deleuzian fold’ to Gilles Deleuze’s 1988 work, The Fold: Leibniz and the Baroque. In this work, Deleuze argued that the writings of the seventeenth-century mathematician and philosopher, Gottfried von Leibniz, provided the basis for an understanding of the Baroque, and yet also for an understanding of contemporary culture. Viewing the structure of the fold as the central point of his analysis, Deleuze states that ‘the baroque refers not to an essence but rather to an operative function, to a trait. It endlessly produces folds’ (Deleuze 1993, p.  3). If the fold, thus, stands for the Baroque ­layering of rhetorical excess upon rhetorical excess, this image in Gache’s work, I contend, will be played out through the layering of hotlinks and 17  In the original Spanish this reads: ‘Su meta, lejos de ser aclarar el mensaje mediante paráfrasis, es impresionar y confundir con expresiones laberínticas, complejas, cuasi-impenetrables, enigmáticas. Así, los versos de Góngora se presentan complejos, ornamentados mediante aliteraciones, epítetos, cultismos y metáforas, alusiones y elusiones, referencias mitológicas y culturales. Recordando al pliegue barroco-leibniziano-deleuziano, en un despliegue barroco constante, los signos proliferan al infinito, de manera incontrolable. Mientras tanto el mundo se pierde tras los signos, abigarrados, amorfos, oscuros, enmascarados, anamórficos y metamórficos. Todo se pliega, se despliega y se repliega y el mundo estalla en la multiplicidad de todas sus representaciones posibles. (Gache 2011a, n.p.)

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pop-up windows, as we shall see below. These terms thus reflect Gache’s own practice and her constant play with text, with intertextuality, and with metatextual commentary. Once entering this wordtoy proper, a pop-up window is launched with a bright yellow background, and only two words in the centre of the screen: ‘el sol’, with ‘sol’ underlined. The interactive element in this wordtoy lies in the ability of the user to click on the underlined word, which then activates a further window or windows. In this case, clicking on ‘sun’ loads a series of pop-up windows displaying different lexia: the word ‘sweet’, which is underlined; the phrase ‘so not scorned’, with ‘scorned’ underlined; and the phrase ‘de ‘master of many small ivory’ with ‘ivory’ underlined.18 Clicking on any of these links then launches further windows which, in turn, contain new lexia with links, and so forth. Gache’s wordtoy here leads us on an intertextual labyrinth, as we click on link after link, only to be constantly pointed towards a further signifier. Instead of each phrase linking to an external signified, or linking to the following line of poetry and so contextualising it within the poem, the individual phrases instead constantly link to other individual phrases. Here, I argue that Gache is drawing a parallel between Góngora’s techniques and the potential of contemporary digital technologies, in which hotlinking is reframed as a potentially Baroque technique. Constantly pointing us towards another signifier, the hotlink provides us with a twenty-first-century version of the intricate intertextual and self-referential literary techniques of the Baroque. Moreover, it is worth noting that the phrases that Gache has created in her hotlinking are mash-ups; just like the text provided in the first image, which was not a direct quotation from Góngora, but a remixing of words taken from lines of his Solitudes, so, too, the phrases employed within the work itself are not original citations. Thus ‘master of many small ivory’ does not exist as a phrase as such in the Solitudes, but in fact appears to be derived from the lines ‘master of many small realms’ from the Second Solitude and from two references to ‘ivory’ in the Second Solitude, the most relevant being ‘their beautiful limbs creating reefs of/ Parian marble or of smoothest ivory’.19 Similarly, the lexia to which it links—‘so not 18  In Gache’s original in Spanish these read: ‘sol’ ‘dulce’, ‘pues no desdeñado’, and ‘de muchos pocos de marfil dueño’. 19  In Góngora’s original in Spanish this reads: ‘haciendo escollos o de mármol pario o de terso marfil sus miembros bellos’.

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fallen in love with Leda’—again does not appear as such in the Solitudes, but is derived from multiple references to the figure of Leda throughout Góngora’s original.20 Gache has thus created a new line of poetry, derived from an intertextual play with Góngora’s work. Moreover, the links between the lexia themselves do not follow a logical pattern. That the ‘ivory’, underlined in this lexia, links to ‘so not fallen in love with Leda’ illustrates that Gache’s hotlinking is not intended to be understood as a straightforward explanatory mechanism. The lexia are neither linked through their location within the poem—that is, ‘ivory’ and ‘in love’ never appear together in the same line of the Solitudes—nor do they have any obvious semantic or grammatical similarity (‘ivory’ is not a synonym for ‘in love’, nor are they the same part of speech). There is, in other words, no immediately obvious connection between the first lexia and the one to which it then leads us. Gache’s technique here, in which she forces us to attempt to establish our own connections as we trace these deliberately difficult hotlinks, serves to imitate one of Góngora’s favoured literary techniques, that of catachresis.21 Catachresis, the figure of speech in which the terms of comparison are implausible, is here enacted for us via these hotlinks, which draw us from one term to another. Mimicking the ‘spiralling catachresis’ (Beverley 1980, p. 28) of Góngora’s work, in Gache the reader is forced to create a connection, as she/he traverses these links in which each lexicon links to a term that is apparently not connected. Thus, as with the ‘Spiral Dedication’ poem, ‘In a Small Space a Lot of Spring’ enacts for the twenty-first-century reader-user the complexities of Góngora’s poetry via the use of digital technologies. The act of clicking on a hyperlink, which then brings up yet another pop-up window, with a further phrase which, rather than succinctly explaining the previous hyperlink, instead brings up another, apparently disconnected phrase, means that Gache’s wordtoy, like Góngora’s poetic style, is far from straightforward or explanatory. Gache’s poem here enacts a form of catachresis for the twenty-first century, where hotlinks are employed to move us into a deferred chain of signifiers. Another poem in this collection, entitled ‘The Pilgrim’s Weeping’, again draws parallels between Baroque techniques and digital technolo In Gache’s original in Spanish this reads: ‘pues no de Leda enamorado’.  See Beverley for an overview of discussions of Góngora’s deliberately difficult style, including how catachresis was seen as ‘the paradigm of Góngora’s poetry’ (Beverley 1980, pp. 15–16). 20 21

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gies.22 In her introductory text to this piece, Gache highlights the Baroque as the ‘art of wandering’, and notes that she chose the figure of the pilgrim due to the fact that it is ‘nomadic, lost, anonymous and alien’, again indicating that the fascination that Góngora holds for her is in the constant connections, tracings, and wanderings that his poetic practice enacts.23 This ‘art of wandering’, representing the Baroque, and the slipperiness of the signifier, is then linked by Gache to her own, twenty-first-century poetic practice, where visual and linguistic games of the Baroque are now re-enacted in her digital wordtoy, when she states that Emulating labyrinth-poems, those visual-linguistic games that were so precious to the Baroque, and taking up the Baroque (and Borgesian) idea of the book as labyrinth, this wordtoy recreates the text as a metaphor of the quest of the main who seems to walk through his life blindly, through tortuous paths in search of his past, his destiny and his meaning. The pilgrim travels along the complex path of his circumstances, just as the reader traverses the verses written by Góngora through the ramifications and meanderings of language.24

Once we launch the work, we see a small human form in silhouette, with no distinct features, representing the pilgrim figure, with several lines of text that appear behind him. The text starts: ‘Whether my wandering steps tread foreign climes or walk on native soil’.25 The text comes from the Soledad segunda and comprises the words of the pilgrim as he tells of his nostalgia, disillusion, and memories. Moving the cursors left and right allows us to move the figure along the line of text in which he is located and slightly up or down, if we move the figure right to the end of the line. It is significant, however, that although Gache has created for us a human figure that can move across the text—the embodiment of the pilgrim and  The title in the original Spanish is ‘El llanto del peregrino’.  In the original Spanish these read: ‘el arte del merodeo’, and ‘nómada, perdida, sola, anónima y ajena’. 24   In the original Spanish this reads: ‘emulando los poemas laberinto, esos juegos lingüístico-visuales tan caros al barroco y tomando la idea barroca (y borgeana) del libro como laberinto, este wordtoy recrea el texto como una metáfora de la búsqueda del hombre que parece caminar por su vida a ciegas a través de tortuosos caminos en busca su pasado, su destino y su sentido. El peregrino recorre el complejo camino de sus circunstancias así como el lector transita por los versos escritos por Góngora a partir de ramificaciones y meandros del lenguaje’. 25  The original Spanish reads: ‘regiones pisé ajenas o clima propio planta mía’. 22 23

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his wanderings—the movement of this figure is deceptively limited and circumscribed. For, although through the movement of the mouse we can make this figure advance across the screen, our movement is ultimately limited. Through left-to-right movement, we can move along the lines of a particular verse, but if we try to reach previous or later verses, we hit upon a problem. The distance we can make him move upwards and downwards is so minimal that further lines of text are not revealed: we soon come to hit the top and bottom of the page and, instead, all we can see are the glimpses of the top edge of words just beyond the confines of the window frame. We can thus move around the text, but only to a certain distance. We cannot scroll high or low enough to access other verses of the text and, indeed, we cannot even access the start of the pilgrim’s speech, which begins two verses earlier in Góngora’s text. Gache has thus deliberately set boundaries around her wordtoy, limiting the amount of text to which we have access. Whilst we may be figured as a pilgrim, a purported symbol of wanderings and nomadic behaviour, in fact we find ourselves bound in by the limits of the window that Gache has created for us. Deliberately frustrating and inhibiting, Gache’s ‘wordtoy’ here, like many of her other works, plays with our expectations and reveals not just the possibilities but also the limitations of digital technologies. The final piece in this ludic poetic collection is entitled ‘The Art of Falconry’ and displays, on its left-hand introductory page, a repeated image of a black line drawing of birds of prey, with the left-hand page displaying a larger version of one of the images used on the left-hand page: a woodcut of two owls which has been animated such that, periodically, the eyes of the birds blink in a deliberately jerky fashion.26 From this opening page we then access the introductory page to this chapter, which displays an image of a treble clef set against the music stave. The introductory text explains the importance of falconry in the Iberian Peninsula, and then goes on to say that The final scene of falconry has a strong sonorous and musical dimension, from its opening verses: ‘a rough harmony is formed by all the winged astuteness’. In his continual quest for metamorphosis, Góngora frequently interlinks the lexical fields of ornithology, music and writing. Birds become, in his verses, both ‘sweet tiny bells of melodious feathers’, and ‘feathered characters on the diaphanous paper of the sky’. In this wordtoy, the same  The title in the original Spanish is ‘El arte de la cetrería’.

26

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eight murderous birds cited by Góngora in the final fragment of the Solitudes will, like musical notes on the scale, represent themselves. Each bird will do so via a voice processor, becoming, along with cuckoo clocks, mechanical nightingales, robot-ducks and musical boxes, one of the many mechanical toys that were so dear to the Baroque mentality.27

The key elements that Gache draws out in her introductory paragraphs here are, as in her other works, birds and birdsong, and their alliance with, and function as allegory for, the poet and poetry. Gache inserts her work within a long tradition stretching back at least as far as Góngora’s mixing of the lexical fields of ornithology, music, and writing. If, for Góngora, birds are both, as Gache points out, ‘sweet tiny bells of melodious feathers’ and ‘feathered characters on the diaphanous paper of the sky’, then birds are both music and poetry.28 In a synaesthesic image, their feathers make music (which in itself is a doubly encoded image, where the pluma in Spanish can be both the feather and the quill pen of the poet as s/he writes), and birds trace out poetry across the sky. Góngora’s use of birds as a metapoetic symbol is itself part of a long poetic tradition, stretching back to classical antiquity and reappearing in many poetic movements and generations, through the troubadours and Romanticism to Modernism and beyond.29 Yet, what is significant is that in the Solitudes, the images of 27  The original Spanish reads: ‘La escena final de la cetrería posee una fuerte dimensión sonora, musical, desde sus primeros versos: ‘ruda hace armonía cuanta la generosa cetrería’. En su continua búsqueda de metamorfosis, Góngora entrecruza con frecuencia los campos léxicos de la ornitología, la música y la escritura. Los pájaros serán, en sus versos, tanto ‘esquilas dulces de sonora pluma’ como ‘caracteres alados en el papel diáfano del cielo’. En este wordtoy, serán las mismas ocho aves asesinas citadas por Góngora en el último fragmento de las Soledades las que, cual notas musicales en un pentagrama, se presenten a sí mismas. Cada ave lo hará a partir de un procesador de voz, convirtiéndose, junto con pájaros cucú, ruiseñores-máquinas, patos-robots y las cajas musicales en uno de los tantos juguetes mecánicos tan caros a la mentalidad barroca’. 28  Indeed, as Gache notes in a footnote to this introductory paragraph, Góngora himself describes his Soledades as a singing bird in the sonnet ‘Restituye a tu mudo horror divino’. 29  Multiple images of the bird as representing poetry abound in classical poetry; for a useful summary, see Doggett, who identifies the tradition of linking birdsong with poetry as reaching back to classical times, appearing in Aristophanes’s play Birds of 414 BC; the writings of Callimachus, who speaks of poems as nightingales; and Virgil’s fourth Georgics, in which the grief of Orpheus is compared to the lament of the nightingale (Doggett 1974, pp.  547– 548); and also Steiner who identifies as a topos in Greek poetry from the archaic to the Hellenistic period the confrontation between antagonistic and contrasting species of birds as a metapoetic device, ‘giving authors a device for self-representation and the expression of

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the bird and of the pluma function as much to express the complexities and the tensions of poetic expression as any straightforward sense of communication. Humberto Huergo has argued that the Solitudes are a song to the silence of words and the impossibility of singing, and analyses birdsong as examples of the various forms of the harmony of counter-tension (Huergo 2004, p. 318 and p. 322) set up by the poem. Indeed, the first of the lines cited by Gache (‘sweet tiny bells of melodious feathers’) is seen by Huergo as an example of how the poem is not about affirmation, but about echoes and muteness (Huergo 2004, p. 332). This notion of birdsong as complex, and of meaning being conveyed through cacophony, is one which we will see played out in Gache’s piece.30 It is also worth noting that Gache establishes a parallel mixing of lexical fields of birds, poetry, and musical stave in her own work. In the case of Gache’s ‘wordtoy’ poem, each bird and its song is created via a voice processor, and she traces a long heritage to the Baroque and the mechanical toys that were the subject of such fascination, thereby inserting her digital wordtoys once again into a long chain of antecedents.31 The bird thus their ethical, stylistic, and generic choices’ (Steiner 2007, p. 177). Birds also featured ubiquitously in troubadour verse, becoming, as Stark has put it, an ‘archetypal symbol for poetry’, with these poets often ‘explicitly ascrib[ing] language to birds’ (Stark 2009, p. 2); see also Kay 2013 for a fascinating study of the contrast between nightingales and parrots in troubadour poetry, and their respective roles as metapoetic images. For the Romantic poets the nightingale was ‘an idealized poet’, and, as rendered most famously, of course, in Keats’s Ode to a Nightingale, the relationship represented ‘the song of the bird as spontaneous artistry and its auditor as a poet comprehending the joy of effortless composition’ (Doggett 1974, p. 556). Birdsong as poetry also reappeared as a frequent trope in modernist poets, appearing in the poetry of Eliot and Pound, amongst others; Stark argues that, for Pound, ‘birds’ paradoxically “dulcet cries” come to embody the mellifluence, urgency and essential inarticulateness of poetic speech’ (Stark 2009, p. 4). 30  It is also worth noting that this tension regarding the poetic image of birdsong appears throughout Góngora’s oeuvre; see, for instance, Elizabeth Amann’s fascinating analysis of complexity of the nightingale in Góngora’s love sonnets, in which, she argues, the nightingale is no longer the image of perfect singing but, rather, ‘here, to be like the nightingale is to find oneself mute or limited in one’s expressive range. The perfect simile between the nightingale and the poet, moreover, breaks down in Góngora’ (Amann 2013, p. 65). 31  It is also worth noting that this intertextuality is existent within Gache’s own oeuvre, given that the motif of the pájaro-máquina appears elsewhere; see, for example, the chapter ‘El idioma de los pájaros’ in Word Toys (2006b), in which she defines the birds as ‘máquinaspoetas’ and notes that ‘en este sentido, comparten con el ruiseñor mecánico, en primer lugar, la paradoja de combinar una fragilidad extrema con una armadura rígida y monstruosa. También comparten el hecho de estar programados para re-citar palabras. ¿Acaso las palabras no son siempre ajenas?’ (Gache, Word Toys, 2006b).

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Fig. 5.2  Belén Gache, Góngora Word Toys (2011a), ‘The Art of Falconry’

stands as a symbol not of nature, but of mechanicity. Indeed, crucially, Huergo argues, what this passage in Góngora reveals is not the harmony between the natural world and the written word, but the opposite (Huergo 2010, p. 38). Hence, Gache’s poetic practice is not about the attempt to capture the natural beauty of birdsong, but about highlighting mechanicity. Once we open the poem itself, we see a musical stave in treble clef with, instead of notes, images of birds placed along the stave. When clicking on each bird, a sound file is activated, and the head of the bird starts to move up and down in a deliberately jerky way. The sound file contains different voices, some robotic and with stilted intonation or sound interference, which read out a short extract from the Soledades.32 In each case, the extracts chosen by Gache focus on one particular bird within this part of the Soledades, and, in each case, both convey the bird itself and open it up suggestively to metapoetic interpretation through the prevalence of terms such as ‘theatre’ and the doubly encoded ‘pluma’, as noted above (see Fig. 5.2). Gache’s poetic creation in this wordtoy lies, as in her other pieces, within this collection, not in the originality of these verses, but in their 32  Each extract is taken from pp. 65–67 of the Soledades describing the birds, with the first one starting on the lines ‘El baharí, a quien fue en España cuna/ del Pirineo la ceniza verde’ (Soledades, pp. 65–66), and the last one starting on the lines ‘El sacre, las del Noto alas vestido,/ sangriento chiprïota, aunque nacido’.

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creative and suggestive reworking in her piece. Firstly, poetic creativity lies in the greater agency afforded to the reader-user, who, as s/he moves through the stave, can select the birds in any order s/he wishes, and so reorder the lines of the poem. Thus, Góngora’s original can be reshaped by the reader-user, who, through the interactivity of the work, takes up the role of bricoleur-poet, piecing the lexia together. Secondly, poetic creativity also lies in the visual and sonorous interaction that Gache creates, whereby the spoken verses of the poem are allied with the moving images of the birds. Here, the written text of Góngora’s original is voiced by a series of human and non-human voices, with digital technologies being employed to create a sound and visual toy. Thirdly, and perhaps most significantly, poetic creation within this wordtoy lies in the fact that, as we play around with the piece, we realise we can activate more than one bird/ sound file at the same time. We can, thus, create a cacophony of competing voices, making the birds speak over each other, with the result that the sense of Góngora’s original becomes obscured or changed as each voice mingles with the other. It is this final feature that is perhaps the most creative of Gache’s wordtoy here, and the one in which she most closely apes Góngora’s original intention. If, as Huergo noted above, Góngora strived not to create simple, accessible poetry but instead to create a dissonant harmony, then it is this creative clash of voices—the at once harmonious and yet dissonant sounds that emanate from each mechanical-digital bird when activated together—through which Gache creates a Baroque, self-­ reflexive poetry for the twenty-first century.

Radikal Karaoke: Resisting the Brand, Resisting the Platform? The second of Gache’s poetic works under consideration in this chapter, Radikal Karaoke, also from 2011, recycles a range of pre-selected texts. Taking as its intertexts slogans and rhetorical phrases, this work denounces the encroaching powers of corporate giants, the structures of faceless corporate capitalism, and branding as, in Adam Arvidsson’s words, the ‘paradigmatic embodiment of the logic of informational capitalism’ ­ (2006, p. 13).33 33  Arvidsson argues that brands are the embodiment of the logic of informational capitalism for two main reasons: because they are in themselves ‘immaterial, informational objects’ and because they are an example of ‘capital socialized to the extent of transpiring the minute relations of everyday life’ (Arvidsson 2006, p. 13).

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Radikal Karaoke, as the title suggests, engages with the interactive song game, karaoke, which first originated in Japan in the 1970s, and became hugely popular worldwide in the 1980s and 1990s. Karaoke as a form is a musical performance intimately associated with technology, as encapsulated by Shuhei Hosokawa and Toru Mitsui in their edited book on the genre in their suggestive notion of ‘global technology, local singing’ to characterise how karaoke functions, with the electronically mediated voice being one of the central features (and pleasures) of karaoke (Mitsui and Hosokawa 2001, pp.  13–14). As a cultural performance dependent on technology, the format of karaoke stands in the work of Gache, I argue, as a sort of synecdoche for late capitalism: for what, as noted in my Introduction to this book, Luis Suárez-Villa has termed ‘technocapitalism’ (Suárez-Villa 2009), in which capitalist restructuring, technology, and corporatism work hand in hand. The reference to karaoke, then, indicates the technologically mediated format of the work we are about to enter, but also, and perhaps more importantly, draws out the notion of the unthinking repetition of received content from the system, since karaoke involves the reproduction of words by the user, allowing, in its traditional form, for little or no deviation. As my analysis will reveal, in Gache’s undertaking the system in question is the system of late capitalism, and she encourages us to draw parallels between the unthinking repetition of the words of the karaoke system and the unthinking reproduction of the system of late capitalism. Gache herself describes Radikal Karaoke as a ‘conjunto de poesías que se apropian de la retórica de la propaganda política’, framing her poetic endeavour with a critical stance and indicating how her poetic practice involves the remixing of set phrases and commonplaces from political and corporate rhetoric in order to generate poetic expression. Following on from this, Gache then makes clear that her use of these set phrases is in order to ‘interrogate hegemonic discourses, and so functions through a contrast between utopia and commonplaces’.34 As we will see below, the way in which these poems are constructed and the manner in which the reader-user activates them encourage us to deconstruct these ‘hegemonic discourses’ by means of parody and the shock contrast of sound, image, and text.

34  The original in Spanish reads: ‘interrogar los discursos hegemónicos y trabaja con el permanente contraste entre la utopía y el lugar común’.

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Fig. 5.3  Belén Gache, Radikal Karaoke (2011b)

This engagement with corporate rhetoric is immediate from the opening page of Radikal Karaoke, which employs a limited palette of colours in which blue, green, and black predominate. To the left of the screen, a silhouette of a male figure can be seen with a microphone in his hand, karaoke-style; to the right is located the title of the work and above this the acronym ‘RK’ set inside a circle, with the ‘R’ in mirror script. A backdrop of a blurred map in dark blue can be seen stretching across the whole of the screen. In the middle distance, between this background and the title and image of the foreground, can be seen a row of figures, also silhouettes, each wearing a suit and tie (Fig. 5.3). Before we have even entered the work proper, then, the main issues presented by Radikal Karaoke are clearly set out. Firstly, the representation of the title of the work as an acronym placed within a circle immediately creates a visual parallel with the commonly recognised ® symbol, denoting a registered trademark. Gache’s Radikal Karaoke thus instantly brings to mind commercial property and corporatism, with her acronym standing as a synecdoche for corporate powers and their branding practices. Her use of this symbol here can be understood through Matthew Sharpe’s arguments about branding and the fetish. Sharpe, taking the logo as representative of the process of branding, draws out Marx’s concern in the early chapters of Das Kapital that capitalism creates a quasi-religious spectrality of its own, in the guise of the realm of commodities, or ‘real abstraction’. Sharpe then argues that the logo as representative of branding practices is ‘but the latest and even the purest level of this abstraction’, since we witness the ‘absolute subordination of use value to its fetishistic aura’ (Sharpe 2003, n.p.).

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Moreover, the fact that the ‘R’ is represented in reverse format indicates that her work will encourage us to take a critical view of these powers: that is, the standard ® symbol is now presented as its mirror image, illustrating how she will encourage us to view the other side of, or the reality behind the mirage of, these corporate powers. Gache’s reverse symbol thus raises issues of ownership and copyright, and encourages us not to be seduced by the brand, but to maintain our distance, and be on our guard against the ‘immaterial capital’ and ‘colonization of the life-world by corporate power’ that branding represents (Arvidsson 2006, p. 7 and p. 14). Secondly, the fact that the backdrop to the page is a world map, whose outlines are unclear, and which does not bear the names of individual countries, encourages us to question the global reach of the corporate powers we are about to examine. That the map is, quite literally, the backdrop upon which the mock trademark is superimposed provides a visual metaphor for the encroaching powers of corporate giants, whose global reach both traverses national boundaries and mobilises local and national differences in its reach for new markets through its process of glocalisation. A portmanteau combining ‘globalisation’ and ‘localisation’, ‘glocalisation’ refers to a micro-marketing process in which multinational corporations engage in ‘the tailoring and advertising of goods and services on a global or near-global basis to increasingly differentiated local and particular markets’ (Robertson 2012, p. 194). Such a process is inherently linked to the encroaching powers of global corporations in their quest to cater to ever-growing markets; indeed, Ritzer has proposed the need for the term ‘grobalisation’ as a companion to the term ‘glocalisation’, to emphasise the ‘imperialistic ambitions of nations, corporations, organizations, and other entities and their desire—indeed, their need—to impose themselves on various geographic areas’ (Ritzer 2003, p.  194). As Robertson stresses, processes of glocalisation are not simply a case of businesses responding to pre-existing global variety, but in fact involve ‘the construction of increasingly differentiated consumers, the ‘invention’ of ‘consumer traditions’ Robertson 2012, p. 194)—a fact made abundantly clear by Gache’s map in which the national contours are entirely fictional, and the differentiated customers are grouped within wholly constructed, artificial national preferences. Gache’s map thus reminds us that corporate capitalism is inflected differently in distinct parts of the globe, indicating both the way in which global capital constantly creates new and superficially differentiated markets, behaviours, and consumers, and hinting at the global structural inequalities inherent to late capitalism.

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Indeed, the fact that the map is not a map of any recognisable country or region, but instead a generic representation of landmasses implies that corporate branding works by only superficially engaging with place, and in fact disavows the real, material, geographic conditions of production. Marx’s original analysis of the ‘fetishism of commodities’ which ‘conceals, instead of disclosing, the social character of private labour’ (Marx 2010, p. 109) now finds its twenty-first-century parallel in the brand’s immateriality, its superficial mobilisation of national traits, and simultaneous disavowal of the material conditions of production. Thirdly, the row of figures each wearing a suit and tie, whose blurred silhouettes are virtually indistinguishable one from the other, and whose faces are not visible, encourages us to view them not as individuals but as a line of types. We are, thus, presented with an image of a series of clones within a system, and with a (literally) faceless corporate capitalism that operates through the colonisation of the lifeworld. From this opening page we then enter the work, with a green screen offering us three possible speeches to choose from, with their titles in Latin, Spanish, and English respectively. These are ‘Ex Africa semper aliquid novi’/ ‘Mirad como Kate presume de su anillo’ and ‘We have no past, you have no present’.35 Here, Gache mobilises the oft-used technique of the poetic refrain, which has a long history stretching back to classical antiquity, and which often repeated existing commonplaces and set phrases.36 In the case of her own refrains, Gache draws from an existing pool of set phrases, encompassing both classical antiquity and the contemporary era. The first of these phrases is derived from an aphorism included in the Historia Naturalis by the Roman author Pliny the Elder (AD 23–79), in which Pliny recounts a Greek aphorism, translating it into Latin.37 The 35  I have kept the three titles in their original languages to indicate how they appear, rather than translating them all into English here. 36  It is worth noting that the poetic refrain has been identified as a device which harks back to poetry’s origins in song: as Abbott notes, regarding the use of refrains in nineteenthcentury French poetry, as poets sought to reassert poetry’s status in relation to music, they made use of the refrain since, as ‘a structural repetitive device, refrains in poetry recall poetry’s heritage as song’, with the refrain thus being both ‘a countable repetitive device and a patent musical trait’ (Abbott 2008, p. 130). Gache’s use of the refrain in this work therefore also makes another connection to the musical-technological format of karaoke that she mobilises, in that it emphasises song. 37  Although the phrase has popularly been attributed to Pliny, Pliny himself admitted that he was doing no more than copying down a Greek aphorism. Feinberg and Solodow (2002)

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phrase, translating as ‘there is always something new coming out of Africa’, conveys the notion of the African continent as the source of exotic wonder and surprise. The phrase has passed into everyday parlance and has become a commonplace, often being employed in reports, films, and documents about the African continent. From the popular Hollywood movie starring Robert Redford and Meryl Streep, Out of Africa (1985, dir. Sydney Pollack), to scores of documentaries, travelogues, and books, the phrase has been used time and again to refer to Africa, and perpetuates an exoticist stereotype about the continent.38 This phrase selected by Gache, thus, is a timeworn cliché, and one which is immediately recognisable has having spawned a whole range of exoticist stereotypes: it is, thus, immediately noticeable for its inauthenticity as well as its intertextuality, and is representative of capitalism’s insatiable desire for new and ‘exotic’ goods to sell and consume. The second phrase, by contrast, has its origins not in the classical past but in a hyper-contemporary event: meaning ‘Look how Kate shows off her ring’, it refers to the moment when Kate Middleton, the then fiancée of the British heir to the throne Prince William, showed off her engagement ring to the press. This title, thus, makes reference to the so-called Kate Middleton mania, and to the vacuities of the contemporary press, in its desire to commentate the minutiae of the lives of the royal family. Similar to the ‘Ex Africa’ aphorism, this phrase also demonstrates a lack of authenticity, being a press cliché frequently bandied about to generate interest in the upcoming royal wedding. The third phrase does not come from one particular source but is in itself a mash-up or remix, building on the punk slogan ‘no future’ first voiced in the song ‘God Save the Queen’ by the Sex Pistols, and dialoguing with Francis Fukuyama’s infamous notion of the ‘end of history’ (Fukuyama 1989, 1992). The first of these sources derives from a British subcultural context and expresses an anarchist and nihilist view, e­ pitomising on the one hand an oppositional stance, and on the other a rejection of the notions of consensus and community that are conventionally deemed necessary for political action.39 The second source—Fukuyama’s (1989) essay, demonstrate how this refrain has its origins in the work of Aristotle who, for his part, was commenting on a popular refrain, rather than being the ‘original’ author of it. 38  See Feinberg and Solodow (2002, pp. 255–256) for a detailed account of uses of the aphorism in contemporary documentaries, travelogues, speeches, and correspondence. 39  See Davies (1996) for more on this slogan and the nihilist attitudes underpinning it.

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subsequently expanded in his 1992 book—argues that, with the death of Marxism, history has come to an end, and that the triumph of liberalism is likely to prevail. Widely seen as a celebration of the neoliberal state, Fukuyama’s notion has been criticised by scholars on the left who have viewed it as an apology for neoliberalism.40 This remixed phrase, then, brings together conflicting worldviews and, interestingly, indicates the need to interrogate the motivations behind the circulation of such slogans. The notion of ‘we have no past, you have no present’ threatens to erase historicity, yet emptying a phrase of its meaning or context is an inherently punk gesture (of partial resistance), but is also, of course, a common ploy of corporations and their branding practices.41 What Gache has done here is to draw to our attention an unexpected parallel in her combination of oppositional gesture with a hegemonic one. In all three cases, the phrases that Gache has chosen encourage us to pick apart slogans, whether these be of Western exoticisation of the other, of media populism, or of the discourses of the triumph of neoliberalism. On selecting any one of these three discourses, the interactive interface of Radikal Karaoke opens. The main part of the screen comprises a video in black and white which shows rows of spectators, applauding, set on a continuous loop and speeded up, such that the spectators constantly applaud without respite, and move their hands in a frenetic rhythm as they face us. Beneath the video lies the control panel of the work, consisting firstly of a row of buttons each identified with letters, and, beneath these, the text of the karaoke. In this work the user has to take on an active role in the execution of the poetry. Firstly, our active participation is required to read the text out loud since, as in karaoke, the words of the poem appear in the lower part of the control panel so that the reader-user can speak them. Using the arrow keys of the control panel, the reader-user makes the text scroll forward, and is required to read out a series of commonplaces. That these are commonplaces is immediately made obvious by the opening to the speeches, which recycle a set of clichéd phrases to engage the audience. Whichever speech we select, and however many times we open it, we are always presented with the same opening lines:  See, for instance, Derrida’s condemnation of Fukuyama in Spectres de Marx (1993).  See, for instance, Klein’s analysis of how terms like ‘diversity’ were taken up by large corporations such as Nike and Benetton, and in so doing became emptied of meaning (Klein 2000, p. 122). 40 41

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Good evening. It’s an honour to be here today in front of this audience. I will make the most of this occasion to say to you….42

Given that these same words are reproduced at the start of each of the three speeches, once we have played this poetic game more than once, we become alert to the lack of authenticity to these opening lines, a feature which puts us on our guard regarding the text we are entering and the role we are expected to play. These opening phrases of welcome—‘good evening’, ‘here today’, ‘this audience’, ‘this occasion’—are without context, since there are no markers of time, place, occasion, and can fit to any occasion. The speech that we read, then, is full of rhetorical flourishes to draw the audience in, but lacks originality and sincerity. In this trick, Gache encourages us to consider the emptiness of corporate and political rhetoric since these same phrases are repeated constantly throughout the work. After these phrases of welcome, the ones that follow are composed of the remixing and recombinations of found texts. As Gache explains, her poems in Radikal Karaoke are constructed through a fixed verbal structure and random texts, and in this way, the poetic value of the work does not lie in the originality of each phrase in itself, but rather in the creative combination—and at times the creative clashing—of these phrases. Such a technique of creating a literary work through the creative combination of fragments of texts is made possible thanks to digital technologies but also, at the same time, borrows from a long literary tradition. Notable precursors of Gache’s tactics can be found in OuLiPo (Ouvroir de Littérature Potentielle),43 whose recombinant and procedural poetic practices involved the creation of poetry via a series of restrictions or constraints.44 As Chris Andrews has argued, the use of constraints in OuLiPo practices has important liberatory power since,

42  In the original Spanish this reads: ‘Buenas tardes. Es un honor estar hoy aquí frente a esta audiencia. Aprovecharé esta ocasión para deciros…’ 43  Founded in 1960 by Raymond Queneau and Francois Le Lionnais, OuLiPo brought together a loose group of authors, including Georges Perec and Italo Calvino, interested in exploring the creation of poetry through constraints and combinatorial practices. For more on the founding of OuLiPo, see Motte (2006). 44  This is not to say that the constraint was the only practice advocated by OuLiPo; see Kurt, who notes that despite the fact that ‘the name Oulipo has been synonymous with one thing: writing under strict constraint’, in fact this association excludes other Oulipo works and poetic forms, including combinatorial literature (Kurt 2015, p. 888).

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Constraints focus the writer’s attention on a particular aspect of the text’s construction, transforming it into a game […]. This tends to invert the process of composition as it has been traditionally taught in rhetoric, obliging the writer to begin with problems of elocution or verbal patterning, which come to determine—in a certain measure—the ‘invention’ and disposition of the content. There lies, perhaps, the secret of the constraint’s paradoxical liberating power. (Andrews 2003, p. 230)

In a similar way to OuLiPo’s attempt to invert the processes of composition, Gache draws on this potential for inversion for the contemporary era, as her resistant, recombinant phrases encourage us to see beyond the slogans and catchphrases of corporatism.45 If such is the pre-digital tradition informing Gache’s work, her creative combination of fragments of texts, is, of course, enabled by digital technologies, and scholars have argued that the techniques of remix and mash­up are particularly representative of contemporary digital practice. Early, utopian conceptualisations of remix saw it as offering ‘active engagement of the user’ and ‘hope for abolishment of producer and recipient (consumer)’, promising agency for the user (Sonvilla-Weiss 2010, p. 12). Yet these potentials are largely unrealised, as Sonvilla-Weiss has noted (Sonvilla-Weiss 2010, p.  12), and, indeed, the blurring between these roles can often be productively co-opted by global corporations. As Christian Fuchs and others have persuasively argued, the rise of the ‘prosumer’ enables corporations to reduce their labour costs and exploit consumers who work for free, in effect using ‘free labour [that] produces surplus value that is appropriated and turned into corporate profit’ (Fuchs 2012, p. 143). Such a phenomenon is a version of what Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, amongst others, have described as the ‘immaterial labor’ intimately linked to the rise of what they term ‘informatization’, and complicit with the discourse of late capitalism (2000, pp. 289–294). Remix as a technique is thus ambiguously located: on the one hand pur45  Indeed, it is worth noting the frequency with which Queneau’s works are cited as sharing similarities with a variety of digital genres including digital literature, virtual reality, net. art, and others: see, for instance, Hayles, who sees in the textual strategies of Cent mille milliards de poèmes similarities with the ‘structure, fragmentation and recombination’ intrinsic to electronic textualities (Hayles 2000); Ryan, who references Cent mille milliards de poèmes in the context of the poetics of interactivity in game worlds (Ryan 2001, p. 185); Aarseth, who mentions Cent mille milliards de poèmes several times in his development of a typology of ergodic literature (Aarseth 1997); and Cosic, who mentions the influence of Queneau and the other members of OuLiPo in the development of ASCII-art (Cosic 1999, p. 20).

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porting to offer greater empowerment to the user, and on the other compelling the user to create content for free that can be appropriated by global corporations—and thus the ultimate in surplus value.46 Gache makes use of this ambivalently encoded practice of remix by bringing together fragments of slogans, catchphrases, and media hype in order to enable us to glimpse the cracks and contradictions in corporate and political rhetoric. For instance, if we have selected the ‘We have no past, you have no present’ speech, after a series of opening platitudes which fully insert us into the world of corporate speechmaking, phrases are interwoven which undermine this corporate rhetoric due to their frankness. For example, as we continue in this speech we read that ‘Our policy has degenerated into a mere lust for money’ and ‘Our policy has been one of gradual progress of falling into the deep well of despair’ (Gache 2011b, n.p.). Such phrases, inserted without warning into a stream of apparently bland slogans and catchphrases, create unease in the reader through their shock value, and provide glimpses into the harsh realities and material conditions that are deliberately obscured by, and underlie, the glib corporate rhetoric. Gache thus mobilises some of the key terms of neoliberal corporatism (‘policy’, ‘progress’) in order to then undermine them with the insertion of phrases that betray the material conditions underpinning this practice. In so doing, she undertakes a defetishising critique of the rhetoric of corporatism, in that she provides us with brief, fleeting moments when the veil is lifted, and we see through the spectacle (in the Debordian sense) of the corporate phrases and slogans.47

46  See Chap. 6 in this volume for a more detailed analysis of the practice of remix as it relates to the work of Eduardo Navas. 47  I am here making reference to Guy Debord’s notions as put forth in his 1967 text The Society of the Spectacle, in which he provides an analysis of commodity capitalism as creating a society in which social space is dominated by commodities and alienated consumption, arguing that ‘the spectacle is the stage at which the commodity has succeeded in totally colonizing social life. Commodification is not only visible, we no longer see anything else; the world we see is the world of the commodity’. Although Debord developed his argument in relation to an earlier form of capitalism—that is, commodity capitalism—his theory remains of relevance today for an analysis of neoliberal, digital, corporate capitalism; see, amongst others, Plant who has argued that ‘the situationist spectacle prefigures contemporary notions of hyperreality (Plant 1992, p.  5); Briziarelli and Armano’s recent edited volume The Spectacle 2.0, which reads Debord’s theory of the spectacle for ‘the twenty-first century and the age of digital media and digital capitalism’ (Briziarelli and Armano 2017); and Gandesha

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A further way in which this resistance to corporate rhetoric is encouraged is through the interactive elements of the work. If the vocalisation of the text is the first level of interactivity that is required of the reader in this work, a second level of interactivity, involving more participation from the reader, is found in the visual aspects of the work. For it is the reader-user who activates the visual poetry of this work, by means of seven keys lying at the right-hand side of the control panel—Z, R, G, B, K, A1, A2—which produce modifications in the video on the main screen, changing its colour or speed, and seven keys on the left (V1–7), which change the video completely and replace it with a different moving image. Using these controls, we can replace the original image—that of the spectators applauding—with a nuclear bomb exploding (V2); a black-and-white spiral that constantly spins (V3); a menacing face with red, hallucinating eyes in the form of spirals (V4); an alien who moves quickly across our screen in front of an urban backdrop (V5); or a group of slaves who drag a heavy burden towards the camera (V6). In the same way as the original video, these new videos are repeated on a continuous circuit and their content encourages us to reflect on the words with which we are presented. In this fashion, the videos function as a metapoetic commentary that makes us question the text that runs across the lower part of the screen which we are reading out loud. For example, if we select V6—the image of the slaves dragging their heavy burden—the video offers us a pessimistic view of contemporary conditions under twenty-first-century capitalism. The video file depicts a group of slaves arranged into two lines, with each line shouldering a thick rope that stretches back behind them to a large, cumbersome object in the background. Dressed in loincloths and bare-chested, the slaves strain at the rope, moving their burden slowly forward, whilst the slave driver stands to the right of the frame. Since the video is presented on a continuous loop—in reality, the video lasts barely three seconds and then starts again—we see the slaves advance a few centimetres, making a great effort, only to return once more to their starting place and begin anew. Gache’s video offers to us our own image: our roles as individuals trapped within a continuous cycle with no let-up, enslaved by the large corporations and late capitalism of the twenty-first century. The original image of a prior form of entrapped labour (slavery) is here mobilised by Gache to create an image of twenty-first-century labour, and thus historical violence is reconand Hartle’s 2017 edited volume which rereads Debord’s theories of the spectacle, alongside those of Lukács’s writings on reification, in the context of contemporary late capitalism.

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figured as structural violence. Indeed, it is worth noting the image of the slave was already used to represent the way in which individuals are trapped within, or enslaved by, commodity capitalism, as encapsulated by Adorno’s famous statement on commodity capitalism that ‘the principle of exchange value destroys use values for human beings […]. Before the theological caprices of commodities, the consumers become temple slaves’ (Adorno 1991, p. 39).48 I argue that Gache’s image here is a visual quotation of Adorno’s famous statement, for the twenty-first century. Another of the video files, triggered by button V5, presents a very short black-and-white animated sequence, lasting some three seconds, set on a loop. An extraterrestrial figure with a withered body, an enlarged head, and black holes for eyes flits across our screen at a frenetic pace, whilst an alien spacecraft hovers in the background over high-rise buildings. Of deliberately poor quality such that it is possible to discern the jumps and cracks across the screen, this image, through the semantic association of ‘alien’ with ‘alienation’, immediately stands as the representation of our alienation under late capitalism. A notion developed by Marx and expounded in particular in his Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844, alienation consists of the process by which ‘the object which labor produces—labor’s product—confronts it as something alien, as a power independent of the producer’ (Marx p.  108). As summed up by Jaeggi, alienation is ‘a disturbance of the relations one has, or should have, to oneself and to the world (whether the social or natural world)’ (Jaeggi 2014, p. 11), coupled with ‘the inability to exert control over what one does—that is, the inability to be, individually or collectively, the subject of one’s actions’ (Jaeggi 2014, p. 12).49 48  This statement appears in Adorno’s 1938 essay ‘On the Fetish Character in Music and the Regression of Listening’, originally published in the Zeitschrift für Sozialforschung. 49  That alienation has become one of the central concepts of Marxist analyses of the colonisation of the lifeworld by capital is noted by a myriad of scholars. Betancourt states that alienation constitutes the foundational moment of capitalism, arguing that ‘alienation of human agency is innate to capitalism—the externalization of productive capacity was its first, definitional moment’ (Betancourt 2015, p. 186). Indeed, Honneth notes that the concept of alienation was so widely accepted that it defined the character of critical theory: ‘no concept has been more powerful in defining the character of early Critical Theory than that of alienation. For the first members of this tradition the content of the concept was taken to be so self-evident that it needed no definition or justification; it served as the more or less selfevident starting point of all social analysis and critique. Regardless of how untransparent and complicated social relations might be, Adorno, Marcuse, and Horkheimer regarded the alienated nature of social relations as a fact beyond all doubt’ (Honneth 2014, p. vii).

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Likewise, if we select V4, the video file reflects our contemporary condition in thrall to large corporations. In this file the red, staring, hypnotised eyes stand out, with the pupils replaced by a vertiginous, ever-moving spiral. Coupled with the red tone that colours the image in its totality, these eyes produce a disconcerting effect in which the human face is distorted and rendered partially machine-like. This video, then, reflects another aspect of our contemporary human condition: hypnotised by consumerism—and, indeed, given Gache’s frequent exhortations to us to question the expected uses of digital technologies, hypnotised by social media—the human being is converted into a zombie. Gache makes reference here to the oft-commented symbolic association of the zombie figure with the mindless consumer, in thrall to commodity fetishism.50 In all of these video files, then, Gache engages in a critique of the technological advances that underpin her own poetic practice. Far from presenting us with a utopian vision of a technologically enhanced world, Gache makes us question the same digital technologies on which her work is based, and indicates the dangers of allowing ourselves to be hypnotised by digital technologies in the service of late capitalism. As she herself states in the preamble to this work, ‘By mechanically repeating slogans we have turned ourselves in zombie society. There’s not us who speak but others (power? market? language itself?) speaking through us’ (Gache 2011b, n.p.).51 Here, Gache’s comments bring together a poststructuralist understanding of the individual as constructed through language (as articulated by Heidegger, Derrida, and others), with a neo-Marxist conceptualisation of the individual in thrall to the ‘aura’ of the brand under the conditions of late capitalism. In this sense, her linking of ‘power’, ‘market’, and ‘language itself’ is the nexus at which branding lies: she speaks here of the very language of branding itself—of the phrase that speaks for the whole, the slogan that sums up and promises the experience, the ‘lifestyle’ for us (Klein 2000, pp. 20–23). In all of these examples, Gache encourages us to deconstruct the texts that we are speaking. For example, if we select V6, we are presented with a marked contrast between the rhetoric we are asked to vocalise when we 50  See David McNally for an overview of the zombie figure as representative of alienation under capitalism, in particular the development from its early use as ‘zombie laborers’ through to its more recent incarnation as the ‘ghoulish consumer’ (McNally 2012, pp. 133–134). 51  In English in the original.

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arrive at the phrase ‘we are the protagonists’ and the image of the slaves who are clearly far from the protagonists and from having agency in their own history, as noted above. In this way, as we read the texts and manipulate the images, we become aware that Gache’s aim is to question neoliberalism and the powers of large corporations, to question political rhetoric, and to question the indiscriminate consumption of social media. Yet it is striking that we are, of course, situated as ventriloquised participants here, and the degree of our agency is deliberately restricted: all we are permitted to do, if we remain within the rules of the game/system, is to repeat the rhetoric of the system. And indeed this stance we are forced to adopt—of clones repeating the branding rhetoric—will take on a particular significance, I contend, when we reach the final button of the game. For it is the last of the videos, V7, that turns out to be the most shocking and disturbing for the reader-user. The eagle-eyed—or perhaps, the technologically cautious—will have noticed that on starting this game we are asked permission to share our microphone and webcam with belengache.net. Perhaps taking this to be a necessary feature in order to make the karaoke audio work, most reader-users will, no doubt, have accepted this request without questioning the reason. However, in the last of the video files the use of our own voice and image becomes chillingly clear. For, after having passed through a series of slaves, of aliens, of hypnotised zombies, if we activate V7, what appears on the screen is our own image. That is, in video V7 Radikal Karaoke captures the image generated by the webcam of the user, and projects it onto the screen in front of us: what we see on the screen is our own face, as we sit at the computer, reading out the text. In this way, the user finds himself/herself implicated in the work, and the oft-cited feature of interactivity at the heart of electronic literature finds a particularly unsettling enactment. We are interpellated into the game not through an avatar on the screen in our stead, but through the direct representation of ourselves on screen. What Gache is indicating to us here is that we too are clones, hypnotised and trapped in the system. Just like the other characters seen in the earlier videos, we too are enslaved by the corporate system: as with the zombie representing the consumer in thrall to commodity fetishism, the slave ­representing alienated labour, the alien representing alienation under late capitalism, we too are trapped within the system. Our insertion into this line of alienated figures thus forces us to consider how we too may be robbed of our agency by the workings of late capitalism.

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It is this shock moment which is perhaps the most powerful in this piece. Gache’s playing with the norms of interactive literature, and her exploration of the potentials of digital technologies, finds its culmination in this moment in which she breaks the fourth wall to bring us directly into the game that we thought we were playing as an external observer. In this shock moment of metalepsis, we find ourselves to be one more player within the game/system. Through this moment of extreme narrative and interactional metalepsis, Gache encourages us to reflect upon our imbrication in the game and, by extension, to reflect upon, and question, our imbrication within the systems of corporate models and global capital. In so doing, this ludic but thoughtful piece makes a series of serious reflections on the status of the individual under late capitalism and corporatism. Undertaking a defetishising critique, Gache aims to unmask and denaturalise the hegemonic discourses of corporate capital, strip away the fetishistic aura of the brand, and enable her reader-player to see through the spectacle. In Gache’s work, as with the work of the other authors studied in this volume, we thus witness on the one hand an experimental use of digital technologies to create new expressive structures, and on the other a profound and continued dialogue with existing literary genres, and with the long and rich literary tradition of the Hispanic world and beyond. As I have demonstrated in this chapter, Gache manipulates and makes use of digital technologies in the creation of poetry—both in the generation itself of the poetry and in its execution by the reader/user—and at the same time, dialogues with existing literary genres and remixes existing written fragments. Yet Gache does so not in a utopian gesture to praise unproblematically the potentials of digital technologies for the creation of new literary genres; rather, she does so to critique the very technologies that she mobilises. In the case of Góngora Word Toys, Gongoran techniques find their parallels in contemporary literary-digital experimentation, yet this does not mean that Gache posits digital technologies as a teleological end point. Rather, she indicates the limitations and, at times, the failings of digital technologies. In the case of Radikal Karaoke, Gache makes use of algorithms and recombinations in the production of poetry, drawing on techniques from OuLiPo and others, yet she does so not to praise digital technologies for their inherent radicalism. Rather, she undertakes a sustained critique of these technologies in order to unmask the discourses of corporate power, and inveigh against the almost unlimited powers of multinational corporatism.

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CHAPTER 6

Twitter Poetry and Rethinking the Aphorism: Eduardo Navas’s Minima Moralia Redux (2011 to date) (US-El Salvador)

This chapter examines one of the most recent electronic literature projects by Eduardo Navas, the US-Salvadoran media artist, critic, theorist, and curator. The work under scrutiny in this chapter is his Minima Moralia Redux from 2011 to date, and I analyse this work, described by Navas as a ‘selective remix’, in terms of its rewriting of the 153 aphorisms of Theodor Adorno’s Minima Moralia. I focus on how the various levels of remixing of Adorno’s text create new interpretations of the original for the twenty-first century, and constitute a reflection on the workings of neoliberal corporate capitalism, and I propose this through a comparison of Navas’s work with its prior intertext. Adorno’s book scrutinised social practices and institutions, the bourgeois era, and the fate of the individual, and attempted to speak out against alienation and awaken the reader to his/her situation as caught within the political and economic structures constructed by the state in alliance with capital. I demonstrate that Navas’s remix techniques, through their insertion of additional material into Adorno’s original sentences and visualisations, produce new, updated aphorisms for the twenty-first century. Still containing much of the original content of Adorno’s statements, and bearing traces of its original aura— that is, the Marxist-influenced scrutiny of the minutiae of everyday life— Navas’s version brings into focus the minutiae of everyday life under late informational capitalism. I also provide in this chapter a detailed scrutiny of Navas’s use of a variety of new media formats and tools—including the blog as platform, word © The Author(s) 2019 C. Taylor, Electronic Literature in Latin America, New Directions in Latino American Cultures, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-30988-6_6

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clouds as visualisation tools, and search engines for retrieving information—to take an oppositional stance. I contend that, significantly, this oppositional stance is undertaken by Navas via an interrogation of textual formats themselves, whether digital or pre-digital. Just as Adorno problematised the very format of the conduct book through his challenging, critical aphorisms, so Navas now problematises the format of the blog and the wider phenomenon of social media within which it sits. The chapter demonstrates how, if Adorno inveighed against the book of aphorisms as a genre which attempted to ensure our compliance with the bourgeois norms of state capitalism, now, for Navas, it is social media and the blog format which runs the danger of encouraging our conformity with late informational capitalism. In Navas’s work, then, remix as a resistant practice is used to rework an earlier text (which itself reworked earlier texts). Navas’s literary play here speaks back to and admits its debt to existing genres, whilst at the same time negotiating the possibilities offered by new media formats. Crucially, as I will demonstrate in his critical, resistant reworking both of existing literary genres and of web 2.0 technologies, Navas makes political comments on corporate (informational) capitalism, encouraging the viewer/ user to look beneath the commonplace uses of the formats he employs, and to acknowledge the political economies that underpin them. Navas has been involved in a variety of on- and offline art projects since the mid-1990s which explore the crossovers between art, culture, and (new) media. In his mobilisation of new media technologies for creative purposes, Navas places particular focus upon the remixing of already existing source texts and images afforded by digital media. His 2000 piece, for instance, The Quixote, takes as its principal intertext the famous short story by Argentine author Jorge Luis Borges’s ‘Pierre Menard, autor del Quijote’ (1939)1—a story which, in itself, involved an ironic rewriting of another 1  In this story, included in the collection Ficciones, Borges tells the story of fictional author Pierre Menard, who sets out to rewrite Don Quijote for the present day, only to end up rewriting the text itself, word for word. Scholars have frequently commented on the intertextual nature of Borges’s story, its problematisation of notions of literary authenticity, and that it reworks a text which, in itself, involved complex reworkings of prior literary paradigms; as Woof sums this up, ‘into this superficially simple story, Borges has built numerous difficulties and complexities, much of which bear on our logical comprehension of fictional undertakings and most especially that text which serves as the story’s source. Don Quixote, considered to be one of the most important precursors of the modern novel, is fraught with paradoxical constructions and violations of the principles of verisimilitude’ (Woof 1999, p. 194).

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intertext, this being Cervantes’s classic novel of the Spanish Golden Age, El ingenioso hidalgo Don Quijote de la Mancha—and mixes translations and versions of Borges’s tale, superimposed over images of Cervantes’s novel.2 His 2002 work, Plástico_2002_Update, an animated Flash project, takes as its intertext the lyrics of the salsa song ‘Plástico’ by Willie Colón and Rubén Blades, and juxtaposes the lyrics with contemporary statistics of the Americas, aiming, in the words of Navas, to provide through its remixing and juxtapositions ‘a metaphoric commentary on how hopeful gestures can quickly become absorbed by our current state of globalization’ (Navas). Navas’s Diary of a Star (2004–2007) also takes up a prior intertext, in this case Andy Warhol’s diaries, and turns them into a blog, to which Navas has also added hyperlinks, commentary, and a ‘meta-­ diary’, aiming to explore, in the words of Navas himself, ‘the activity of web-surfing as part of a new social space’ (Navas 2007, n.p.). His Traceblog project of 2008 onwards consists of a daily ghost log of Navas’s online searches; arising from concerns that arose when working on his earlier Diary of a Star, Traceblog investigates the practice of data mining. Classified by Navas as a ‘regenerative remix’ (of which more is discussed below), Traceblog is, in the words of Navas, ‘both a metaphor and the actual thing: it is about blogs and it is a blog’, and it is ‘a work about data-mining that exposes information that is data-mined. It is about the relation among resistance, futility, and aesthetics’ (Navas 2012a, p. 143). His Goobalization trilogy of 2005–2007 consists of three short videos which are created from images downloaded from the internet, and reworked along the axes created by the intersections of four terms— ‘surveillance’, ‘difference’, ‘resistance’, and ‘globalisation’—encouraging the viewer to reflect on the complex relationship between these terms and the images which are reproduced.3 His Poemita (2010a) consists of an online collection of micropoems published on the Twitter platform, making use of the constraints of the format of the tweet and also making metatextual commentary on contemporary society and forms of expression. Most recently, his Instagram Drawings (2018a to date) consists of a

2  It is worth noting that another of the authors studied in this volume, Belén Gache, also dialogues with Borges’s tale in another of her works, this being the piece ‘Escribe tu propio Quijote’ included in her 2006 collection Word Toys. 3  See my 2012 article ‘Post-Digital Remixes and Carnavalesque Relinkings’ for a detailed analysis of this work.

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series of drawings that are based on news and current events, intended as a critical commentary on the platform itself. Navas’s work, then, has a particular interest in the reworking and recycling of existing sources as enabled by new media technologies, with the frequent aim of drawing out inconsistencies, shedding light on new meanings, and exploring the power relations hidden in the interconnections between the various sources that he reuses. Navas has also been a leading figure in the development of remix theory (of which more later), with his most prominent works including his 2012 monograph Remix Theory: The Aesthetics of Sampling, which set out his theory and developed a taxonomy of remix. His recent 2018 book Art, Media Design, and Postproduction (2018b) sets forth a series of guidelines for the creation of digital media artworks, covering topics such as mash-ups, sampling, codification, creativity, and a range of related topics, whilst he is also co-editor of the volume Keywords in Remix Studies (2017), which brings together a range of scholars and practitioners covering topics in remix, ranging from intellectual property through to memes and feminism.

Minima Moralia Redux: Remixing Adorno for the Twenty-First Century Navas’s Minima Moralia Redux (2011a to date) is a blog-based work that remixes and visualises excerpts from the English translation of Theodor Adorno’s Minima Moralia: Reflexionen aus dem beschädigten Leben. It forms part of a larger body of works by Navas from 2004 onwards that he groups together as his Blog Remixes, in which he uses the blog format as an art medium to put into practice what he terms ‘selective remix’ (Navas 2011b). Navas began Minima Moralia Redux with its first posting on 16 October 2011, and has posted a total of 61 entries to date, with the plan that eventually all the 153 aphorisms of Adorno’s work will become part of the project. Adorno’s text is thus the central intertext with which Navas dialogues in Minima Moralia Redux, and he engages in a complex homage to and yet remixing of Adorno for the present day. Composed between 1944 and 1947, Adorno’s Minima Moralia: Reflexionen aus dem beschädigten Leben was first published in 1951, and subsequently published in English translation as Minima Moralia: Reflections From Damaged Life. Punning on the title of Aristotle’s treatise on ethics, Magna Moralia, Adorno’s book was intended to challenge

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some of the norms of philosophical inquiry.4 Whereas the notion encapsulated in the Magna Moralia—‘great ethics’—implies philosophical thinking on a grand scale, Adorno insists on the importance of the minima, that is, on the minutiae of everyday life. Arguing in his dedication to the volume that ‘he who wishes to know the truth about life in its immediacy must scrutinize its estranged form, the objective powers that determine individual existence even in its most hidden recesses’ (Adorno 2005, p. 15), Adorno proposes a detailed scrutiny of the conditions in which the individual lives in order to ask ourselves how the structures that rule our lives compel us to behave. Adorno’s punning title thus questions the foundations of philosophical enquiry and of ethics; as Clark has summed this up, ‘the title […]—an ironic, aphoristic, and chastened reversal of Aristotle’s inquiry into “the teaching of the good life” in Maxima Moralia—hints at the fact that philosophical system building is no longer possible’ (Clark 2015, p. 32). Adorno’s work, thus, was itself engaged in an intertextual dialogue with prior text, but challenged some of this prior text’s premises. There are two particularly important features of Adorno’s original that, I argue, are fundamental to our understanding of Navas’s practice in his Minima Moralia Redux: firstly, Adorno’s focus on the individual under the conditions of commodity capitalism and secondly, his undermining of the very genre he was mobilising. Regarding the first of these, in his book Adorno undertakes a detailed examination of the minutiae of everyday life in order to illustrate that, as he puts it, ‘what the philosophers once knew as life has become the sphere of private existence and now of mere 4  Although for ease of reference I have here given the author of the Magna Moralia as Aristotle, it is worth noting that the authorship of Magna Moralia has been disputed, with some scholars arguing that it was written by a pupil of Aristotle rather than by Aristotle himself; see Nielsen 2018 for a comprehensive overview of the positions taken by scholars on this text, in which, in Nielsen’s words, ‘views about the authenticity of the MM fall on a continuum, running from outright dismissal to carefully qualified defenses of its authenticity’ (Nielsen 2018, p. 198). That said, most scholars nowadays concur that it is a genuine work of Aristotle; see Simpson, who argues that ‘suffice it to note, first, that the majority of scholars who have devoted serious study to MM (notably Von Arnim and Dirlmeier) do think it genuine, and, second, that MM itself contains a passage that is almost a self-confession by the author that he is Aristotle’ (Simpson 2014, p. 368). Moreover, even those who doubt the authenticity of the text view it as representing Aristotle’s ideas; as Cooper argues, since it ‘seems to report in someone else’s hand lectures of Aristotle’s on ethics’, it therefore represents ‘the earliest version of Aristotle’s moral theory’ and so can be understood as reflecting his views, if not actually written by him (Cooper 1986, p. xiii).

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­consumption’ (Adorno 2005, p.  15). That is, Minima Moralia is concerned with revealing to us how the everyday details of our private, individual lives are not personal, irrelevant details, but in fact are determined by the commodity capitalism under which we live. In order to do so, Adorno focuses on a range of habits and customs, with chapters dedicated to topics as diverse as the dividing up of goods in a divorce, the archetype of the bank clerk, leisure time activities, technology, the giving of presents, and many more. What is common to all of these different examples is Adorno’s attempt to uncover the political and economic structures underpinning them. Thus, for instance, his aphorism 10, ‘divided-united’ about marriage, serves as a springboard for him to condemn marriage as ‘a fusion derived from an enforced community of economic interests’ (Adorno 2005, p. 31). Or, to cite another example, his aphorism 84, entitled ‘timetable’ in which he reflects on the division between leisure time and work time, leads him to conclude that ‘the doctrine inculcated since Aristotle that moderation is the virtue appropriate to reasonable people, is among other things an attempt to found so securely the socially necessary division of man into functions independent of each other’ and that, as a result, ‘atomization is advancing not only between men, but within each individual, between the spheres of his life’ (Adorno 2005, p. 130). In these and the other varied examples contained within the 153 aphorisms of Minima Moralia, Adorno demonstrates his concern with drawing out the social practices and institutions that condition our existence, and he undertakes a sustained condemnation of the bourgeois era, the bourgeois concept of the individual, and the alienation of the individual in commodity capitalism. As Jaeggi summarises Adorno’s approach in this text, his ‘critique of the “organization of the world” here stands for a fundamental questioning of our relations to the world and ourselves as a whole, beginning from the most personal experiences and carried out in detail. Out of the phenomenology of everyday life a critique of capitalism as a form of life is assembled’ (Jaeggi 2005, pp. 65–66). Crucial in Adorno’s study, therefore, was that the minutiae of everyday life could reveal the fundamental systemic structures to which the individual is in thrall. Adorno’s original text thus attempted to speak out against alienation and awaken the reader to his/her situation as caught within the political and economic structures constructed by the state in alliance with capital. Yet in addition to the content of his text, the format itself is also significant, for Adorno chose to set down his denunciation of the conditions of life under commodity capitalism in a deliberately jarring format.

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Importantly, as Norberg argues, the very genre itself employed by Adorno—a collection of aphorisms—is undermined by the content: Adorno packs a social-theoretical diagnosis into a generic form that is undermined by this very diagnosis. The volume inhabits and violates the conventions of textually mediated advice in order to draw attention to or, better, to organize the experience of the discrepancy between society’s logic and the individual’s cognitive and pragmatic resources. And it performs this operation in the field of a particular genre for a clearly outlined reason: to deliver a critique of classical liberalism as well as of the totally administered world. (Norberg 2011, p. 401)

In other words, the very book of aphorisms is of a bourgeois genre, forming part of the broader genre of conduct literature that witnessed a boom from the nineteenth century into the early decades of the twentieth, and which schooled its readers on how to behave in accordance with societal norms.5 Regarding firstly the aphorism specifically, scholars have noted how this genre works by encouraging conformity in its readers, due to the fact that ‘wise sayings typically view the world as providential, guaranteeing reward for prudence and righteousness’ (Morson 2012, p.  7). As regards the broader genre of conduct literature within which the book of aphorism sits, as Cruz sums up this type of literature, ‘by enunciating and prescribing rules of refined behaviour in accessible publications’, these works ‘introduced the ideals of conduct that men and women were expected to follow if they desired to succeed socially, thus providing the idealized portrait of the perfect […] bourgeois’ (Cruz 2012, p. 348). In this way, the book of aphorisms or the advice book was complicit with the conditions of commodity capitalism in its providing of advice to the bourgeois individual on how best to comply with the norms of capitalist society. Adorno’s text, therefore, in its attempt not to oblige the reader to comply with societal norms but, rather, to unmask the structures underlying them, undermines the genre within which it sits. In so doing, it ‘robs 5  Although there was a notable boom in conduct literature in the nineteenth and the first half of the twentieth century, coinciding with the consolidation of the middle class, the aphorism itself of course has a long literary history which stretches back to classical antiquity. See, for instance, Morson’s detailed history of the aphorism, in which he traces the aphorism to as far back as Biblical proverbs, arguing that ‘the oldest and most commonly used aphoristic genre is the “wise saying”: the pronouncements of sages and the anonymous wisdom of past generations that circulate as proverbs’ (Morson 2012, p. 7).

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the reader of the belief inherent to the mode of address of the advice book, namely that pressing problems and moral issues can be adequately grasped and dealt with within the individual’s immediate sphere of cognition and influence’ (Norberg 2011, p. 405). Minima Moralia is thus an attack on the very foundations of the conduct book, in that it inveighs against the bourgeois individual, with a significant number of the entries in Minima Moralia unpicking the notion of the self-determining bourgeois individual. In this way, the practice of giving advice through the conduct book is troubled by Adorno’s ironic reuse of the genre. There are, hence, I contend, two important features to draw out from Adorno’s original with regard to Navas’s purposes in Minima Moralia Redux. Firstly, the sustained critique of industrial society and the dominant form of capitalism under which Adorno lived, namely statist capitalism; and secondly, the reworking of existing literary forms, both Aristotle’s Magna Moralia specifically and the genre of conduct literature more broadly. These two features come to the fore in Navas’s work, in its recycling of previous textual formats and in its updating of Adorno for the neoliberal, corporatist era. As my analysis below will demonstrate, where the critique undertaken by Adorno in Minima Moralia was of the liberal, statist model of capitalism, and of the ways in which, in the words of Norberg, people are ‘incessantly coerced, bribed, and trained to satisfy the system requirements of compounded market and state structures […] through close coordination between the state and concentrated capital’ (Norberg 2011, p.  402), now it is the neoliberal, corporatist model of capitalism that comes under scrutiny in Navas. The way in which this transformation and critique is achieved is through remix as a creative strategy, whereby Adorno’s aphorisms are remixed, added to, and updated in order to comment on the era of corporatist technocapitalism. That is, in its use in Navas’s work, Adorno’s text is not only simply quoted, but remixed, reworked, and re-semanticised through a variety of means, as will be analysed below. Navas defines the specific type of remix in which he engages in Minima Moralia Redux as ‘selective remix’ (Navas 2011b), a particular form of remix that can be understood through his own theoretical publications on remix theory. In a variety of articles, posts to his theory website (http://remixtheory.net/), and his recently published monograph Remix Theory: The Aesthetics of Sampling (Navas 2012b), Navas has developed the notion of remix as an aesthetic practice in art, music, and new media.

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Tracing its roots in early forms of mechanical reproduction in the nineteenth century, Navas subsequently draws on techniques of music sampling in the 1960s and 1970s to develop his theory of remix. Building on these remix techniques in music and DJ culture, Navas proposes the model of remix as representing the aesthetics of the internet, due to the latter’s dependence on sampling, copying, and pasting in order to function as a network, positing that ‘the Internet as a network relies directly on sampling; some examples include file sharing, downloading open source software, live streaming of video and audio, sending and receiving e-mails. These online activities rely on copying, and deleting (cutting), information from one point to another as data packets’ (Navas 2012b, pp. 74–75). For Navas, the fundamental feature in remix culture on the internet is the role of the user, as he argues that ‘what is particular to new media is that the user plays a crucial role in activating the material’ (Navas 2012b, p.  75). Navas also proposes a taxonomy of differing versions of remix, within which ‘selective remix’ is defined as involving ‘adding or subtracting material from the original composition’ (Navas 2012b, p. 66). Whilst this type of remix contains new sections of material, the ‘spectacular aura’ of the original composition is maintained (Navas 2012b, p. 76). It is this particular type of remix, then, that Navas is aiming to create in Minima Moralia Redux, and, indeed, in his brief gloss of the work, Navas explains in more detail the significance of selective remix in this context: The selective remix consists of adding to or subtracting material from a pre-­ existing source. […] The selective remix may not only extend the pre-­ existing material, […] but can also contain new sections, while others are subtracted, always keeping the source recognizable. In this fashion, Adorno’s aphorisms are rewritten to make evident how his voice is still worth revisiting. (Navas 2011a–)

What is striking here, therefore, is that the selective remix, all the while subtracting from the original and adding additional material to it, still maintains the relevance of the original. This maintenance of the ‘aura’ of the original text in this particular case is, as Navas argues, intended to demonstrate that Adorno’s thinking still remains relevant. It is this attempt to update Adorno for the twenty-first century—or, to borrow Navas’s term, to remix Adorno for the twenty-first century—that we see coming to the fore in Minima Moralia Redux.

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In terms of its presentation, Minima Moralia Remix currently has two main parts, with a third likely to be created in the future, given that its structure mirrors that of Adorno’s original.6 The first part, consisting of aphorisms 1–50, comprises a black-and-white interface in which boxes of lexia are arranged across the screen, of differing font sizes and consisting of single words or phrases rather than a continuous paragraph, as was the case in Adorno’s original. As we move our mouse over a particular box, the box enlarges and a title appears at the top left of the box, in grey; this gives us the number of the particular aphorism of Adorno’s work with which the content dialogues. On clicking on each particular box, the specific entry for that box loads. This consists of, firstly, a larger version of the same visualisation, with black screen and white font and, below this, the remixed aphorism from Adorno given in a continuous paragraph. Below this, a smaller version of the same visualisation appears, and then further below this, a remixed visualisation (more on which below). In this work, we are faced with a range of possibilities in rethinking and visualising Adorno’s original by means of Navas’s different remixing strategies. The most immediately obvious of these, and the most straightforward, is the visualisation of Adorno’s text in the form of word clouds. The word cloud or tag cloud format allows for the visualisation of text whereby word frequency in a particular text is represented by the difference in font size, and allows the most prominent terms of a given text to be grasped at a glance.7 This technique can be employed to visualise any text, but is of course in contemporary usage most commonly associated with a particular type—the tag clouds of social media platforms, particularly popular on blogs and the photo sharing site, Flickr. Since tag clouds are nowadays a standard feature of the blog format, Navas’s use here of word clouds clearly references this popular blog device, although now this format is employed for artistic purposes—an example, as in many other of Navas’s works, of the use of, or citation of, conventional digital media t­ echnologies 6  These three parts correspond to the three sections of Adorno’s original: Part 1, which included aphorisms 1–50, written in 1944; Part 2, comprising aphorisms 51–100, written in 1945; and Part 3, comprising aphorisms 101–153, written between 1946 and 1947. 7  Although most immediately recognisable as a digital format, it is worth noting that word clouds also have a pre-digital, print heritage; Jänicke and Scheuermann identify the precursors of tag clouds in Stanley Milgram’s 1976 mental map of Paris, and also in the German edition of Deleuze and Guattari’s A Thousand Plateaux (1992), which included a word cloud on the cover to summarise the content of their book (Jänicke and Scheuermann 2017, p. 199).

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for new purposes. The word cloud or tag cloud thus stands as a synecdoche for social media and, as I will demonstrate below, Navas’s use of this device encourages us to question the political economy underpinning it. For Navas, the main interest of text clouds is their ability to aid visualisation, with one of his aims being ‘the visualization of data in forms that will lead to new ways of understanding cultural production’ (Navas 2011a). Thus the visualisation of Adorno’s original aphorisms by means of the text clouds provides the first level of selective remix undertaken by Navas, whereby, rather than a continuous paragraph, only certain of the key words are selected, and these are then given greater or lesser weight by their relative font size and position on the screen. This, therefore, represents the ‘subtracting’ element of the selective remix, whereby certain elements—in this case, many of the word categories of the original, such as articles, prepositions, and so forth—are removed from the original, to leave only the key words that we see visualised here. If this is the first level of remix undertaken by Navas in this work, the second lies in the varying interfaces that are available for us to view the lexia. As with the text clouds mentioned above, the various interfaces allow us to view the lexia in different settings and see them as interacting with each other in different ways. Here, for instance, our choosing to view the lexia via the ‘Timeslide’ interface would encourage us to read them in a sequential format, and imbue them with a chronology that is absent from Adorno’s original. Conversely, were we to select the ‘Snapshot’ interface, we view the lexia as frozen instants, and framed as pictorial rather than textual representations. In each of these interfaces, then, our reading of Adorno is reshaped by the different presentation and layout of the material. Yet, more significantly than these first two levels of selective remix that essentially involve deleting or reshaping material already in the original, a third level of selective remix is at work in Navas’s piece, namely the adding to or extending the original material. Here, the act of remixing as a creative act comes to the fore, as Navas produces for each lexia not only a word cloud based on the original aphorism, but a second, different word cloud based on an adapted, remixed version of Adorno’s text. This tactic can be seen in all of the lexia within the work, whereby the visualisation of the original text that appears at the top of each entry is complemented by a thumbnail of a second visualisation of the remixed version. As regards the way in which these remixed aphorisms are created, Navas describes this rewriting process:

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For the first part, consisting of fifty aphorisms, I examined each entry carefully, evaluating every word. I studied the history of particular words, and evaluated each sentence’s relevance during the times when the book was written. I then considered how the entries could be understood and how they were at play in contemporary times. When I rewrote the aphorisms, I kept in mind how remixing functions in music and video, and considered how such approaches could function in writing to see what the results could be. (Navas 2017, p. 69)

Navas’s technique here is thus concerned with assessing the relevance for Adorno at the time of his writing, and then updating it for the present day, with remix being a fundamental process for doing so. An example of this dynamic can be seen in Navas’s aphorism 14, which remixes Adorno’s original aphorism entitled ‘Le bourgeois revenant’ and which, I argue, demonstrates clearly this remixing and updating of Adorno for late capitalism. In Adorno’s original, a strident attack on the bourgeois order was voiced, in which, for Adorno, ‘whatever was once good and decent in bourgeois values, independence, perseverance, forethought, circumspection, has been corrupted utterly’, with Adorno lamenting that the ‘bourgeois live on like spectres threatening doom’ (Adorno 2005, p. 34). This aphorism is one of the many instances in Minima Moralia in which Adorno inveighed against bourgeois capitalism, and the way in which all areas of social life were becoming, as Burges has put it, ‘entirely immanent to capitalism, enveloped and administered by all-encompassing economies of exchange’ (Burges 2013, p. 70). Accordingly, the word cloud that Navas has generated to represent the original text from Adorno gives prominence to terms such as ‘bourgeois’, ‘bourgeoisie’, and ‘economic’, amongst others (see Fig. 6.1). The largest

Fig. 6.1  Eduardo Navas, Minima Moralia Redux (2011a), aphorism 14

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of these terms is ‘bourgeois’, and is located at the top right of the screen; given that word clouds function by visualising hierarchies, this calls our attention to the word ‘bourgeois’ as the structurally most important keyword. The word cloud thus visualises for us how the bourgeois order is the primary structuring order to which all the other words on the screen, below it and in smaller font—‘property’, ‘administration’, ‘functionaries’, and so forth—are subordinate. In the lexia that lies beneath it, and in thumbnail image towards the bottom of the page, however, Navas’s remixed version tells a similar, although subtly different, story. Regarding firstly the paragraph of text, although starting off with Adorno’s familiar opening lines of the a­ phorism, the third sentence in Navas’s version has had a small but significant addition. The original text by Adorno reads: ‘Private life however is also marked by this’.8 However, Navas’s remixed version reads: ‘Private life is certainly marked by this, quite inevitably, given that the concept of “private” was originally conceived by the very system that now data-mines it in the name of the emerging social media market’. Navas’s version now updates Adorno’s aphorism for the era of informational capitalism and web 2.0. Whereas Adorno’s concern was how the private realm reflected the dominant social order—that is, where purportedly ‘private’ institutions such as the family upheld and reproduced bourgeois statist capitalism—for Navas, the term ‘private’ is now interpreted in terms of data privacy, and his condemnation is of the way in which data mining lies in the hands of, and is used to serve the interests of, corporate giants. Navas’s version thus draws our attention to the tendency first flagged up in the 1990s by David Lyon and others, who warned of the dangers of a growing ‘surveillance society’ in which the coordinated development of information gathering, technology application, and management serves the interests of ‘super corporations’ (Lyon 1994, p. 152). More recently, with the explosion of social media and web 2.0 platforms, many scholars have highlighted how data mining is increasingly employed by new media giants; as McKee has noted, ‘from behavioral profiling and paid prioritization to the warrantless seizure of digital communications, the extent of overt and covert Web surveillance, data mining, and corporate takeover of the 8  In the most widely used print translation of Adorno’s Minima Moralia, the version by Jephcott, this phrase appears as ‘Thereby has private life also been marked’ (Adorno 2005, p. 34). However, Navas has here used the translation available on www.marxists.org, hence I cite from this version here.

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Internet already occurring is mind-boggling’ (McKee 2011, p.  277). Similarly, Arntfield has warned of the dangers of what he terms ‘wikisurveillance’ in which ‘an open-source, collaborative, and consensual culture of publicly endorsed and cooperative watching [is] suborned by a crucible of both corporate interests and a defeatist “I’ve got nothing to hide” capitulation to the dissemination of personal images and data under the guise of “total information awareness”’ (Arntfield 2008, p. 38). Navas’s new version of Adorno’s original sentence here thus turns into a warning about the increasing corporate takeover of the internet. Moreover, Navas’s remixed aphorism also cautions that the very concept of ‘private’ was ‘originally conceived by the very system’ that now data-mines it. In this phrase, Navas is alerting us to the fact the notion of ‘private’ and how it is conceived in relation to our data is itself invented by, and in collusion with, global corporate social media. That is, the focus by social media platforms on private data, on the data of a named individual, and on data security, is in itself an invention of this same system, and relies upon a neoliberal concept of privacy which obscures the real conditions of late capitalism. As Christian Fuchs has argued, definitions of information privacy reflect bourgeois liberal values since concepts of privacy are highly individualistic, and always focused on the individual and his/her freedoms. Fuchs then goes on to argue that ‘privacy under capitalism can best be characterized as an antagonistic value that is, on the one hand, upheld as a universal value for protecting private property, but is, on the other hand, permanently undermined by corporate and state surveillance into human lives for the purpose of capital accumulation’ (Fuchs 2012, p. 141). In a similar vein, referring to the functioning of new media technologies and specifically search engines (of which more below), Michael Zimmer has cautioned that, although privacy problems relating to individuals require attention, ‘we must expand the investigation of search-related privacy problems from concerns over the personal information about other people that can be found via search engines, to include critical exploration of the personal information that is routinely collected when users rely on search engines for their information-seeking activities’ (Zimmer 2008, p. 83). In this way, the very concept of ‘private’ is complicit with the figure of the private, bourgeois entrepreneurial subject. To extrapolate from Fuchs and Zimmer, it is not the security of our individual (bourgeois, entrepreneurial) data that we should worry about, but rather the data mining of the system by the very corporations themselves who provide us with these platforms.

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Similarly, a few lines below, Adorno’s original sentence reading ‘for while bourgeois forms of existence are doggedly preserved, their economic prerequisites have fallen away’ is transformed by Navas into an adapted, expanded version. Navas’s sentence now reads: ‘Bourgeois forms of existence are comfortably preserved even though their prerequisites have moved into an ephemeral decentralized system, which keeps them relevant through endless recombination.’ Again, Navas’s version updates the referent of Adorno’s original: whereas Adorno’s critique in Minima Moralia was of statist capitalism—of, in Norberg’s words, the ‘subordination of the individual subject in the age of technocratic state capitalism’ (Norberg 2011, p. 402)—now, in Navas’s remixed aphorism, the system is no longer statist, but is ‘ephemeral’ and ‘decentralized’. The terms inserted by Navas here recall the key feature of late capitalism—what David Harvey has called the regime of flexible accumulation, in whch late capitalism ‘exploits a wide range of seemingly contingent geographical circumstances, and reconstitutes them as structured internal elements of its own encompassing logic’ (Harvey 1990, p. 294), or what Hardt and Negri described as a ‘world market […] liberated from the kind of binary divisions that nation-states had imposed’ and in which differences ‘do not play freely across a smooth global space, but rather are regimented in global networks of power consisting of highly differentiated and mobile structures’ (Hardt and Negri 2000, p. 151). In Navas’s remix, it is thus the system of late neoliberal capital that comes under scrutiny, where power lies no longer in individual states but increasingly in the hands of global big businesses whose networks of power extend across the nation-­ state boundaries. Moreover, in Navas’s scenario, the ‘endless recombination’ refers not only to the functionings of the classical liberal market where the constant promotion of new commodities ensures the survival of capitalism, but also hints at the workings of social media. That is, the seemingly endless recombinations—or remixings, we might say, to borrow Navas’s favoured term—form the backbone of users’ interaction on social media, with images and data constantly shared by users across a range of social media platforms. The remixed aphorism here thus problematises the very functioning of social media (in collusion with corporate capital) itself. Further down the paragraph, we see another insertion that has not only added to Adorno’s original sentence but has created new sentences entirely. In the original aphorism, the sentence reads: ‘that which is private has gone over completely into that privation, which it secretly always was, and the stubborn grip on one’s own interest is intermingled with the rage

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that one is no longer capable of perceiving that things could be different and better’.9 In Navas’s version, however, we now read: ‘The private is now completely immersed in privation, which from the very beginning was its secret leniency. By doing this, paradoxically, it is now in the open, and used as a tool of advertising. There is more revenue in tracking the flow of privation throughout the network. The stubborn grip on particular interests is intermingled with rage, and one is no longer able to perceive that things could be different and better.’ In Navas’s new version, the private, as noted above, has now been re-semanticised to refer to data privacy issues on the internet, and his reference here to ‘the network’ invokes both the internet as structure and wider issues of global network capitalism, as expounded by Christian Fuchs and others. Moreover, with his insertion of the reference to advertising, Navas explicitly links this notion of internet privacy that he established earlier in the remixed aphorism with advertising and corporate interests, a feature that has come under scrutiny by scholars in recent years. Joseph Turow, in his book-­ length study of the relationship between social media and advertising, opens with the claim that through its data mining of social media content, ‘at the start of the twenty-first century, the advertising industry is guiding one of history’s most massive stealth efforts in social profiling’ (Turow 2011, p. 1). Turow goes on to demonstrate that, as hundreds of millions of internet users every day are being analysed and tagged, companies working for marketers mine these data, resulting in a ‘highly controversial form of social profiling and discrimination by customizing our media content’. In this way, data mining of social media content in the interests of advertisers has the ‘capacity to determine not only what media firms do but how we see ourselves and others’ (Turow 2011, p. 8). Similarly, reflecting on the production of data itself and its relation to advertising, Christian Fuchs has noted how the production of content on social media platforms such as Facebook is upheld by advertising, observing that ‘a widely-used accumulation strategy is to give the users free access to services and platforms, let them produce content, and to accumulate a mass of prosumers that are sold as a commodity to third-party 9  Again, I cite here from the online translation that Navas has used for his work. This sentence in the print translation by Jephcott reads: ‘Privacy has given way entirely to the privation it always secretly was, and with the stubborn adherence to particular interests is now mingled with fury at being no longer able to perceive that things might be different and better’ (Adorno 2005, p. 34).

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advertisers. No product is sold to the users; the users are sold as a commodity to advertisers’ (Fuchs 2012, p. 144). Fuchs’s argument within this article—namely, that ‘capital accumulation on Facebook is based on the commodification of users and their data’ (Fuchs 2012, p. 139)—proves a useful way of approaching Navas’s enterprise in this aphorism and indeed throughout Minima Moralia Redux as a whole. Just as Fuchs brings to bear some of the tools of classical Marxist inquiry on twenty-first-century informational capitalism, illustrating how privacy and surveillance on Facebook are connected to surplus value, exploitation, and class, so Navas reworks Adorno’s comments on commodity capitalism for the corporate capitalism of the twenty-first century. In each of these examples, the insertion of additional material into Adorno’s original sentences via Navas’s remix has produced a new, updated aphorism for the twenty-first century, which now focuses on the minutiae of everyday life under informational capitalism. The effect on the reader, as we browse through the various lexia, is disconcerting, as it is at times hard to spot which sentences or phrases of Adorno have been doctored, and we need to be familiar with Adorno’s original aphorisms to immediately pick up on what has been inserted. Some of the subtler insertions may initially escape our notice as we read through the paragraph, and, only as we start to pick up on the jarring of certain terms—for instance, in the case of this aphorism, the fact that the term ‘data mining’ is anachronistic in the context of the 1940s when Adorno was writing—do we spot the intrusion of the additional content. Indeed, part of this strategy is precisely to encourage the reader to check back against the original, and Navas has enabled this for us, with a hyperlink to the original aphorism of Adorno in each blog entry, below the remixed text. Here, thus, in our reading, we are encouraged to look beyond the text we have in front of us and to go back to Adorno, and then undertake a similarly Marxist-inspired critique for the present day. If such is the effect on the reader as we peruse the new, remixed aphorism, similarly, in the new word cloud we encounter towards the bottom of the page, Adorno’s emphasis has been altered to present a visualisation of the structures of network capitalism. In this new word cloud, the terms ‘bourgeois’ and ‘bourgeoisie’ still maintain some prominence, but are rendered in medium-sized font towards the centre of the screen. Instead, the most visually arresting term is now ‘private’, rendered in large font to the right of the screen (see Fig. 6.2). Dominating the screen, this term now takes precedence and a small ring of satellite terms around it, in medium-­

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Fig. 6.2  Eduardo Navas Minima Moralia Redux (2011a), aphorism 14 remixed

sized font—‘now’, ‘system’, ‘social’, ‘elite’, and ‘caring’—radiate out from it. It is now these terms, and the other smaller ones within the word cloud, that are subordinate to the term ‘private’ as the structuring node of the system. Navas’s remixed word cloud has thus mapped out for us the transition from a form of capitalism based on bourgeois statism in Adorno’s time to a form of capitalism based on private finance and corporatism; in other words, from liberal, statist capitalism to neoliberal, global capitalism. Indeed, the addition of the new terms inserted by Navas within this constellation, such as ‘media’, ‘network’, ‘decentralized’, and so forth, indicates how our current visualisation represents an updated, informational capitalism. Crucially, I argue, this updated version of the aphorism as represented by the word cloud also functions as a metatextual commentary on the platform itself that Navas mobilises. That is, the word cloud or tag cloud is, as scholars have widely noted, closely linked with the phenomenon of user-generated content.10 Associated with blogs and with other forms of user-generated content, including user-created metadata, a key feature of tag clouds and word clouds—and of user-generated content more broadly—is that the social media users themselves create it for free. Whilst such a phenomenon is often hailed as a positive example of the rise of the produser, it is also, of course, one in which the labour to produce such content is exploited. That word clouds are employed to undertake a criti10  See, for instance, Peters’s (2009) detailed study of folksonomies’ visualisation techniques, especially tag clouds, as well as their usefulness as facilities for efficient information retrieval; or Sinclair and Cardew-Hall (2007) for an analysis of the popularity and usefulness of tag clouds on folksonomy-based websites, including Flickr, Delicious, and Technorati.

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cal analysis of the political economy of late capitalism functions as one example of Navas’s resistant use of the genres he mobilises. Just as Adorno did with the genre of the book of aphorisms, in Navas’s version, the very format of the tag cloud is being employed to protest about the socio-­ economic conditions that underpin the tag cloud economy.

Minima Moralia Redux, Part Two: The Ideology of the Algorithm If this is the way in which Minima Moralia Redux in its first iteration functioned, from March 2015 Navas embarked on the second part of his work, moving from remixing solely textual elements to creating image-­ based remixes. Starting with aphorism 51, which is the first aphorism of Part Two of Adorno’s original text, the process in these entries from March 2015 onwards involves initially the same generation of a word cloud based on the text of the aphorism, but then a new element of visual input and mixing takes place. Navas takes the ten most frequent words in each word cloud, and uses these as the basis for his new remix. Firstly deciding on the order of these words, Navas then remixes them, adds some new elements, and subsequently runs a Google Image search, of which he then takes a screenshot, and which becomes the new, remixed version of the aphorism. Explaining this process in his recent 2017 article, Navas says that Selectivity can take on different forms, and for the first part of Minima Moralia Redux, it made the most sense to me to engage with Adorno’s writing as an intertextual exercise that also relies on sampling (copying and pasting), consisting of adding new content while deleting sentences, phrases and words in each entry. The selective approach, however, changed for the second set of aphorisms. […] It became evident to me that Adorno’s writing needed to be connected directly with the network on which it functions as a remix. […] Part two consists of linking phrases, parts of phrases, or single words, devoid of any punctuation, to corresponding Google searches (Figures 4 and 5). The reader can click on any link and be taken to respective search results, which will change according to Google’s updates. (Navas 2017, p. 72)

In this way, Navas’s second remix technique in Part II consists of integrating Google searches into the work itself. This tactic is, I contend, a way of commenting on, and critiquing, the algorithmically based search mecha-

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nisms of Google and its relational database structure. As I will analyse below, in a further denunciation of dataveillance, it is now the political economy of the algorithm that comes under scrutiny here. The first such aphorism to be presented in this way, Aphorism 51, is  particularly significant (http://minimamoraliaredux.blogspot.co. uk/2015/03/minima-moralia-51.html), given that the original aphorism on which it is based is self-reflexive, constituting Adorno’s musings on the process of writing. Bearing the title in the original German ‘Hinter den Spiegel’ (literally, behind the glass), this aphorism engages in meditations on writing, reading, and transparency.11 Jarosinski has identified this aphorism as one of the most important in the book, since it takes us, as its title suggests, ‘to the far side of mimetic perception and reflection’, and, Jarosinski argues, what is at stake in this aphorism is ‘the movement of language as it passes through and bears the traces of a complex web of social relations and aesthetic conventions’ (Jarosinski 2010, p. 166). In Navas’s remixed version, predominance is given to the visualisation, which appears first, preceding the written text of the aphorism itself. A further notable feature here that differs from the presentation of the text in the earlier entries in Part One of Navas’s work is that the text of the aphorism is now hyperlinked. Navas’s remixing technique in this second part of Minima Moralia Redux takes several levels here, I argue, and I contend that we must understand his practice in this part of the work through three axes: firstly, the content of the original aphorisms as they are repositioned in the twenty-first century; secondly, the visualisations; and thirdly, the hyperlinking to search engines. Regarding the first of these, the content of this original aphorism comprises Adorno’s advice on writing, drafting, and crafting sentences; it is thus, significantly, a metatextual aphorism in itself. The opening paragraph reads as follows: First word of caution for authors: check every text, every fragment, and every line to see if the central motif presents itself clearly enough. Whoever wants to express something, is so carried away that they are driven along, without reflecting on such. One is too close to the intention, ‘in thought,’ and forgets to say, what one wants to say.

11  It is worth noting that the title given to this aphorism in the published English translation—‘Memento’—loses the emphasis on transparency and mimesis that the original German title contains.

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Adorno’s original aphorism was, of course, written for the era of print technology, in which the process of writing and rewriting referred to the author as she/he refines a text, which subsequently goes to print. However, the process described by Adorno here—in which the wording has not been altered by Navas—in the new context in which Navas situates it inevitably brings to mind contemporary technologies of editing, revision, and remixing that are offered by digital technologies. Navas’s repositioning of this aphorism is thus both intertextual and metatextual. That is, this aphorism now refers to the technological platforms that Navas mobilises, and to his practice of resistant remix, since Adorno’s recommendations about checking text and examining fragments can easily be compared to Navas’s process of creating this work. Further on in this aphorism, the following section again resonates with contemporary practices, and, in particular, with Navas’s meticulous reworking of the minute details of the aphorisms that we witnessed in Part One of Minima Moralia Redux: No improvement is too small or piddling to be carried out. Out of a hundred changes, a single one may appear trifling and pedantic; together they can raise the text to a new level.12

In Adorno’s original, these comments were of course already metatextual, in that not only did they constitute advice to an external reader, but they could also be read as a commentary on Adorno’s practice in Minima Moralia itself. Thus, the ‘small’, ‘piddling’, ‘trifling’, and ‘pedantic’ refer clearly to Adorno’s attention to the minima moralia, to the minutiae of everyday life that he carries out in this work. In Navas’s version, however, the ‘piddling’ and ‘trifling’ refer not only to the minutiae of everyday life under informational capitalism, but also to the minute changes that Navas made to Adorno’s original. That is, as noted earlier, in Part One, Navas engaged in a subtle revision of Adorno’s original, by inserting small phrases and amendments into Adorno’s aphorisms. It is through these apparently ‘trifling and pedantic’ revisions that Navas does indeed ‘raise the text to a new level’.

12  In the published translation by Jephcott, this paragraph appears thus: ‘No improvement is too small or trivial to be worthwhile. Of a hundred alterations each may seem trifling or pedantic by itself; together they can raise the text to a new level’ (Adorno 2005, p. 85).

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Moreover, through the conjunction of the visual with the textual, our understanding of Adorno’s original changes due to the affordances of the digital age. For example, when we read the following in Adorno’s original: Whoever wants to avoid cliches, should not restrict themselves to words, lest one falls victim to vulgar coquetry. The great French prose of the 19th century was especially sensitive to this. Individual words are seldom banal: in music, too, the single tone never wears out.

The exhortation ‘not to restrict [ourselves] to words’ now takes on a new meaning, given that this text is now reproduced within a wider media ecology combining images and interactivity. The new aphorisms in Minima Moralia Redux are no longer restricted to words, as they integrate the visual into their process. Secondly, regarding the visualisation of this aphorism, below the full text of the aphorism we can still see the word cloud visualisation, as with the aphorisms covered in Part One. In the case of Aphorism 51, the most frequent terms were then reworked into a search string by Navas—‘one them oneself thought against all author beautiful expression language’— and subsequently fed into Google Images to generate the visualisation that appears towards the top of the page (see Fig. 6.3):

Fig. 6.3  Eduardo Navas Minima Moralia Redux (2011a), aphorism 51

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The images illustrate the key features of the text, yet also bring out new meanings. For instance, we see in this collage a variety of images, including, amongst others, a photograph of British-Indian author Salman Rushdie; the book cover of Minae Mizumura’s The Fall of Language in the Age of English (2015); and a cartoon image of the word ‘thought’ attached to a ball and chain. Whilst none of these were explicitly mentioned in Adorno’s original aphorism, these images have been generated through the use of the keywords, and their conjunction in this image collage brings forth a series of interrelated issues. For instance, the photograph of Rushdie giving a talk immediately brings to mind the controversy over his fourth novel The Satanic Verses (1988), and the fatwa calling for his assassination issued by the then supreme leader of Iran, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini. Alongside the image of the word ‘thought’ attached to a ball and chain, a combined visual metaphor is created which functions as a commentary on censorship or attacks on freedom of speech. Yet, when we see the image of Rushdie alongside the book cover of Minae Mizumura’s The Fall of Language in the Age of English (2015), we may be inclined to think instead of Rushdie’s focus on multilingualism, diaspora, and transnational identities, in the context of Mizumura’s concern for the perceived loss of national and regional languages in the face of the rise of English.13 In this way, the various images that are captured in this mosaic build upon and yet update Adorno’s concerns as expressed in the original aphorism. The keywords drawn out by Navas now generate images whose content references contemporary concerns as much as any historic ones that are specific to Adorno’s text. Whereas Adorno’s original focused in particular on style, precision, and ways to write effectively in a print era, this new image collage instead foregrounds contemporary concerns regarding censorship, (lack of) freedom of expression, and languages in the digital age. Thirdly, regarding the tactic of hyperlinking, it is important to note the precise way in which the text itself is reworked through digital means. For, in Navas’s presentation, every phrase or word of the text is hyperlinked; for example, the first four words ‘First word of caution’ are one hyperlink, ‘check every text’ is the next chunk to be hyperlinked, and so forth. 13  Interestingly, it is worth noting that in chapter 6, ‘English and National Languages in the Age of the Internet’, Mizumura sees the internet as one of the culprits for the loss of national and regional languages.

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Clicking on each hyperlinked lexia loads not a specific, pre-programmed URL that Navas has created, but instead a Google search window that searches for that word or phrase on the internet. In this way, Navas’s remix brings up dynamic content that changes over time, but also, crucially, changes according to the user, and it is this latter fact, I argue, which provides the most sinister of the warnings that Navas sets out in this work. In his article about the process of Minima Moralia Redux, Navas highlights the fact that the search results in this part of the work will continue to change as material is added, noting that in the work he ‘repurpose[s] Adorno’s aphorisms, as a series of links to search results that will continue to change as material is added and deleted on the Web’ (Navas 2017, p. 27). However, I argue that what is significant about the search results is not only that they will change as material is added to the internet, but also, crucially, that the results will change according to each user. That is, functioning through algorithms which make the results of searches relational, Google will deliver results to each user that will differ according to his or her existing search history, number of pages they have already accessed, where they log on, and so forth. I thus argue that this third feature of Navas’s work must be understood through recent scholarship on the algorithmic functioning of search engines, for which scholars have proposed notions such as ‘dataveillance’ (Zimmer), ‘linguistic capitalism’ (Kaplan), ‘traffic commodity’ (Van Couvering), ‘algorithmic ideology’ (Mager), and ‘algorithmic capitalism’ (Bilić) to understand the functioning of algorithms by search engines such as Google. Regarding the first of these, Zimmer has coined the term ‘dataveillance’ to refer to the way in which the drive for the ‘perfect’ search engine delivers results based on a user’s past searches and general browsing history and targets advertising to them, cautioning that ‘the panoptic gaze of Google’s infrastructure of dataveillance tracks our search histories, e-mails, blog posts or general browsing habits’ (Zimmer 2008, p.  91).14 Frederic 14  It is worth noting that Bentham’s model of the panopticon, and Foucault’s reading of it as the way in which surveillance is instilled in the individual, that underpins Zimmer’s development of the theory of dataveillance is not agreed on by everyone. Although not making specific reference to Zimmer, Siva Vaidhyanathan has coined the term ‘cryptopticon’ to refer to ‘an inscrutable information ecosystem of massive corporate and state surveillance’ (Vaidhyanathan 2012, p. 67). Providing an analysis of the myriad ways in which our behaviour is tracked, from social media platforms and browser cookies through to store discount cards and mobile applications, Vaidhyanathan argues that, ‘unlike Bentham’s Panopticon, the Cryptopticon is not supposed to be obvious. Its scale, its ubiquity, and even its very

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Kaplan, meanwhile, undertaking an analysis of the way in which Google employs algorithms to associate web pages to queries based on keywords, and then to assign commercial value to those keywords by selling these words to advertisers, coins the term ‘linguistic capitalism’, warning us that ‘Google has extended capitalism to language, transforming linguistic capital into money’ (Kaplan 2014, p. 59). Van Couvering, meanwhile, arguing that we must understand the development of search engine technology as closely intertwined with the social, political, and economic contexts in which it has developed, has proposed the notion of the ‘traffic commodity’ to refer to the way in which the search engine business model is based no longer on the audience—that is, the commodity which was sold to advertisers in prior eras—but now ‘the online commodity of choice would be traffic or the flow of visitors from one Website to another’ (Van Couvering 2008, p. 196). Astrid Mager, providing a detailed overview of how Google’s practices, including its use of links provided by users to index the web and rank its search results, and its employment of user data to adapt sponsored links to users’ preferences, argues that ‘capitalist modes of production are deeply woven into Google’s algorithm and computational mechanisms’ and, therefore, that ‘the algorithm is ideological’ (Mager 2014, p. 35). In a similar vein, Paško Bilić has put forward the notion of ‘algorithmic capitalism’, warning that ‘algorithms, engineered calculations and estimates of human needs increasingly determine the relations between humans in algorithmic capitalism. The more people use social media and the Internet, the more metadata of their online presence circulates for surveillance and commodity exchange purposes. Smooth interfaces, and free-of-charge online services blur the awareness of data-­ gathering practices’ (Bilić 2018, p. 325). Similarly, regarding our understanding—or lack thereof—of these algorithms, Tewell criticises the ‘carefully articulated rhetoric of neutrality’ which in fact obscures how technology ‘reflects and reinforces existing power structures’ (Tewell 2016, p. 293). Providing a range of examples— including how the algorithms behind the filter bubble produce customised search results which show only content expected to interest the user; existence are supposed to be hidden from clear view. […] Unlike Bentham’s prisoners, we don’t—perhaps can’t—know all the ways in which we are being watched or profiled’ (Vaidhyanathan 2012, p. 67). The subjects of the cryptopticon, for Vaidhyanathan, find it impossible to know whether and how they are being manipulated, and, indeed, they become complicit in the process of profiling and behavioural prediction.

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how this is subsequently marketised for advertising; how Google encourages users to sign up for its suite of products, so that it may amass more data and tweak algorithms accordingly, in order to target advertising more effectively; and how data is captured in myriad ways at the individual user level—Tewell contends that ‘algorithms fulfill both practical and ideological functions’, since ‘the providers of algorithms create the illusion that these complex formulas are “automatic” and free from attempted influence’ (Tewell 2016, p. 294). Crucially, Tewell flags up the lack of transparency in this process, because ‘the opacity of the customization process makes it difficult to know how the results we see are affected by what Google thinks we want to know’ (Tewell 2016, p. 298). All of these scholars, and others like them, have warned us about the hidden algorithms behind search engines, how they determine the content that we see, how they reinforce existing hierarchies, and how they further discrimination. Search engines thus emphatically do not return to us an objective list of results related to the term we have inputted; rather, the results we see are influenced by our pre-existing preferences and searches, our search history, and a whole range of factors making up our online behaviours which are data-mined and marketised. In the case of Minima Moralia Redux, the resultant links that are served to us as we access this part of the work are not chosen by Navas, but are generated by the algorithmic ideology of Google. I thus argue that the significance of the integration of Google search into Minima Moralia is not merely to provide us with access to content beyond the confines of the work; it forms, I contend, a critique of the apparently objective production of content that is returned by the Google search algorithm. That is, we cannot but see the search engine results that we access in Part Two of this work in the light of the earlier, remixed text-based aphorisms of Part One, which warned us about the commodification of the online self and the mining of data in the interests of corporate capital. If we access Minima Moralia Redux more than once, the fact that the results returned to us may change—based on our browsing habits, use of online products, social media likes, and many other online behaviours in the interim—serves as a chilling indictment of the conditions of late capitalism and the encroaching power of the algorithm on our lives. In summary, the visual and hyperlinked remixes that we encounter in Part Two of Minima Moralia Redux undertake a further updating of Adorno for the contemporary media age. These new remixed aphorisms, as I have demonstrated, work through three main processes: firstly, by

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revitalising the content of the original aphorism through its presentation in the present day; secondly, via a remixing that takes place through the use of images, in an attempt to represent the textual information in a visual way; and thirdly, through hyperlinking to the Google search engine, which makes connections beyond the text itself, and forces our attention on the algorithmic ideology that underpins search engine technology. What is crucial in regard to all of these practices—revitalising for the present; re-presenting through visualisations; and providing content through search engines—is that they are representative of contemporary new media practices. In this way, just as Adorno adopted and yet questioned the underpinnings of the book of aphorisms as a genre, so, too Navas makes use of these practices, but also to problematise these contemporary genres. Parallel to the way in which Adorno’s Minima Moralia critiqued the bourgeois capitalist norms that underpinned the book of aphorisms, Navas critiques in Part Two of this work the late capitalist norms that underpin contemporary new media communicative formats. If these are the various levels of the selective remix that are undertaken by Navas in the two extant parts of Minima Moralia Redux to date, it is also worth noting that a further, more open-ended form of remix is enabled in the public participation that is integrated into the work. Significantly, Minima Moralia Redux is not intended to be solely the sum total of the lexia remixed by Navas, but, on the contrary, public participation is conceived of as central to the work. This public participation is enabled both online through the website itself and also in associated exhibitions.15 Via the link towards the top of the blog entitled ‘Public Access Exhibit’, viewers/users are provided with a list of ways in which they can contribute to Minima Moralia Redux, ranging from the most straightforward option of simply contributing a comment on an existing entry in the work to creating their own remixed entries. Users choosing to try out the latter option are pointed towards the Many Eyes online platform via a hyperlink, and are given the opportunity to create an alternative visualisation of an aphorism that Navas has already remixed, or to select an aphorism not yet remixed, and create their own visualisation. Each visualisation created by users will then be added to the blog when the respective entry is ready to be published. 15  Minima Moralia Redux was exhibited at the Public Access exhibition, curated by Rachel Falconer, at the Living Space Internet Cafe in London in June 2012. Viewers in London and connected up from elsewhere in the world were invited to contribute to the work.

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In this level of remix within Minima Moralia Redux user input is maximised and, potentially, constantly evolving versions of the aphorisms are made possible. Navas thus capitalises upon the potentials offered by new media technologies more broadly, and web 2.0 in particular, to offer an active role to the reader-user of his work, yet our participation in this activity will, of necessity, be tinged by the cautionary tale that we have encountered throughout all of the aphorisms of Minima Moralia Redux. That is, if Navas has constantly reminded us of how our online data is data-mined in the interests of multinational corporations, of how social profiling of our online activities is undertaken in the interests of advertising, and of how social media exploits its users to create content for free, then our engagement with the online tools in order to participate in Minima Moralia Redux will be informed by the warnings he has given us. Aware of the exploitation of our data as we participate, and our own status as working for free, generating intellectual surplus value as produsers, we contribute to Minima Moralia Redux all the while maintaining a critical stance on the tools we employ. So, through our input, we become co-­ authors of this genre, but, just like Navas in Minima Moralia Redux and Adorno before him in Minima Moralia, we are encouraged to resist the political economy underpinning the genre or platform we are mobilising. As this chapter has demonstrated, Navas’s Minima Moralia Redux evidences concerns with new media technologies, control of data, and remixing as a technique, exploiting new media platforms for literary purposes. In this work, Navas makes use of a variety of new media formats and tools—the blog as platform, word clouds as visualisation tools, search engines to generate content—for artistic purposes, and in order to engage in a resistant commentary on the uses of digital technologies, and their complicity with late capitalism. As evidenced above, the impetus behind Navas’s choice of Minima Moralia as original source text was to make evident how Adorno is still relevant for the present day. As my analysis has shown, this notion of Adorno still being relevant lies in the updating of Adorno’s aphorisms for the present-day context of neoliberal corporatism. In line with a growing body of scholarship by the likes of Fuchs, Castells, and others, who have vociferously argued that the workings of informational capital need just as close a scrutiny as those of its predecessor, commodity capital, and that we need to update our understandings of the material conditions of production under informational capitalism, Navas’s work encourages the reader to explore how new media technologies are increasingly put to use for, or mined in the interest of, large corporations.

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Significantly, this political critique is undertaken by Navas via an interrogation of textual formats themselves—whether these be digital or pre-­ digital formats. He engages in a reworking of existing literary genres—the book of aphorisms and conduct literature—in order to explore how such literary genres may mutate and be reworked online, speaking back to and admitting his debt to existing genres, whilst at the same time negotiating the possibilities of new media formats in his creative practice. Just as Adorno undermined the very format of the conduct book through his challenging, critical aphorisms, so Navas now takes a critical stance on the format of the blog and the wider phenomenon of social media within which it sits. Greater freedom of personal expression afforded by the internet and web 2.0 technologies is, Navas warns, accompanied by greater opportunities for the analysis and control of the data we produce; if this data is no longer predominantly manipulated by the state as per Adorno’s earlier vision of capitalist control, then now it is the power and influence of global corporations against which we must be on our guard. This work, in its critical, resistant reworking both of existing literary genres and of web 2.0 technologies, makes political comments on corporate (informational) capitalism, encouraging the reader to look beneath the commonplace uses of the blog format, word clouds, and search engines, and to acknowledge the political economies that underpin them.

Works Cited Adorno, Theodor. 1973. Minima Moralia: Reflexionen aus dem beschädigten Leben. Frankfurt: Suhrkamp. First published 1951. ———. 2005. Minima Moralia: Reflections on a Damaged Life. Translated by E.F.N. Jephcott. London: Verso. Arntfield, Mike. 2008. Wikisurveillance: A Genealogy of Cooperative Watching in the West. Bulletin of Science, Technology and Society 28 (1): 37–47. Bilić, Paško. 2018. A Critique of the Political Economy of Algorithms: A Brief History of Google’s Technological Rationality. Triple C 16 (1): 315–331. Burges, Joel. 2013. Adorno’s Mimeograph: The Uses of Obsolescence in Minima Moralia. New German Critique, 118, 40 (1): 65–92. Clark, Michael. 2015. War, Home, and Permanent Exile: Theodor Adorno’s Minima Moralia and William Spanos’s In the Neighbourhood of Zero. Boundary 2 42 (1): 19–41. Cooper, John M. 1986. Reason and Human Good in Aristotle. Indianapolis: Hackett. Cruz, Jesus. 2012. “El hombre fino”: Courtesy Books and Male Bourgeois Conduct in Nineteenth-Century Spain. Bulletin of Hispanic Studies 89 (4): 347–362.

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Fuchs, Christian. 2012. The Political Economy of Privacy on Facebook. Television and New Media 13 (2): 139–159. Hardt, Michael, and Antonio Negri. 2000. Empire. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Harvey, David. 1990. The Condition of Postmodernity. Oxford: Blackwell. Jaeggi, Rahel. 2005. “No Individual Can Resist”: Minima Moralia as Critique of Forms of Life. Constellations 12 (1): 65–82. Jänicke, Stefan, and Gerick Scheuermann. 2017. On the Visualization of Hierarchical Relations and Tree Structures with TagSpheres. In Computer Vision, Imaging and Computer Graphics Theory and Applications, ed. José Braz et al., 199–219. Cham: Springer. Jarosinski, Eric. 2010. Of Stones and Glass Houses: Minima Moralia as Critique of Transparency. In Language without Soil: Adorno and Late Philosophical Modernity, ed. Gerhard Richter, 157–171. New York: Fordham University Press. Kaplan, Frederic. 2014. Linguistic Capitalism and Algorithmic Mediation. Representations 127 (1): 57–63. Lyon, David. 1994. The Electronic Eye: The Rise of Surveillance Society. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Mager, Astrid. 2014. Defining Algorithmic Ideology: Using Ideology Critique to Scrutinize Corporate Search Engines. Triple C 12 (1): 28–39. McKee, Heidi A. 2011. Policy Matters Now and in the Future: Net Neutrality, Corporate Data Mining, and Government Surveillance. Computers and Composition 28: 276–291. Mizumura, Minae. 2015. The Fall of Language in the Age of English. New York: Columbia University Press. Morson, Gary Saul. 2012. The Long and Short of It: From Aphorism to Novel. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Navas, Eduardo. 2005–2007. Goobalization. Accessed February 1, 2019. http:// www.navasse.net/goobalization. ———. 2007. Diary of a Star: Context. Accessed February 1, 2019. http:// navasse.net/star/context.html. ———. 2008–. Traceblog. Accessed February 14, 2019. http://navastraceblog. blogspot.co.uk/. ———. 2010a. Poemita. Accessed June 25, 2018. https://twitter.com/poemita. ———. 2011a. Minima Moralia Redux. Accessed March 5, 2019. http://minimamoraliaredux.blogspot.co.uk/. ———. 2011b. Blog Remixes. Remix Theory. Accessed March 5, 2019. http:// remixtheory.net/BlogRemixes/. ———. 2012a. Traceblog: Eduardo Navas. In Net Works: Case Studies in Web Art and Design, ed. Xtine Burrough, 137–144. New York: Routledge. ———. 2012b. Remix Theory: The Aesthetics of Sampling. New York: Springer. ———. 2017. Rhetoric and Remix: Reflections on Adorno’s Minima Moralia. Journal of Contemporary Rhetoric 7 (2/3): 68–78.

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———. 2018a. Instagram Drawings. Accessed March 19, 2019. http://navasse. net/InstaDraw/. ———. 2018b. Art, Media Design, and Postproduction: Open Guidelines on Appropriation and Remix. New York: Routledge. Navas, Eduardo, Owen Gallagher, and Xtine Burrough, eds. 2017. Keywords in Remix Studies. New York: Routledge. Nielsen, Karen Margrethe. 2018. Deliberation and Decision in the Magna Moralia and Eudemian Ethics. In Virtue, Happiness, Knowledge: Themes from the Work of Gail Fine and Terence Irwin, ed. David O.  Brink, Susan Sauvé Meyer, and Christopher Shields. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Norberg, Jakob. 2011. Adorno’s Advice: Minima Moralia and the Critique of Liberalism. Publications of the Modern Language Association 126 (2): 398–411. Peters, Isabella. 2009. Folksonomies: Indexing and Retrieval in Web 2.0. Berlin: De Gruyter. Simpson, Peter. 2014. Aristotle on Natural Justice. Studia Gilsoniana 3: 367–376. Sinclair, James, and Michael Cardew-Hall. 2007. The Folksonomy Tag Cloud: When is it Useful? Journal of Information Science 34 (1): 15–29. Taylor, Claire. 2012. Post-Digital Remixes and Carnavalesque Relinkings: Eduardo Navas’s Goobalization. Hispanic Issues 9: 192–213. Tewell, Eamon. 2016. Toward the Resistant Reading of Information: Google, Resistant Spectatorship, and Critical Information Literacy. Portal: Libraries and the Academy 16 (2): 289–310. Turow, Joseph. 2011. The Daily You: How the New Advertising Industry is Defining your Identity and Your Worth. New Haven: Yale University Press. Vaidhyanathan, Siva. 2012. Antisocial Media: How Facebook Disconnects Us and Undermines Our Democracy. Berkeley: University of California Press. Van Couvering, Elizabeth. 2008. The History of the Internet Search Engine: Navigational Media and the Traffic Commodity. In Web Search: Multidisciplinary Perspectives, ed. Amanda Spink and Michael Zimmer, 177–206. Berlin: Springer. Woof, William. 1999. Borges, Cervantes & Quine Reconciling Existence Assumptions and Fictional Complexities in “Pierre Menard, Author of Don Quixote”. Variaciones Borges 7: 191–230. Zimmer, Michael. 2008. The Gaze of the Perfect Search Engine: Google as an Infrastructure of Dataveillance. Information Science and Knowledge Management 14: 77–99.

CHAPTER 7

Critiquing Web Structure and Online Social Capital: Doménico Chiappe’s Minotaur Hotel (2013–2015)

In the final chapter of this book, I turn to one of the most recent electronic literary projects of one of the leading figures in hypermedia narrative: the Peruvian-Venezuelan author and journalist, Doménico Chiappe. I reveal how his hypermedia novel Minotaur Hotel undertakes a reworking of classical myth in order to encourage us both to understand the networked functioning of the internet and to question the commodification of the online self. Regarding the first of these, I focus firstly on the locale, arguing that Chiappe’s narrative structure, situating the reader as investigator making his/her way through the labyrinthine structure of the hotel, draws parallels between the classical myth and the storyworld. I also demonstrate how this parallel is metatextual, and I argue that Chiappe invites us to contemplate the labyrinthine structure of the internet, where tortuous pathways of the Minotaur’s labyrinth become the entry points and pathways of the internet. Subsequently, I investigate how, in addition to mobilising the trope of the labyrinth to talk about the hypertextual structure of his work, Chiappe also makes use of another feature of the myth—the figure of Pasiphae, the mother of the Minotaur—to discuss the commodification of the female body and the functioning of online social capital in the internet age. In Chiappe’s updated version of the Minotaur myth, women’s bodies continue to be the subject of control; where the labyrinth of classical times was employed to contain the shameful offspring of the excessive sexuality of Pasiphae, now, in contemporary times, the ‘labyrinth’ as the internet © The Author(s) 2019 C. Taylor, Electronic Literature in Latin America, New Directions in Latino American Cultures, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-30988-6_7

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functions as a containment and yet a compelled display of female sexuality. I argue that Chiappe here provides a critique of social media, of the commodification of the online self, and of the functioning of online social capital as what Faucher has termed ‘an ideological product of neoliberal-­ informationism’ that champions competitive individualism and further alienates its users. I then move on to the ways in which Chiappe links this commodification of the online self to broader structural inequalities of neoliberalism, arguing that his combination of images of social media, the conceit of the email, and a diatribe against privatisation functions to make us aware of the ways in which social media platforms encourage women to focus on their self-representation and (perceived) individual empowerment, in the service of the discourses of neoliberalism—discourses which perpetuate a myth of postfeminism, and, concomitantly, obscure the structural inequalities to which women are subject. I conclude by suggesting that, in this disturbing and grotesque work, Chiappe forces us to question our own position as voyeur as we surf the web, and to understand our own complicity in the perpetuation of the neoliberal discourses that underpin the circulation of online social capital. Chiappe is an author and journalist who was born in Peru, subsequently lived for several years in Venezuela, and is currently residing in Spain. He has written several essays and articles on the impact of digital technologies on literary forms, developing various concepts and theoretical paradigms, and focusing on issues such as passive and active interaction, and collective authorship, amongst others, as well as writing about the challenges faced by authors of this type of literature.1 In particular, Chiappe has developed the concept of ‘hyperphonic literature’; arguing that one of the characteristics of digital literary creation is teamwork, Chiappe coins this term to refer to polyphony both within the work and as part of its creative process. For Chiappe this consists of a novel which is both ‘polyphonic in its narration […] but also polyphonic in its creation, in its metanarrative state’ (Chiappe 2009b).2 Chiappe is also actively involved in the creation of electronic literature himself, and is author of Land of Extraction (1996–2007), 1  See Chiappe (2009a) for his development of a model of hypermedia literature’, and Chiappe (2007b, 2012) for a discussion of the challenges faced by the multimedia author and reflections on the creative processes of hypermedia literature. 2  In the original Spanish this reads: ‘polifónica en su narración […] pero también polifónica en su creación, en su estado metanarrativo’.

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which was included in the second anthology of the Electronic Literature Organization (Borràs et al. 2011).3 A multimedia novel, Tierra de extracción is composed of multiple lexia structured into sixty-three chapters, accessed through a navigation map structured along four axes, according to which the reader chooses his/her own path. As well as undertaking innovations with form and structure, and dialoguing with a variety of intertexts, this novel also makes references to the contemporary socio-­ political situation of Venezuela, the country in which the novel is set.4 Chiappe was also involved in a project to create a collaborative novel entitled The Imprint of the Cosmos5; developed between June and December 2005, the project involved a collaborative community of writers and readers who participated in forums, making suggestions and contributions which would then feed into the work. As Gainza describes the process of creation of this work, it functioned ‘in a similar manner to the production of open software, whereby the creator of software posts his or her production in collective forums where everyone involved discusses the plots and can suggests modifications’ (Gainza 2017, p. 4). In these pieces, as with the novel under analysis in this chapter, Chiappe’s work combines an interest in the literary innovations of his predecessors, an experimental use of digital technologies in narrative structure, and an attention to the complexities of the socio-political situation in which he is writing. The work under analysis in this chapter, Minotaur Hotel, is a hypermedia novel which was started in 2013 and completed in 2015. The story was included in the print anthology edited by Fernando Marías, Solitude Is the Home of the Monster, bearing the title ‘It’s Enough to Open a Hotel’s Doors’.6 However, beyond the title and credits, no actual print text of the content of Minotaur Hotel appears here, unlike the other pieces included in this anthology; instead, below the title and credits, a QR code is inserted, which redirects the reader to the online hypermedia novel. The online  The title in the original Spanish is Tierra de extracción.  For more on this, see Thea Pitman, who has identified a range of intertexts informing Tierra de extracción, including the works of canonical Latin American writers Juan Rulfo, Mario Vargas Llosa, Horacio Quiroga, and Gabriel García Márquez (Pitman 2010, p. 255), as well as noting the multiple references to Venezuela and to oil extraction, through which this work addresses issues of globalisation in Venezuela and the petroleum industry governed by multinationals (Pitman 2010, p. 277). 5  The title in the original Spanish is La huella de cosmos. 6  The titles in the original Spanish are La soledad es el hogar del monstruo and ‘Basta con abrir las puertas de un hotel’. 3 4

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work itself, which offers versions in Spanish, French, and English, is authored by Chiappe, who worked collaboratively on the project with a team including David Losada who contributed to the concept, Fidel Cordero who created the music, Jesús Jiménez who worked on design and programming, and Paola Rey who worked on production.7

Rhizomes and Labyrinths: Navigating Locales and Hypertext Structures Minotaur Hotel, as is immediately evident from its title, reworks the myth of the Minotaur, one of the most enduring of classical myths. The original Cretan myth of the Minotaur gained in popularity through the later Alexandrine Greeks and then the Romans, appearing in Ovid’s narrative poem Metamorphosos and Virgil’s Eclogues, amongst others.8 Subsequently, the myth of the Minotaur and of the labyrinth has become one of the most enduring classical myths that has had a significant influence on twentieth-­ century art and literature, becoming one of the iconic images in the modern turn to antiquity. One example of the extent to which the Minotaur had become a symbolic figure in avant-garde art and literature in this period can be seen in the fact that one of the most important art magazines of the 1930s, Minotaure, took its name from the mythical creature; running from 1933 to 1939 and including contributions from leading surrealist artists, authors, and theorists, including André Breton, Pierre Mabille, Paul Éluard, Salvador Dalí, Pablo Picasso, Marcel Duchamp, Joan Miró, Henri Matisse, René Magritte, and Max Ernst, amongst others, Minotaure became ‘the most effective surrealist effort to focus primarily on its visual aspects and escalate the surrealist influence in the artistic domain’, particularly championing automatism in painting (Kolokytha 2013, p.  188). Representations of the Minotaur can be seen in a wide range of works of artists of this period and beyond; ranging from Man Ray’s photographs and Leonora Carrington’s paintings through to Friedrich Dürrenmatt’s poetry and Matisse’s illustrations of Henry de 7  Talking in an interview with Barrachina, Chiappe identified this novel as an example of his concept of literatura hiperfónica, in that it both presents multiple sources and voices and is collaborative in its construction (Chiappe 2014, n.p.). 8  Most famously, the Minotaur appears in Ovid’s narrative poem Metamorphoses, which chronicles the history of the world from creation to the era of Julius Caesar, and which recounts the myth of Minos and the Minotaur in Book VIII. Virgil’s Eclogues also tell the story of Pasiphae and the bull in Eclogue VII.

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Montherlant’s Pasiphae: Chant de Minos, a huge number of writers and artists were influenced by the Minotaur myth in their works. Most famously, of course, Pablo Picasso combined the image of bull-fighting with that of the classical myth in many of his works during the 1930s, with a number of his etchings and engravings depicting the Minotaur as a lustful, hyper-sexualised figure, including his Minotauromachia of 1935, whose very title combines the bull-fighting tradition of Spain (tauromachy) with the figure of the Minotaur (Minotaur). It is notable, therefore, that the Minotaur becomes a key figure in twentieth-century art, but also that the figure of the Minotaur and the myth of the labyrinth become for these writers and artists symbolic of the conditions of crisis in which they felt themselves to be living. Kolokytha notes that the publication of Minotaure was a period of socio-political crisis, and that this magazine, along with other rival publications, involved a series of position-takings by its editors and contributors (Kolokytha 2013), whilst Ries notes that the publication of Minotaure was during a period in which ‘the catastrophes of Europe, the Great War, the Depression, the Spanish Civil War, and the tremors in Western civilization weighed on men’s mind’ (Ries 1972–1973, p.  142). Regarding the broader significance of the Minotaur in works of art of this period, Ziolkowski has suggested that the Minotaur emerged during the 1930s as ‘an image of the artist’s sense of alienation, while the labyrinth suggested to many writers the hostile socio-political world of the twentieth century’ (Ziolkowski 2008, p.  70). Moreover, regarding specific works, several scholars have suggested how the techniques that Picasso developed in his Minotaur etchings reached their culmination in his Guernica, where the nightmarish qualities of Tauromaquia and several of the symbols of this earlier work are reused to make a devastating commentary on the effects of war and on the suffering of individuals.9 The Minotaur, thus, has become one of the most easily recognisable figures of classical myth, through its extensive reworking in contemporary art. At the same time, the Minotaur myth came to stand for the socio-­ political crises of the early first half of the twentieth century, an impulse 9  See, in particular, Brunner (2001) for an analysis of the figures of Guernica, including the reuse of figures and symbols from Tauromachia; Weisberg (2004), who identifies a number of correspondences between Tauromaquia and Guernica, including characters and symbols; and Damian and Simonton (2011), who undertake a quantitative analysis of how Minotauromaquia influenced Guernica, based on four principal figural elements.

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which, I contend, we still see in Chiappe’s work. Taking up Ziolkowski’s mention of the alienation of the avant-garde writers of this period, I argue that Chiappe mobilises the Minotaur myth to comment upon the alienation of late capitalism. As my analysis will demonstrate, Chiappe engages with this myth in a variety of ways, both to speak metatextually about the structure of his work and to make socio-political commentary on the workings of late capitalism. Regarding the first of these uses of the Minotaur myth, from the outset of this work Chiappe invites us to consider our positioning as reader-player in his storyworld and makes a series of comments that link the very storyworld we are invited to traverse to the classical labyrinth. The opening interface to Minotaur Hotel, locating us within the confines of a narrow corridor, with doors to the left and right, is one of geometrical precision, as the left and right walls disappear to a central vanishing point, and we are positioned in the centre. This geometrical precision is further enhanced by the wallpaper covering the walls, which is of a geometrical pattern and in itself is labyrinthine, as the interlocking geometrical shapes lead the viewer’s eye, in dizzying fashion, towards the vanishing point at the corridor’s end. This corridor, as the entrance to the hotel rooms, has both a diegetic and extra-diegetic function. Extra-diegetically, it is our entrance to the storyworld, and functions as part of the procedural enactment of the work, since clicking on the middle panel at the centre of this corridor launches the work itself. Yet it is also, of course, diegetic, as the corridor provides the entrance to the rooms in the hotel within the storyworld; these are the doors through which we, and the characters, pass within the story (see Fig. 7.1). On clicking on this central panel, the same interface reappears, but with a block of lexia over it, comprising the introductory text setting the scene for the reader-player of this hypertext novel. A sound file is also activated at this point, composed initially of ambient sounds—comprising snippets of indistinguishable chatting, glasses clinking, the metallic rattle of cutlery being moved—followed by a guitar solo. This opening lexia immediately sets out the rich intertextual and metatextual play that Minotaur Hotel will undertake, as well as highlighting its focus on the contemporary power relations underlying internet content, with particular reference to the circulation of images.10 The first lines inform us of the central ­character (the 10  Nohelia Meza, in her analysis of Minotaur Hotel, subsumes the hypertextual and the intertextual into the same term, and classifies both the hyperlinking in this novel and the

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Fig. 7.1  Doménico Chiappe, Minotaur Hotel (2013–2015), opening interface

Minotaur), but also, crucially, immediately draw parallels between the Minotaur’s surroundings and internet structure: The minotaur, a monstrosity spawned by zoophilia, repeats his routine. He lives in the dilated time of a labyrinth of hallways, doorways and rooms. A tangle of interconnected lexias.11

What is notable here is that the description of the Minotaur’s surroundings is couched in terms of the functioning of electronic literature. For the labyrinth of ancient times is not only updated to the modern-day labyrinth intertextual references to myth as ‘hipertextualidad’ (Meza 2015b, n.p.). However, I do not agree with this and argue that it is important to distinguish between practices of hyperlinking and practices of intertextuality, notwithstanding the ways in which the two may complement each other. 11  I am here and henceforth providing my own translation of the original Spanish, rather than citing from the English version of Chiappe’s work, given that the English version available online loses some of the nuances and metaphors that are contained in the Spanish. The original Spanish reads: ‘El minotauro, engendro de la zoofilia, repite su rutina. Vive en el tiempo dilatado de un laberinto de pasillos, pórticos y estancias. Una maraña de lexías interconectadas (Chiappe 2013–2015).

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of the hotel, whereby we now have references to its ‘hallways, doorways and rooms’, but is also described using the metaphor of ‘tangle of interconnected lexias’ (my emphasis). ‘Lexia’ is, of course, the term that Landow borrowed from Roland Barthes to refer to the individual blocks of text in the functioning of hypertext, and has now become the standard terminology to refer to the individual sections of text that are linked through hyperlinking.12 ‘Lexia’ is thus a highly charged term, and in using this to describe the Minotaur’s labyrinth, Chiappe’s novel makes reference to its own structure as a hyperlinked novel. Similarly, further instructions to us again combine reference to the storyworld with reference to the digital technologies themselves, as we are told, for instance, that ‘He/you must choose one of the entries to the network where Minos threw him/you to hide the lust of Pasiphae, his/ your mother, also condemned to die in this dungeon.’13 As with the conceit of the corridor, which, as noted above, functioned both diegetically (as entrance to the rooms in the hotel in the storyworld) and extra-­ diegetically (as entrance to the game), this screen provides both narrative content (diegetic) and game instructions (extra-diegetic). We are informed of the background to the storyworld we are entering—that of Minos, who, according to classical myth, imprisoned the Minotaur, illegitimate offspring of Minos’s wife, Pasiphae, in the labyrinth. Yet the text also comprises extra-diegetic instructions to us as to how to negotiate the storyworld, since the verb ‘debe’ is deliberately ambiguous. In Spanish, a language which habitually omits the subject pronoun, the third-person singular of a verb could refer to either she/he (ella/él) or you (usted) in the formal form of address. Thus the ‘debe’ in Chiappe’s instructions could be either a description of the Minotaur’s actions (he must select which entry point in the labyrinth of the storyworld) or a reference to the reader-player (we must select which entry point procedurally, as we click 12  In his S/Z, first published in 1970, Barthes, by means of an analysis of Balzac’s short story ‘Sarrasine’, sets out in detail a structuralist method for approaching texts on the basis of five codes, comprising the hermeneutic, the proairetic, the semantic, the symbolic, and the cultural. In order to analyse a text, Barthes proposes breaking it up into ‘brief, contiguous fragments’ or ‘blocks of signification’, which he defines as ‘lexia’ (Barthes 1990, p.  13). Landow takes up the term from Barthes and uses it to refer to the ‘blocks of text’ (Landow 1992, p. 3) that are then connected by electronic links to form hypertext. 13  In the original Spanish this reads: ‘debe elegir uno de los accesos de la red donde Minos le arrojó para ocultar la lujuria de Pasíphae, su madre, también condenada a morir en este calabozo’.

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on links).14 Significantly, thus, Chiappe’s instructions encompass both character and reader-player, since, indeed, procedurally we have to select one of the access points from this interface. Moreover, it is also worth noting that Chiappe has chosen to describe the labyrinth not with the conventional appellation ‘laberinto’ meaning ‘labyrinth’, but with the term ‘red’ or network. In a similar way to his use of the term ‘lexia’ earlier, Chiappe is again drawing deliberate parallels between the interior storyworld and between the exterior structure on which this storyworld is based. Thus the doubly encoded ‘red’ is both the web in the sense of the labyrinth where Minos hid the Minotaur and the web in the sense of the internet. In another instance of metatextual play, thus, ‘red’ refers to the hyperlinked structure underpinning this hypertext novel. As with the ‘lexia’ metaphor above, Chiappe’s instructions to his reader are metatextual—a feature which we witness in many other lexia in this novel, as will be discussed in more depth below. This mobilisation of the labyrinth metaphor is similarly evident throughout the lexia that we encounter when we enter the work proper. Once these opening instructions disappear, we discover, on moving the mouse around, that the two doors to the right and left, and the exit sign at the back are hotlinks, and that clicking on these loads new content. Again, the lexia launched here frequently combine diegetic and extra-diegetic functions, in the same way as the opening lexia that launched the work. If the metaphor of the labyrinth of classical myth is thus actualised via the ‘red’ in this and other lexia, it is striking that Chiappe also mobilises another of the images that has been employed—and also criticised—to refer to hyperlinking, and the structure of the internet more broadly. This is visible in one of the lexia we encounter in the main corridor, which reads, simply: ‘in the rhizome where he wanders/you wander, he/you must decide without knowing what lies behind each choice’.15 Firstly, this short lexia again combines the diegetic with the extra-­ diegetic, functioning diegetically if we read the ‘debe’ in the third person as referring to the story of the Minotaur who is wandering around the 14  Given that the third person in Spanish encompasses both él/ella (he/she) and usted (you), standard practice, in cases of potential confusion, would be to disambiguate through the insertion of the subject pronoun for avoidance of doubt. The fact that Chiappe has chosen not to do so is an indication that this is a deliberate tactic to render these instructions ambiguous. 15  In the original Spanish this reads: ‘En el rizoma donde vaga debe decidir sin saber qué se esconde tras cada elección’.

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labyrinth-as-hotel, or extra-diegetically if the third person addresses us, functioning as our instructions. This lexia, thus, functions as both plot and instructions to player-reader-user, being one of the many moments within this work in which the boundaries between the storyworlds are breached in a moment of narrative metalepsis. Secondly, what is notable is that this is another of the metaliterary moments within Minotaur Hotel. Chiappe’s choice of word here to refer to the labyrinth—‘rhizome’ instead of ‘labyrinth’—again deliberately frames the storyworld within a wider debate about digital technologies, in the same way as his opening lexia did, with its reference to ‘network’ instead of ‘labyrinth’. Chiappe’s terminology immediately recalls Deleuze and Guattari’s theories of a rhizomatic understanding of knowledge and data organisation, as developed in their A Thousand Plateaus (1980). Envisaging the rhizome as having ‘neither beginning nor end, but always a middle (milieu) from which it grows and which it overspills’, and as constituting ‘linear multiplicities with n dimensions having neither subject nor object’ (Deleuze and Guattari 1988, p. 21), Deleuze and Guattari propose the rhizome as an entity not based on fixed points, binary relations, and with hierarchical modes of organising knowledge. Rather, it is constituted of ‘lines of segmentarity and stratification’ and is an ‘acentered, nonhierarchical, nonsignifying system’ (Deleuze and Guattari 1988, p.  21). The rhizome, for Deleuze and Guattari, is a non-hierarchical system, consisting of multiple entry and exit points, and contrasted to the arborescent, hierarchical concept of the structuring of knowledge. Significantly, Deleuze and Guattari’s notions of a rhizomatic organisation of knowledge have been taken up and discussed in relation to the organisation of information in the digital age and, in particular, the structure of the internet. Marie-Laure Ryan has identified the rhizome as one of the early metaphors associated with the utopian discourses of first-wave hypertext theory, noting that ‘hypertext was supposed to implement the ideas of Kristeva, Foucault, Deleuze, Eco and especially Barthes on such topics as intertextuality, rhizomatic organization, openness and self-­ renewability, and the disappearance of the distinction between reader and author’ (Ryan 2016, p.  336). Stuart Moulthrop’s chapter from 1994, ‘Rhizome and Resistance’, in Landow’s edited book Hyper/Text/Theory proposed that Deleuze and Guattari’s A Thousand Plateaus was particularly ‘appropriate for a commentary on hypertext and culture’. Suggesting that A Thousand Plateaus itself was ‘an incunabular hypertext’ (Moulthrop 1994), Moulthrop set down the features of the rhizome, and suggested

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that ‘perhaps then hypertext and hypermedia represent the expression of the rhizome in the social space of writing’ (Moulthrop 1994). Landow, meanwhile, dedicated a section of his Hypertext 3.0 to ‘Hypertext and Rhizome’ (Landow 2006, pp. 58–62), asserting that ‘many of the qualities Deleuze and Guattari attribute to the rhizome require hypertext to find their first approximation if not their complete answer or fulfilment’ (Landow 2006, pp. 58–59). For Landow, this included their description of the plateau, which he found ‘accurately describes the way both individual lexia and clusters of them participate in a web’, and he drew out several features of the rhizome, including multiple entryways and exits, and the capacity to connect any one point to any other point, as parallels for the ways in which a networked text can produce multiple versions and approaches. Landow argued that ‘like Derrida and the inventors of hypertext, they propose a newer form of the book that might provide a truer, more efficient information technology’, which he saw as ‘derive[d] from the rhizome’s fundamental opposition to hierarchy’ (Landow 2006, p. 59). Similarly, Kathleen Burnett has argued that hypertextual design, due to its non-hierarchical nature and cognitive leaps, is rhizomatic, asserting that ‘if we accept the rhizome as a metaphor for electronically mediated exchange, then hypertext is its apparent fulfillment, and Deleuze and Guattari’s “approximate characteristics of the rhizome”—principles of connection, heterogeneity, multiplicity, asignifying rupture, and cartography and decalcomania—may be seen as the principles of hypertextual design’ (Burnett 1993, n.p.). Burnett also linked this to the decentring potential of hypertext, arguing that At any given moment the ‘center’ of any rhizomorphic structure is the individual’s position in relation to that structure. Distinctions between author and reader, constituent and politician, even intermediary and end-user disintegrate as the reader participates in authorship, constituent in polis, and end-user in the search itself. (Burnett 1993, n.p.)

Burnett thus proposes a utopian vision of the internet and its capacity for decentring that leads her to argue for an understanding of the internet and linked data as rhizomatic, and as creating fundamental disruptions in the reader-author power relationship. In these and other relatively early conceptualisations of the rhizome and its relevance for digital technologies, scholars tended to emphasise the decentred, non-hierarchical nature of the rhizome as being embodied in networked technology.

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Other scholars, however, have taken up the metaphor of the rhizome in relation to the internet to suggest not an inherently radical or democratic structuring of the internet per se, but, rather, to argue for the competing regimes which are attempting to structure and control the internet. Mark Nunes has proposed an understanding of the spatial configuration of the internet through Deleuze and Guattari’s notions of ‘smooth’ and ‘striated’ space, and which, crucially, he sees as two competing topographies of cyberspace. Setting these two topographies in opposition, Nunes argues that A striated ‘highway’ topography determines cyberspace as a system of regulated connections between determined points on dedicated lines; conversely, a smooth ‘plane’ topography ‘writes’ a cyberspace of fluid transit and continual passage. (Nunes 1998, p. 62)

Nunes’s proposition, therefore, is that there is nothing inherently rhizomatic about the internet; rather, the rhizome is but one possible configuration of the internet, and this competes with a more top-down, state-controlled, hierarchical potential configuration. In a similar vein, Christian Beck has more recently proposed employing Deleuze and Guattari’s concept of the rhizome to represent how the internet ‘possesses the ability to openly challenge oppressive institutions through establishing smooth digital spaces and deterritorializing controlled corporate-Statist striated spaces’ (Beck 2016, p.  335). However, and echoing Nunes, Beck notes that the simple fact of permitting non-­ linearity ‘does not necessarily make movement nomadic or create smooth space’. Instead, Nunes warns us, the perceived freedom that the potentially rhizomatic structure of the internet offers can often result in this freedom being ‘channeled, and facilitated by corporate entities’ (Beck 2016, p. 339). Seeing the threat of a non-rhizomatic internet in the shape of corporate control rather than state control as Nunes did, Beck argues that a truly nomadic use of the internet is achievable through disruptive uses of this rhizomatic structure, such as hacktivism and electronic civil disobedience. In this way, Chiappe’s use of the term ‘rhizome’ in his lexia to describe the hotel is a loaded one. The rhizome is firstly a representation of the hotel-as-labyrinth, and, therefore, is a metaphor within the storyworld, demonstrating how the hotel appears as a dizzying, disorientating environment to the characters within the story, an environment that they must

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negotiate to discover what lies behind its doors. Secondly, the rhizome is also a representation of the structure upon which this novel is based—that is, the hyperlinking mechanism which allows for multiple entry and exit points, and for varied ways of accessing the content of the story, depending on the link selected by the reader. It represents the nonlinear structure that Chiappe’s novel offers, for we can click on different links, and, indeed, the content of the novel does not follow a fixed, linear structure. Yet the internet is not, of necessity, non-hierarchical, disruptive, or nomadic, and this has implications for Chiappe’s critique. I argue that this tension is apparent in the way in which Chiappe’s work hints at the potential of a disruptive, nomadic structure, but also brings us face to face with the limitations of this possible model, in the contradiction that swiftly becomes apparent between the visuals and the textual content of the lexia. For, it is worth noting after we have clicked on either one of the doors and accessed its content, we do not have any other options within this doorway. Once we enter a doorway, there are no multiple links behind the door and, after reading the lexia or viewing the image, there is only one option we can activate. There are not, thus, multiple options provided to the reader, and she/he cannot roam nomadically through a multiplicity of links to access content according to a route that she/he is in control of tracing. On the contrary: there is one, sole, option. Moreover, significantly, this one, sole option that we can click on does not take us to a new locale, but returns us right back to the same corridor of the hotel. That is, our only possibility takes us back to exactly the same visuals of the opening interface; we have not gone into another section or floor of the hotel, but we are right back where we started. In this sense, we do not end up in a different scenario, and we do not find ourselves moving down multiple forking paths to different locations. Rather, visually, we are right back where we started because, even though the content behind these doors might change, the visuals of the surroundings do not. In so doing, Chiappe invites us to contemplate, as much as any labyrinthine, rhizomatic structure of the internet, with multiple possible links, a restricting locale from which we cannot escape. On the one hand, this obsessive return to the same corridor in Chiappe’s work is an actualisation of the frustrating experience of the Minotaur of classical myth, who found himself faced with the looping paths and dead ends of the labyrinth, famously unable to escape. Chiappe’s metaphor thus draws out the seemingly impossible-to-escape construction of the original Greek myth, in which Daedalus’s structure was intended to contain the Minotaur forever,

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and, indeed, Daedalus himself barely escaped from the labyrinth after constructing it.16 On the other hand, this repeated return to the same visuals represents a comment on the competing regimes that attempt to control the internet, as expounded by Beck. Our repeatedly finding ourselves face to face with the same locale provides the sensation of the potentially rhizomatic capacities of the hyperlink being closed down. That the storyworld is deliberately structured such that visually it appears we are not getting there anyway is a visual and procedural representation of our present-­day condition, caught endlessly within an internet space which is increasingly colonised by corporate interests. Chiappe’s playing with the rhizome metaphor thus brings us face to face with the realisation that we cannot escape; just as the Minotaur of classical myth could not escape the labyrinth, so we are trapped within the increasingly corporate, enclosed spaces of the internet. In these ways, and in other similar moments within other lexia of this work, Chiappe undertakes an engagement with the intertext of the classical myth of the Minotaur in various ways. Firstly, he undertakes an updating of the Minotaur-labyrinth myth for the modern world, where the stone walls of the labyrinth have transmuted into the modern architecture of the contemporary hotel, creating the locale for the modern-day storyworld of his work. Secondly, he draws parallels between the Minotaur-­ labyrinth myth and the structure of hypertext, making metatextual commentary on the process of his own novel—so reaching beyond the storyworld itself. Thirdly, that this structure is inherently disruptive or nomadic is questioned and, as we will see below, is an indication of the profound questions that Chiappe raises about the internet as a power structure that we see enacted elsewhere in this work.

Pasiphae and Compelled Sexualised Performance Online If, in the previous section, we have seen how Chiappe mobilises one feature of the myth of the Minotaur—the labyrinth—to talk about the hypertextual structure of his work, in this section, we now move on to another feature of the Minotaur myth, which this time refers to the specific ­content 16  See book 8 of Ovid’s Metamorphoses: ‘Thus Daedalus fills the countless paths with windings and could himself barely return to the threshold: so great is the deceptiveness of the structure’ (162–168).

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of part of this work. This is the myth of Pasiphae, the mother of the Minotaur who, I will argue, is mobilised by Chiappe to discuss the functioning of social capital online, the alienation of the digital self, and the ways in which women are compelled to self-present (and self-regulate) on social networking sites. Chiappe has commented that part of his intention in this novel is to reveal to us ‘la retórica de nuestro tiempo’ (in interview with Goicoechea 2015), and that this involves ‘una trama que aborda entrelíneas la estética de internet’. I argue that this issue comes to the fore particularly through the content that we encounter behind the right-hand door of the hotel, which provides us with a series of images that encourage us to contemplate the circulation of images on the internet. In contrast to the left-hand door, all of the content located behind the right-hand door is exclusively image-­ based, with no text, and each image follows a similar format, raising issues about the internet, self-publicity, and the display of women’s bodies online. For example, the first time that we click on the door we are presented with the image shown in Fig. 7.2.

Fig. 7.2  Doménico Chiappe, Minotaur Hotel (2013–2015), right-hand door

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The image shown here, as with other images we later encounter, is of deliberately grainy quality. Rather than a high-quality, high-definition image, Chiappe has selected an image and then has purposefully degraded it, rendering it fuzzy. This deliberately degraded aesthetic carries with it a connotation of seediness, as we are viewing an image which is in some way tainted or corrupted. The deliberately grainy quality, grey-scale tones, and distorted presentation of the images come together to produce a Goyaesque effect in this and all of the other images presented in this section of the work. In an article describing the process of creation of Minotaur Hotel, Chiappe cites Goya’s The Disasters of War series as having heavily influenced this work, stating that, through the evocation of Goya, he wanted to bear witness to the grotesque (Chiappe 2015).17 Indeed, we can immediately note some of the aesthetic parallels between these images and Goya’s engravings. Where the subject matter of Goya’s prints is the 1807 invasion of Spain by the Napoleonic armies, the ensuing war, and its devastating effects on the people, his images serving to ‘denounce extreme violence by showing how dehumanizing it is’ (Bouvier 2011, p.  1108), Chiappe’s version, as we shall see, denounces the violence (both individual and structural) of the contemporary era. Indeed, it is important to note that Goya’s etchings are more than simply a depiction of individual acts of war, and of atrocities as an aberration. Shaw has argued that Goya’s relentless depiction of the dismembered human body is not an attempt to show exceptional, abhorrent acts that are counter to the humanist project, but asks rhetorically: ‘Could it be that, contrary to the prevailing view, Goya has already brought to light the irrationality that is at the core of the humanist tradition?’ (Shaw 2003, p. 481). In this way, Goya’s etchings were not the representation of an aberration—of war as an irrational, grotesque exception—but were actually a critique of the Enlightenment and its humanist values— values which represented the ruling orthodoxy of his time. In a similar way, I shall argue below that Chiappe uses this abrasive aesthetic for which Goya was known (Allan 2016, p. 975) to critique the ruling orthodoxy of his time—this, for Chiappe, being late (informational) capitalism. Just as The Disasters of War was not solely concerned with the devastation of war, and with individual acts of violence, but with the inherent contradictions 17  Chiappe here makes reference to Francisco Goya’s famous series of eighty-two engravings, which he created between 1810 and 1820, although they were only published posthumously as a collection in 1863.

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and systemic violence of enlightenment values, so too for Chiappe, his focus is on the systemic violence of social media and late capitalism.18 If such is the harsh, grainy aesthetic of this image as a whole, as regards the content and composition of the image, this image, as with others we encounter behind this door, depicts a young woman in a provocative stance, scantily clad. The background details are barely visible, and the main focus is the woman herself, as she faces the camera, smiling into it. This semi-erotic image, blurred and not fully visible, raises issues about female sexuality and the commodification of women’s bodies on the internet, and functions, I argue, as an updating of the classical myth of the Minotaur. In classical times, the myth of the Minotaur was closely linked to patriarchal notions about the punishment and containment of female sexuality, since it was Pasiphae’s excessive lust, leading her to mate with a bull, which led to the engendering of the monstrous Minotaur, for which she was subsequently castigated. In my reading of Minotaur Hotel, Chiappe’s version encourages us to consider the censure of female sexuality in the contemporary era. Regarding ancient myth, it has often been noted that women in ancient myth, from the Amazons through to many other classical figures, functioned as a projection of masculine fears about women. If, in the words of Sarah Pomeroy, the goddesses of classical myth are ‘archetypal images of human females, as envisioned by males’ and those who are considered ‘appropriate to a patriarchal society’, then any woman who goes beyond this ‘tends to 18  It is worth noting that Chiappe is not alone in mobilising Goya to make comments on contemporary conflicts—and, indeed, to draw our attention to structural violence. As scholars have noted, Goya’s series has been re-mobilised in various contexts; see, for instance, Lisa Jackson-Schebetta, who demonstrates how in the US, Goya’s series was republished in 1938 as a ‘newly potent invective against the atrocities of global fascism in which Spain figured as the key battleground’ (Jackson-Schebetta 2014, p.  36), and how Republican propaganda also reappropriated the sieges of Zaragoza and Girona, the Spanish victory at Bailén, and Madrid’s popular uprising ‘in order to stress the parallels between those nineteenth-century representatives of the Spanish popular classes and the twentieth-century fighters belonging to working class organizations’ (Jackson-Schebetta 2014, p.  38). See also Byrne on how Seamus Heaney employed Goya as allegory for the situation in Northern Ireland, arguing that Heaney employed Goya to reveal the ‘darker, deeper truth behind what the Northern Irish government wants to historically signify as rational action’ and that ‘what critics have read as Goya’s allegory for the Spanish state’s consumption of its own children in wars and revolution becomes for Heaney, and through his reading, for us, an allegory for the colonial state’s cannibalization of its own youth (both Catholic and Protestant, rebel and officer) in order to retain its mantle of power’ (Byrne 2016, p. 8).

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engender anxiety’ (Pomeroy 1995, p. 8). Pasiphae is one such example of these women who transgress the norms of being a woman as deemed appropriate to patriarchal society, and she is punished for it. Thus, as is evident in the many depictions of the Minotaur myth through the ages, women’s sexuality is the subject of reprobation. Miller has argued for an understanding of the labyrinth as symbolic, which functions as a mechanism of repression; in this reading, the labyrinth as in the Aeneid is ‘a rational structure built to contain the Minotaur, a monstrous offspring “created from the blending of female and animal passion”’ and is an ‘evocation of the necessity of containing desire. The labyrinth serves as an “abstract defensive entanglement” whose function is to protect the community from violent forces both within and without’ (Miller 1995, p. 234). The labyrinth is thus a structure of containment, and, in particular, for the containment of desire. Significantly, this is gendered, for Miller has argued that the labyrinth stands for the patriarchal structures that are meant to contain women: In the Aeneid, then, an extraordinarily subtle web of images and associations not only ties together women, fire, and dangerous things, but also associates this complex with the labyrinthine structures of patriarchal society that are meant to contain them. The rituals and dances that enact these defensive gestures function as part of the discursive structures of the symbolic, which serve to channel and contain the destructive and narcissistic desires of the potentially monstrous imaginary, generally identified with women as the quintessential other in patriarchal culture. (Miller 1995, pp. 239–240)

The labyrinth, then, stands for the much wider, much more entangled labyrinthine structures of patriarchal society that are deliberately designed to contain women. If patriarchal societies figure women as in need of containment, then the labyrinth represents the complex web of societal structures in place to contain them. Indeed, regarding the figure of Pasiphae specifically, she is routinely seen as one of the ‘bad women’ of mythology, and it is notable that her containment in the labyrinth was due, precisely, to what was perceived as her excessive lust and overt sexuality. Speaking about Pasiphae, Rebecca Armstrong has argued that she is ‘a figure who represents in shocking short-hand the worst excesses of female passion and deceitfulness’ (Armstrong 2006, p.  169), and is deliberately constructed as a ‘prime example of woman’s lustfulness’ (Armstrong 2006, p.  178). Similarly,

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Blumenfeld-Kosinski, talking about the Old French fourteenth-century text Ovide moralisé, notes how it builds upon a lengthy moralising tradition ‘condemning Pasiphae as personified lust’, and emphasises that, for the author of the Ovide moralisé, Pasiphae’s crime was not just that of bestiality, but ‘even more as one of excessive and unnatural female lust’ (Blumenfeld-Kosinski 1996, p. 309 and p. 324). In other words, Pasiphae stands for excessive female desire per se, and so represents the sexualised female figure who is punished for her excessive lust—a punishment which reaffirms the patriarchal order. In this way, the gendered dimension of the Minotaur myth is clear, with the labyrinth representing a containing structure—the labyrinthine structures of patriarchal society—and Pasiphae within it representing women punished for their excessive sexuality. In classical myth, and how it has continued to be interpreted throughout the ages, where patriarchal society depicted women with excessive sexuality, it was a projection of masculine fears, and it was to subsequently punish these women; in the case of Pasiphae, her punishment was to engender a monster, and be contained within the labyrinth. Here, in Chiappe’s updated version of the Minotaur myth, the content behind this door demonstrates how women’s bodies and sexuality are yet again the subject of control, of censure, and, in this case, of voyeuristic pleasure (for an implied male gaze). As we have seen above, in Minotaur Hotel Chiappe re-semanticises the term ‘red’, where the ancient labyrinth is now the contemporary internet. And where this red-labyrinth in classical times was employed to contain the shameful offspring of the excessive sexuality of Pasiphae, now, in contemporary times, the red-­internet functions as a containment of—and, yet, as we shall see, display of—female sexuality. That is, in contemporary times, women may appear to demonstrate their sexuality of their own free will in the spaces of the internet, but, as we shall see, it is in fact an updated version of (online) surveillance and women are, in the internet age, far from being free of the patriarchal constraints of classical times. Indeed, as Chiappe’s disturbing story forces us to see, women are both encouraged and condemned for putting themselves on display on the internet, and this act of display for the implied male gaze is, in itself, demanded by the patriarchal structures of the internet. This issue of censure and yet display of female sexuality is made evident not only in the images themselves, I argue, but also, in particular, by the icons that appear to the bottom right of this image which take the form of

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a ‘thumbs up’ and ‘thumbs down’ image, and which are a representation of the functioning of social media. As Chiappe commented in an interview when asked about these icons and the fluctuating numbers, ‘they represent the “likes” and “don’t likes” of social media’, and he aims to draw parallels between the girl in the photographs and ‘all [social media] users who give up their privacy in exchange for a vain compensation […]: friends, likes, and Google results’ (Goicoechea 2015, n.p.).19 These icons thus stand in shorthand form for the workings of social media as a whole, for what has been termed the ‘like economy’, and, in particular, for the form of societal conditioning that social media instils in us. I thus propose a reading of this section of Chiappe’s work in terms of the criticisms that various scholars have raised in recent years against the functionings of social media, in which the experience of self becomes increasingly commodified. A variety of studies have highlighted the way in which social media, far from offering sociality and connectedness as its nomenclature would purport, in fact functions to commodify the self and extract value from the data provided by its users. Gerlitz and Helmond, for instance, have cautioned us about the way in which the ‘rhetoric of sociality and connectivity’ of social media sites such as Facebook in fact belies ‘an infrastructure in which social interactivity and user affects are instantly turned into valuable consumer data and enter multiple cycles of multiplication and exchange’ (Gerlitz and Helmond 2013, p.  1349). Tony Sampson, similarly, proposes that we need to develop an understanding of ‘how alienation might work in the experiences of the Like economy’ (Sampson 2017, p. 135), and notes that by freely using social media, ‘the experience of friendship is captured as a commodity and prompted into action through the sharing and liking of others’ content. It is this experience that is then sold to marketers to extract value from (Sampson 2017, p. 136). Ulises Mejias, in his book-length study of how the digital network forms part of a capitalist order that reproduces inequality, has argued that the participatory culture of social media is in fact rationalised, standardised, and institutionalised to contribute to a capitalist social order. Critiquing what he describes as the ‘commodification of the social’, Mejias argues that participation in such networks ‘produces inequality because it is asymmetrical’, for, ‘while users surrender their privacy for the sake of conve19  In the original Spanish this reads: ‘simulan los “me gusta” y “no me gusta” de redes sociales’ and ‘todos los usuarios que renuncian a preservar su intimidad a cambio de una recompensa fatua, como la de los números de internet: amigos, likes, resultados de Google’.

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nience, network owners are increasingly opaque about the ways in which they use the information they collect’ (Mejias 2013, p. 5). More recently, Kane X. Faucher has published a book-length study on the functioning of what he terms ‘online social capital’, which he defines as ‘represented by numeric counters in a “like” and “attention” economy, facilitated by social buttons and operated by social media sites to encourage more participation for their own real economic interests (data collection, targeted advertising, and the exploitation of digital labour)’ (Faucher 2018, p. xiv). Crucially, for Faucher, online social capital is ‘an ideological product of neoliberal-informationism’ in that it ‘champions competitive individualism rather than community-based collaboration within a broader network spectacle, fostering the conditions of conspicuous prosumption, status display, and a metric by which to falsely compare social value with other users’ (Faucher 2018, p. xiv). For this reason, Faucher cautions us against being deceived by the hype about social media as offering a decentralised, utopian network of users, for, he argues: the utopian ideal of an entirely decentralised network of media producers and consumers (or prosumers) has been lionised as an inclusive and democratising antidote to top-down, largely unilateral media hierarchies that dictate content to a passive audience on a one-to-many basis. However, this new media arrangement narrows options to ever fewer media conglomerates and hosting services that extract surplus value from our online participation. (Faucher 2018, p. xx)

For Faucher, such utopian rhetoric thus blinds us to the real functioning of social media and, in particular, to how online social capital is positioned as a deliberate strategy by major social media networks to encourage participation for profit. The processes of acquiring online social capital in fact align with the goals of capitalist accumulation, since users are compelled to aim for ever-increasing and quantifiable measures of friends, followers, likes, and views, whilst the large media corporations owning these platforms mine the data for profit. For Faucher, the integration of social buttons to share and measure online social capital is part of a measure to extract more surplus value from users, by increasing the incentives to participate and compete for online social capital (Faucher 2018, p. 135). If such have been the evaluations of social media as regards the commodification of the online self per se, feminist scholars have alerted us to the particularly gendered ways in which this commodification is effected,

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and how the alienation of the online self instils and reinforces patriarchal values. Kate Ott has warned us against the uncritical alignment of the values of social media with those of feminism, noting that the purported values of social media, such as openness, collaboration, and networking, whilst superficially seeming to have similarities with feminist values, are in fact much more problematic, since ‘the opportunities social media platforms afford are increasingly shaped by the business models and algorithms behind them’ (Ott 2018, p. 93). Borrowing from Astra Taylor’s metaphor of social media as feudalism or sharecropping, where ‘platforms offer “open” land and then lay claim to content and mine data, shaping the labor and desires of users’ (Ott 2018, p.  95), Ott emphasises that existing hierarchies and inequalities related to labour are also perpetuated on social media, and goes on to warn us that the more data we generate, the more we are providing free labour for the business model of the corporate giants who own the platform. Ott cautions us that ‘as users, we may assume we are controlling the experience of who we friend, how we search or even what we buy; big data are in fact influencing us by assuming our desires and thus driving us to content that becomes our digital identity and in turn influences our offline identity’ (Ott 2018, p. 95). Lisa Nakamura, meanwhile, has argued forcefully for understanding the function of social media in terms of digital surveillance, saying that women are compelled to self-regulate on social networking sites. Nakamura draws out how social media places women’s bodies under surveillance and encourages women to become complicit in their own objectification, arguing that ‘women on these sites generate a significant amount of the user traffic and profit for social-networking companies, and in fact, endure significant pressure to behave in ways that actively invite a sexualised gaze’ (Nakamura 2015, p. 223). Moreover, Nakamura points out that women are also disproportionately exploited in social media sites, since women perform much of the free labour of social media: Women perform much of the ‘free labor’ of social media: they are more likely to use Facebook than men; they use picture-sharing services like Instagram and Pinterest more frequently (Duggan and Brenner 2013); they populate and generate original and unique content for fan bulletin boards; and they produce and share fan fiction. As Mark Andrejevic (2009) and ­others have shown, this subjects them to new and invisible forms of surveillance and enclosure as every click, every post, and every log-on is measured and often sold to advertisers. (Nakamura 2015, p. 223)

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Thus, for Nakamura, individuals operate those same technologies—social media—that put them under surveillance, meaning that, when women use social media, they are subjected to ‘both symbolic and legal violence’ (Nakamura 2015, p. 225). Jessica Megarry, meanwhile, has undertaken a detailed analysis of how the harassment that women receive on social media amounts to surveillance. Again urging us not to be duped by liberatory hype about digital communications and about women’s self-representation on social media as inherently empowering, Megarry argues, pace Haraway, that what is not recognised by narratives that focus on women’s achievements in social media networks is ‘how the uses and structure of social media technologies might rather facilitate the reproduction of hierarchical gender relations or the extension of male dominance online’ (Megarry 2018, p. 1072). Megarry gives various examples, such as the fact that few women occupy positions of power in the design of technologies; that men have founded, own, and control the most successful social media companies; and that discrimination and sexual harassment against women is rife in the social media industry to conclude that ‘it would be difficult to claim that these represent autonomous spaces free from male interference’ (Megarry 2018, p. 1073). Megarry alerts us to the fact that ‘male-designed algorithms and bots are also playing an increasing role in which content is displayed to whom, and when’, and thus argues that ‘social media platforms actively, but not always transparently, perpetuate patriarchal values’, since male bias is encoded in the platforms themselves (Megarry 2018, p.  1074). Megarry thus argues for an expansion of the notion of social media surveillance ‘beyond physical and economic abuse to include the ways in which patriarchal culture also enacts symbolic violence against women’ (Megarry 2018, p. 1076), inviting us to consider the ways that women’s bodies and behaviours are surveyed by social media. Moreover, Rachel E. Dubrofsky and Megan M. Wood encourage us to understand the ways in which women present themselves on social media in terms of a much longer trajectory in which women’s bodies have been objectified by the media throughout the ages, arguing that ‘visual-media technologies—including surveillance technologies embedded in social media—are always already part of an objectifying process that has p ­ articular implications for gendered bodies’ (Dubrofsky and Wood 2015, p.  93). Focusing on the practices and discourses of social media in which women are objects of the gaze but also, paradoxically, producers of the gaze, they argue forcefully that the rhetoric of social media which frames women as

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empowered in their sexualised displays of their own bodies in fact ‘dangerously elides the misogynist context that hails them to perform in particular ways’ (Dubrofsky and Wood 2015, p.  94). In this way, Dubrofsky and Wood encourage us to consider how social media encourages women to present their bodies for display and become complicit in their own objectification. Crucially, they argue, regarding this rhetoric of women expressly ‘inviting the gaze’: This rhetoric is not unlike ‘rape myth’ discourse, in which a woman who previously consented to sex or a woman who dresses provocatively ‘asked for it’ […]. In this case, the act of posting pictures of oneself on Twitter naturalizes white supremacist heterosexist patriarchy. The images are always already part of a misogynist culture […] the visual display of women’s bodies is consistently problematic in a culture where women are disenfranchised. (Dubrofsky and Wood 2015, p. 104)

In this way, Dubrofsky and Wood demonstrate how social media instils in women the need to be complicit with their own objectification by displaying their bodies, and then perpetuates a discourse in which these women are subsequently blamed for the display of their bodies. In this way, a variety of feminist scholars have drawn our attention to the ways in which social media instils patriarchal values in women, encourages them to be complicit in their own objectification, and then censures women for these same displays. In the light of these theorisations, I argue that Chiappe’s presentation of the images that we encounter behind the right-hand door of the hotel functions as an updating of the Pasiphae myth for the contemporary era. That is, the young woman of Chiappe’s tale is compelled to present herself as the object of male desire; like the spell of Poseidon on Pasiphae, which compelled her to mate with the bull, the young woman in Chiappe’s tale is under the spell of social media, which compels her to objectify her own body. The content behind these doors thus demonstrates the false consciousness of social media, in which the young woman, under pressure from societal forces (or, we might say, social media forces), adopts values that are detrimental to herself. If Pasiphae was under the (literal) spell of Poseidon, now women in Minotaur Hotel are under the spell of social media, as they feel compelled to comply with patriarchal norms. And, moreover, as we shall see below, just as Pasiphae endured societal disapproval for her overt sexuality, so the female figure of Chiappe’s tale is subject to censure due to her putting her body on display.

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In this way, the images that we encounter in this section of the work, each of them in black and white, deliberately grainy, depicting a woman posing, and displays of the same thumbs-up/down icons, are disturbing commentaries on the commodification of women on the internet. The woman depicted in these images sets herself up as the object of desire, but this is a compelled act, since the structures of social media compel women to present themselves as the object of an imagined male gaze. Also, crucially, these images are disturbing due to our implication in the scenario: these are images of women for whom we have been searching in this quest-drive storyworld, behind the closed doors of the hotel bedrooms, and our voyeuristic gaze is implicated. For, we must remember, the opening instructions to the storyworld positioned the Minotaur, ambiguously, as both character and as us, as the user-player of this storyworld. If we, thus, are tasked with seeking out these images and if we are the ones electing to click on this door to see what lies behind it, we too are implicated in the contemporary regime of social media which demands the display of women’s bodies as an object for consumption by an implied male gaze. In so doing, Chiappe forces us to question our own position as voyeurs as we surf the web and to acknowledge the material conditions of the production of texts, images, and sounds on the internet.

Email Conceits and Technocapitalism If the content behind the right-hand door focuses on women’s bodies on display under the surveillance of social media, the content behind the left-­ hand door draws our attention to the ways in which this display is censured, and also to the imbrication of this in the wider structure of neoliberalism. The content in this part of the work can be understood, I argue through feminist scholars who have argued that the disavowal of feminism is intimately linked with the discourses of neoliberalism, and that this, in turn, is closely tied to social media. Megarry emphasises that the liberatory rhetoric of digital communications, in which women are autonomous, self-realising, entrepreneurial actors, means that ‘female self-­ representation on social media can be positioned as inherently empowering, because women’s choices and behaviours are seen as unrelated to the continuing subordination of women to men’ (Megarry 2018, p. 1072). Thus, the discourses that promote individual empowerment function in the service of neoliberalism; these same discourses attempt to disavow feminism,

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and direct our attention away from structural inequalities (such as the subordination of women to men), since they focus on the acts of individual women as entrepreneurial actors. Similarly, Elias and Gill, writing in the context of online apps which encourage women to self-monitor, argue that there are close links between postfeminism and neoliberalism when considering these digital tools, for Both postfeminism and neoliberalism are structured by a grammar of individualism that has almost entirely replaced notions of the social or political, or any idea of individuals as subject to pressures, constraints or even influence from the outside. In postfeminist culture, women are interpellated as active, autonomous and self-reinventing subjects, whose lives are the outcome of individual choice and agency. (Elias and Gill 2017, p. 64)

Rogan and Budgeon, meanwhile, have emphasised how social media ‘promotes the production of narcissistic and highly individualistic subjects whose performance of the self is consistent with the celebration of neoliberal values’ (Rogan and Budgeon 2018, p.  6). The online practices of women thus contribute to a growing regime of visibility which accords worth to the presentation of the female body. It is for this reason that social media, along with other digital spaces, ‘enhance neoliberal modes of governance in which power acts directly upon the subject who is tasked with creating an empowered, entrepreneurial self seemingly unconstrained by structural power relations (Rogan and Budgeon 2018, p. 6). As these and other scholars have shown, if users of digital spaces are encouraged to see themselves as entrepreneurial, articulating their own needs, then this articulation is complicit with neoliberalism, since it promotes the illusory discourse of the individual self, entirely divorced from material or structural constraints. I argue that this nexus is explored in the content we encounter in this section of Minotaur Hotel, which again builds on certain parts of the Minotaur myth, and again suggests analogies with digital formats. Where the two sections of the novel analysed above drew parallels with new media formats—those of hypertext structure and social media respectively—in this third section the particular format is email, and technocapitalism comes under scrutiny. Comprising a combination of images, animations, sound, and text, the content behind this door encourages us to see connections between the exploitation of this particular character and the structural violence of late capitalism more broadly.

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The first time we enter through this door, a screen launches which tells us of the Minotaur’s quest, with the lexia reading as follows: The minotaur wants to believe that this radiant woman could also love him. He embarks on a pursuit which is like a loop. In a room, a prize-winning and senile author exclaims ‘O liberal goddess, privatize public health, because the weak are hiding their evilness’. Opposite him, the masked executioner reads an edict: ‘beloved lord, congratulations for the praise to the banker and the debt that your lady was concealing’. The sickle severs. ‘I sentence you!’ Without cleaning the blade of his weapon, the executioner cuts his own throat.20

In terms of the content of the lexia, this comprises a segment of the plot, recounting the Minotaur and his quest, as well as describing one of the inhabitants of one of the rooms of the hotel. But the lexia is also replete with metaliterary references, such as the fact that the Minotaur’s pursuit of the woman is described to be ‘like a loop’. Here, as with other examples in his novel examined above, Chiappe uses contemporary metaphors and similes to both update the classical myth of the labyrinth and make comment on his own structure. Chiappe’s employment of the computer terminology ‘loop’—used to describe a recursive structure or programmed sequence of instructions—as a simile to describe the circuitous paths through the labyrinth with no exit is, again, one of the many instances in which he draws between the labyrinth and the structuring of digital technologies. This lexia also contains a mise-en-abîme, with the figure of the writer within the lexia and, in this way, this lexia contains two metatextual commentaries: the first, on the digital platform with the reference to the loop; and the second, on the writing process, with the figure of the writer. The series of eccentric pronouncements by the writer and the executioner in this sequence mobilise the rhetoric of ancient times, yet now to provide a satirical commentary on the workings of late capitalism: the gods of 20  The original Spanish reads: ‘El minotauro quiere creer que esa mujer luminosa también podría amarle. Lleva a cabo una persecución que parece un loop. En la habitación, un escritor laureado y senil exclama: “O, diosa liberal, privatiza la sanidad social porque el débil esconde maldad” Frente a él, un verdugo de antifaz lee un edicto: “Amado señor, enhorabuena por la loa al desfalco del banquero y a la deuda que escondía vuestra dama” La hoz sesga. Cae la cabeza del escritor que grita: “¡Te condeno!” Sin limpiar la hoja del arma, el verdugo corta su propio cuello’.

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ancient times are transmuted into the gods of (neo)liberalisation and privatisation; praise is now uttered not to a mythical higher being, but to the banker and the debts; and the sacrificial scene becomes that of the writer sacrificed to the god of neoliberalism. This satirisation of the workings of contemporary capitalism, interspersed with the commentary on digital technologies in this lexia, encourages the reader to establish connections between the two, providing a condemnation of the neoliberal economy underpinning the digital. The dialogue between Chiappe’s unnamed male character and the executioner here, and his invective against the encroaching neoliberalisation, thus also functions as a criticism of the systems themselves—both the digital system and the system of late capitalism. Finally, the last part of this lexia, describing the sickle wielded by the executioner, is both an element of the storyworld and also becomes part of the physical presentation of the text on screen and the procedural enactment of the work. That is, the transition to the next screen is enacted through a slice, in which we see the shadow of the sickle, as it rises up from the bottom of screen space, and then sweeps down from the top right, cutting across the screen and, crucially, cutting through the lexia. The text is cut into fragments and falls downwards, out of screen space. This moment involves the breaking of the boundaries between storyworlds, since this motif belonging to the inner storyworld (the sickle wielded by the character of the executioner) comes out of that storyworld and takes on a role outside of it in an instance of visual metalepsis. This is made all the more striking by the fact that the sickle actually cuts through the lexia; the lexia is cut into fragments, which highlights the fragmentary nature of hypertext narrative. Over the entirety of this screen runs a sound file, comprising discordant guitar music, with a voice-over reading out a short song.21 It is notable that there is a deliberate dissonance between text and sound, for the lyrics of this poem do not correspond to the text we read, and instead are those of a song entitled ‘Puppets’, read out by Fidel Cordero, whose words make reference to a corrupt regime, with a predominance of vocabulary 21  This song is one of three included in Minotaur Hotel, the other two being ‘La voz del monstruo’ and ‘La fuerza del rencor’. ‘Títeres’ and ‘La voz del monstruo’ were created and composed by Chiappe especially for this work, in conjunction with Fidel Cordero, whilst ‘La fuerza del rencor’ is a live recording by Natalia Hernández and Jorge Ramírez which has been remastered and edited for the purposes of Minotaur Hotel. For more on this, see Chiappe’s comments in interview with Maria Goicoechea (2015).

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related to artifice—‘puppets’ ‘cardboard country’, ‘buffoon show’, ‘theatre curtain’, ‘script’, ‘acting’—indicating corruption and falsehood.22 After this lexia disappears by falling out of screen space, a new text appears upwards from below in fragments and is then pieced together. Again, the lexia on this second screen also makes reference to neoliberalisation, with the mouth of the writer shouting, ‘spectacle, you are nothing more than a spectacle’, an utterance which we can interpret as referring to the spectacle (in the Debordian sense) of late capitalism.23 In this example of the content that we encounter behind the left-hand door, then, the combination of sound, text, images, and animation all emphasise the corruption of the system, and encourage us to draw parallels between the metatextual and the societal critique. Other content that we discover behind this door includes a series of images which display the conceit of the email image. Significantly, the content displays the email as format and reworks the story of the woman, thus suggesting a nexus at which lies neoliberalisation, media platforms, and the surveillance of women on social media. That is, the ways in which social media platforms encourage women to focus on their self-­ representation and (perceived) individual empowerment function in the service of the discourses of neoliberalism, perpetuating a myth of postfeminism and, concomitantly, obscuring the structural inequalities to which women are subject. This nexus becomes apparent, I argue, in Minotaur Hotel in the form of the email conceit that we encounter behind this left-hand door, one such example being as shown in Fig. 7.3. In this example, as in others that we encounter behind this door, the screen is presented in the format of email messages, with an image at the top only partially visible. We cannot fully discern the content of the image, since it is truncated and pixelated, but given its black-and-white tones and the grainy character, we are likely to associate it with the images of the modern-day Pasiphae whom we have encountered behind the right-­hand door. The fact that the content of this screen is presented in the form of email messages is a mobilisation of another easily recognisable new media format of communication. In a similar way to that in which Carlos Labbé, as analysed in Chap. 2, used the conceit of email to build upon, and yet chal22  These words in the original Spanish read: ‘títeres’, ‘país de cartón’, ‘bufo show’, ‘telón’, ‘guión’, ‘actúa’. 23  ‘¡Espectáculo, no eres más que espectáculo!’.

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Fig. 7.3  Doménico Chiappe, Minotaur Hotel (2013–2015), left-hand door

lenge, the norms of the epistolary novel, here Chiappe is employing the email format, but now to make us question the economy of visibility and the production of individualistic subjects in the era of neoliberalism. In Chiappe’s novel, we are unable to open each individual email that we encounter behind the door, and can only see the first line of the content of each message. Reading down through this list of first lines, it becomes apparent that the messages are all opinions about a woman—the woman whose image we find behind the right-hand door. This link is established firstly through the intertextual references to the classical myth, apparent in the message which reads: ‘the girl had another name and Colchis is the place she came from’.24 Colchis refers to the ancient kingdom located on the Black Sea which appears in Greek mythology; this is the kingdom to which the Argonauts travelled, and where King Aeëtes hung the Golden Fleece. Pasiphae was his (Aeëte’s) sister, so the reference to Colquis here immediately establishes a parallel between the woman mentioned in the emails and the classical figure of Pasiphae. Again, the link set up here encourages us to make comparisons with the classical myth and its presentation of a ‘bad woman’ who is subsequently punished, 24  The original Spanish reads: ‘La chica tenía otro nombre y Colquis es el lugar del que venía’.

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and the contemporary character of Chiappe’s novel who displays her sexuality and is subsequently castigated online. Secondly, the link to the character whom we saw behind the right-hand door is reinforced in the content of the email messages, which foreground the ways in which the woman is judged explicitly on her appearance and sexual attractiveness, such as the comment ‘she was perfectly screwable’.25 Comments such as these illustrate the new regimes of visibility to which women are subject online and can be understood through the arguments of feminist scholars noted above. At the same time, the comments also indicate how women are subject to reprobation in this new regime of visibility, for the woman is blamed for the outcome, as illustrated in the comment ‘she ended up the way she did because of her loose lifestyle’.26 Striking here, therefore, is the way the comments demonstrate how the architecture of social media compels women to put their bodies on display for an implied male gaze, and become complicit in their own objectification. This rhetoric of ‘inviting the gaze’, as Dubrofsky and Wood, cited above, have proposed, then also perpetuates a discourse in which women are subsequently blamed for the display of their bodies. In this case, the sorry fate of the woman—who has, we piece together from the lexia, died—is framed, in the words of this commentator, as her ‘asking for it’. In another screen behind this left-hand door, we encounter another example of this playing with digital media formats, with a screen displaying only one email message, which simply reads: ‘amongst the voices, the real name of Luna de Colchis is brought up. Her real identity is: ’.27 Again, Chiappe is playing with the conceit of the email, yet, significantly, the culmination of the message is left blank: we are not given her ‘real identity’, and so we never find out the true identity of the woman. Chiappe’s tactic here teases us for, of course, he thwarts our desire to find out the truth and solve the mystery of Minotaur Hotel: the narrative drive for resolution of the mystery is disrupted. Yet he also raises serious questions about digital technologies and our implications on them. Firstly, the lack of resolution of the ‘true identity’ raises the oft-discussed issue of identity on the internet. We can witness this in, amongst others, Sherry Turkle’s work on the assumption of different personae in our interactions in the virtual world,  The original Spanish reads: ‘estaba bien fornicable’.  The original Spanish reads: ‘terminó como terminó por mala vida’. 27  The original Spanish reads: ‘Entre las voces, surge el nombre real de Luna de Colquis. Su verdadera identidad es: ’. 25 26

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in which she has argued that this ‘gives people the chance to express multiple and often unexplored aspects of the self, to play with their identity and to try out new ones’ (Turkle 1995, p. 12). Yet, as we have seen from the feminist critics cited above, this potentially liberatory capacity of the internet, allowing users to swap identities at will, is in fact much more complex: women are not free to take on any guise they wish, but are compelled to display their bodies in the like economy of social media. As Baer and many others have noted regarding this discourse of the liberatory potential of online identities, ‘while cyberfeminists have emphasized the potentially utopian possibilities of digital culture to overcome gender binaries and tailor the cyborg body to feminist specifications, the emphasis of social media platforms on commodified self-representation and the widespread digital dissemination of images of the material body escalate the demands of hegemonic femininity’ (Baer 2016, p. 24). That is, whilst there may have been radical, liberatory potentials that are opened up by the possibilities of creating online identities, in actuality the discourse of creating one’s own online identity has been colonised by big corporations. Thus the ability to swap selves and identities is perhaps not so radical, since the selves that are created online are often compelled performances, and, indeed, the notion itself of the entrepreneurial self, who engages in self-­fashioning online, is an illusion that serves the interests of corporate capital. Secondly, and perhaps just as importantly, by leaving this space in the email blank, Chiappe encourages us to find ourselves implicated in the dynamic that his novel has revealed for us—namely, the dynamic of the shaming of women online. The woman is not named, because she is not just Pasiphae, but she represents all the women who are compelled to present themselves online in the new regime of visibility. The story of the woman who is punished is, thus, not just an ancient myth whose barbarity we can easily distance ourselves from. Instead, we are implicated as participants within this new regime of visibility, and we too perpetuate the neoliberal conditions of the circulation of online social capital. We are part of this culture which simultaneously requires women to hypersexualise their bodies and present them for display, and then punishes them for doing so. As this chapter has attempted to show, Chiappe’s Minotaur Hotel sets up a series of analogies between the classical myth of the Minotaur and, on the one hand, the hypertextual structure of his story and, on the other, the workings of contemporary social media. Regarding the first of these,

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Chiappe encourages us to see similarities between the labyrinthine structures of the myth and the hyperlinked structure of his story. Yet he also troubles this easy association, and cautions us against assuming a utopian model of nomadic, rhizomatic structuring. Instead, he warns us that the utopian hype of a rhizomatic wandering free of constraints may be no more than an illusion. Similarly, Chiappe draws parallels with the ancient tale of the overly sexualised Pasiphae and the contemporary protagonist of his story, who compulsively presents herself on social media, and who reaches a tragic end because of doing so. In so doing, Chiappe updates the classical myth in order to comment on the functioning of social media. Far from endorsing a liberatory rhetoric of the entrepreneurial self online, Chiappe’s story invites us to understand how women are compelled to display their bodies in the like economy of social media, and how they are, subsequently, castigated for it in accordance with this new regime of visibility. Linking this to the neoliberalism, Chiappe encourages us to understand how these mechanisms which instil in women the compulsion to be complicit in their own objectification function in the service of the neoliberal discourse of the autonomous self, deliberately obscuring any structural inequalities to which women are subject. In this way, Minotaur Hotel encourages the reader to question their role as reader-voyeur and their complicity with this systemic violence of late capitalism.

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CHAPTER 8

Conclusion

As this book has demonstrated, authors of digital literature in Latin(o) America mobilise a variety of digital platforms and tools, ranging from blogs through to visualisations and many more, in their creation of hybrid digital genres. In their works, they engage in a range of literary and experimental practices, pushing the boundaries of existing literary genres and norms, all the while dialoguing with their print literary predecessors. As my analysis has shown, Labbé is particularly concerned with legacy media practices, especially how the historical avant-garde might be appropriated by corporate media, and where an oppositional stance might lie. As I have demonstrated, if cut-and-paste has now been recuperated into computer interface architecture of late capitalism, Labbé’s potential disruption of these practices and partial recuperation of the radical edge comes in his metacommentary on the process of writing a hypertext narrative, and through the insertion of fragments of the ‘real’, which, in our contemporary era, come in the shape of the lexia fragments of the detritus of the digital age. Zerbarini, meanwhile, also engages with prior moments of literary experimentation, but in this case focuses her attention on high modernist techniques for which Joyce and others are well known. Taking up the techniques of narrative gaps, inconclusive endings, and stream of consciousness, Zerbarini both indicates to us the parallels between these modernist literary practices and the affordances of digital technologies, and yet problematises these parallels, as she demonstrates, through her metatextual commentary, the limitations of these same digital ­technologies. © The Author(s) 2019 C. Taylor, Electronic Literature in Latin America, New Directions in Latino American Cultures, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-30988-6_8

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Zerbarini also integrates user input into her work, and, in so doing, creates moments of narrative and interactional metalepsis, which trouble the ontological realms of the storyworld. Jaime Alejandro Rodríguez makes sustained reference to the surrealist heritage of the cadavre exquis, whilst also invoking the popular genre of the whodunnit. As my analysis has demonstrated, it is through the productive bringing together these two literary precedents that Rodríguez effects his innovations, as he blurs boundaries between narrative levels, engages in narrative metalepsis, and troubles the conventions that are central to the whodunnit genre he employs. Belén Gache, it has been shown, constantly dialogues with existing literary precedents and cultural formats, again drawing parallels in a similar way to Zerbarini. For Gache, the Baroque techniques of literary allusiveness or catachresis have similarities with contemporary literary-digital experimentation, yet are not envisaged in a teleological progression, whilst the cultural format of karaoke serves as a mechanism to unmask the discourses of corporate power. Eduardo Navas, analysed in Chap. 6, shares this concern for the imbrication of digital technologies with late capitalism that came to the fore in the second of Gache’s works, but for Navas, this critique also extends to the very digital formats that he mobilises. Making use of popular social media formats, Navas engages in a resistant remix, in which aphorisms are remixed into new statements, word clouds, and visualisations, reworking—as he does so—the book of aphorisms in order to make political comments on corporate capitalism and unmask the political economies that underpin social media. Finally, Doménico Chiappe’s work, as analysed in the last chapter, shares similarities with Navas’s concern for social media in particular. Chiappe’s sustained intertextual engagement with classical myth functions both to draw out a series of parallels between the labyrinth and web structure, and to question the circulation of online social capital. Chiappe’s novel denounces the commodification of the online self, and alerts us to functioning of online social capital as the ideological product of neoliberalism that champions competitive individualism and further alienates its users. In these ways, the authors studied in this volume undertake an extended intertextual dialogue with prior literary experimentations, as their works mobilise previous tropes, generic conventions, techniques, and intertexts, but also update these for the digital age. They draw parallels between experimental practices of the print era and those practices they carry out in the contemporary era, illustrating, for example, how the Baroque

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t­echniques of stylistic excess and catachresis find their parallels in animations and hotlinking, or how the collage techniques of the cubists and surrealists bear resemblance to the cutting-and-pasting of digital media. At the same time, they also indicate the shortcomings of these digital technologies, revealing, for instance, how the branching structures afforded by hyperlinking are not fully able to realise stream of consciousness, or how the potentially rhizomatic possibilities of the internet are constrained. Their works are also, as my analysis has shown, markedly metatextual, with a predominance of references within their works to the processes of their own digital creation. Their works abound with metaphors that make mention of the underlying structures of their works, such as tracks, routes, portals, and labyrinths; similarly, their works often employ imagery of aleatory or combinatory systems, such as jigsaws, puzzles, collage, and others. Many of their lexia often take up overtly terms that are employed to describe hypertext or electronic literature more broadly, with terminology such as ‘lexia’, ‘the net’, ‘rhizome’, and others being inserted into the narrative of the storyworld. And many of their works contain moments of narrative and interactional metalepsis, in which we are explicitly invited to consider the system—the digital platform—in which we momentarily become inserted as character, and so, contemplate our own imbrication in the system. Their works combine these features, to different degrees, with a critique of the material conditions of the digital technologies that they employ. Some of the authors studied in this volume undertake a scathing attack on the political economy underpinning contemporary digital practices by making overt reference to their oppositional stance, such as the explicit naming of the Marxist analyses of Adorno in the very title of their works, in the case of Navas. For other authors, the oppositional stance is more implicit, but nonetheless significant, with their works denouncing the experience of life under late capitalism through imagery, metaphor, visualisations, sounds, and more. In order to approach their works, and in order to approach digital literature as a phenomenon, I have, therefore, proposed in this book a three-­ fold approach, combining aesthetics, technologics, and ethics. It is, I contend, only when we take into account these three features that we can fully understand the complexity of digital literature, its function, and its positionality. This paradigm involves us understanding how digital genres build on prior literary traditions, which is not to say that digital literature is merely the reproduction of previous works in electronic format, but to

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trace their commonalities and divergences. It involves paying close and detailed attention to the technological platforms and tools employed, whilst also recognising that these tools do not in and of themselves determine the works of art. And it also involves being alert to the stance that each work takes in relation to the socio-political conditions in which the digital technologies have been developed. Regarding the first of these, as I have demonstrated in this book, it is crucial when we approach digital literature that we understand how writers dialogue with their predecessors and contemporaries. Literary movements, genres, and experimentations of a prior era influence the contemporary experimentations that authors undertake in digital form today. These prior influences range from entire genre conventions (such as the detective novel or the conduct book), through to pre-existing literary techniques (such as stream of consciousness or surrealist collage), right down to specific, named intertexts whose fragments become embedded in the digital literary work (such as verses of Góngora’s poetry, or lines from Joyce’s short stories). Understanding the dialogues that take place between contemporary digital literature and its print precedents is, therefore, crucial to capture the traditions that inform contemporary authors. Moreover, one particular facet of this attention to a prior literary heritage that I have drawn out throughout this book is the fact that this heritage is not an exclusively Anglophone one. Rather, as my analysis throughout this book has demonstrated, a Modern Languages-informed approach is necessary when we investigate how digital literary products speak to a pre-digital literary heritage.1 Thus, the authors in this book engage with Anglophone writers and paradigms, but also with the works of Góngora, Borges, Cervantes, Huidobro, Goya, or the genre conventions of the nota roja or the cadavre exquis. Tracing the non-Anglophone literary heritage of digital literature is important to avoid another determinism that would be just as detrimental as technological determinism: namely, Anglophone determinism, which would prevent us from seeing electronic literature in all its richness. 1  As Thea Pitman and I have argued elsewhere, all too frequently, digital technologies, their applications, and their analyses have been developed in a predominantly Anglophone environment. What a Modern Languages-inflected approach can bring to the studies of digital culture is an attention to cultural and linguistic specificity, and a pluricultural and plurilingual understanding of cultural heritage that can offer enhanced understandings of digital culture (Pitman and Taylor 2019, forthcoming).

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Secondly, doing critical digital cultural studies involves paying close and detailed attention to the technological platforms and tools employed, whilst also recognising that these tools do not in and of themselves determine the works of literature. In a similar way to the close reading advocated by the proponents of cultural studies in its heyday, our task must now involve the close reading of the technological features of electronic literature and—in a similar fashion to cultural studies—of the resistant uses of these technological features. Thus we must pay attention to features such as hotlinking, animations, visualisations, pop-up windows, interactive textboxes, search tools, and many other such elements in our analysis of these works. Avoiding technological determinism whilst we do so, our analysis must be informed by the ways in which these digital tools or platforms work, whilst also being alert to their re-purposing and uses against the grain. Thirdly, our approach to digital literature must also encompass an understanding of the socio-political conditions underpinning digital technologies, providing a critique of these conditions, all the while being aware of their own (and our own) imbrication in them. Our analysis of digital technologies must take on board the detailed and forceful critiques that numerous scholars have made about the relationship between digital technologies and late capitalism, and be informed by an understanding of contemporary phenomena such as the ideology of the algorithm, the functioning of online social capital, the digital entrepreneurial self, the aura of the virtual, the surveillance of the online self, amongst many other such phenomena. At the same time, we must be alert to the ways in which these digital technologies can be (temporarily, tactically) used by writers and others against the grain. In so doing, we can gain an enhanced understanding of the digital-as-globalising debates, since in our attention to the ethics it is also a case of ensuring consideration of the transnational and the local inflections of digital technologies, and of the particular ways that the structural inequalities of late capitalism are played out in different areas of the globe. Our attention to the ways in which these digital tools are employed thus also allows for a critical position to be developed vis-à-vis these tools, and this forms one way of doing ‘the politics of politics’ for the contemporary era. Throughout this book I have thus advocated a three-fold approach of aesthetics, technologics, and ethics. Herein lies, I hope, precisely the sort of updated, revitalised cultural studies that scholars have been calling for. Doing digital cultural studies today can indeed be about doing ‘the p ­ olitics

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of politics’, and there is an urgency and necessity for doing so. Understanding the aesthetics, the technologics, and the ethics—the literary, the technological, and the socio-political elements—this is what we, as scholars of digital literature, must do.

Works Cited Pitman, Thea, and Claire Taylor. 2019. Modern Languages, the Digital, and the Transnational. In Transnational Modern Languages: A Handbook, ed. Derek Duncan. Liverpool: Liverpool University Press.

Index1

A Active reader, 3, 140 Adorno, Theodor, 21, 28, 43, 57, 119, 120, 184, 184n49, 193, 194, 196–216, 213n12, 218– 221, 263 Minima moralia, 28, 43, 193, 198, 200, 204, 205n8, 207, 213, 218–220 Aesthetics, 3, 13, 13–14n8, 14, 24–26, 39–46, 57, 59, 96, 126, 127n13, 157, 157n8, 160, 195, 200, 201, 212, 240, 241, 263, 265, 266 Agency, 9, 10, 21, 37, 60, 141, 173, 181, 184n49, 186, 250 Algorithm, 38, 40, 90, 96, 99, 100, 114, 187, 211–221, 246, 247, 265 Alienation under capitalism, 185n50, 186, 230

of the individual, 4, 33, 198 under informational capitalism, 4, 33, 193 Animation, 91, 92, 102, 103, 134, 144, 153, 157–173, 250, 253, 263, 265 Aphorisms, 43, 44, 177, 177n37, 178, 178n38, 193–221, 262 Aristotle, 178n37, 196–198, 197n4, 200 Author, 1–8, 6n3, 10, 12–14, 26–33, 29n12, 38–46, 80, 80n30, 94n7, 117, 120n4, 138, 141, 153–155, 157n6, 160, 161, 170n29, 178n37, 180n43, 187, 194n1, 195n2, 197n4, 213, 214, 225, 226, 226n1, 228, 234, 235, 243, 251, 261–264 Authorship, 74, 118, 127n13, 197n4, 226, 235 reconfiguration of, 7

 Note: Page numbers followed by ‘n’ refer to notes.

1

© The Author(s) 2019 C. Taylor, Electronic Literature in Latin America, New Directions in Latino American Cultures, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-30988-6

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INDEX

Avant-garde, 27n11, 29, 38, 40, 51, 52, 55–62, 56n6, 64, 81, 155n4, 228, 230, 261 Avatar, 42, 112, 118, 124, 136, 186 B Baroque, 26–29, 31, 42, 153–187, 262 Betancourt, Michael, 34, 36, 37, 37n16, 60, 184n49 Blog, 15n9, 39, 43, 44, 125n10, 154, 193–196, 202, 209, 210, 216, 219–221 Bourgeois, 30n13, 56–59, 61, 121, 122, 193, 194, 198–200, 204–207, 209, 210, 219 bourgeois individualism, 43 C Caligrammes, 26 Capitalism and aliénation, 4, 33, 43, 46, 184, 184n49, 186, 198, 230 capitalist accumulation, 39, 245 and commodity, 33, 34, 198 Catachresis, 27, 42, 163, 167, 167n21, 262, 263 Cause-effect, 41, 118, 148 Chiappe, Doménico, 28, 31, 39, 44, 45, 66n14, 225–257, 262 Classical myth, 28, 44, 163, 225, 228, 229, 232, 237, 238, 241, 243, 251, 254, 256, 257, 262 Collage, 38, 40, 51, 53–72, 75, 76, 81, 124, 156, 215, 263, 264 papier collé, 27, 29, 40, 51, 55 Commodification, 34, 38, 56, 59, 75, 182n47, 209, 218, 225, 226, 241, 244, 245, 249 commodification of the online self, 33, 39, 45, 46, 226, 245

Commodity commodity fetishism, 4, 185, 186 commodity fetishism of the digital age, 33 Communicative capitalism, 34, 37, 38, 75, 81 Competitive individualism, 45, 226, 245, 262 Conduct literature, 28, 199, 199n5, 200, 221 Corporate branding, 42, 154, 177 Corporate capital, 4, 33, 36, 38, 43, 44, 154, 187, 207, 256 Corporate colonisation of the lifeworld, 4, 32, 33 Corporate power, 33, 34, 43, 175, 176, 187, 262 Cubists, 40, 51, 55, 63, 263 Cultural studies Americanization, 21 celebratory, 18–20, 30n13 indiscriminacy, 19 and the ‘politics of politics,’ 22, 33, 265, 266 D Data mining, 39, 44, 195, 205, 206, 208, 209 Defetishisation, 154, 182, 187 Dehierarchization of culture, 25 Detective fiction, 42, 117, 119–121, 120n4, 123, 128, 130–142, 147, 148 crime novel, 29 Digital capitalism, 34, 36, 37, 40, 45, 182n47 Digital technologies, 1–14, 16, 28, 31–33, 35–43, 37n16, 45, 46, 58, 76, 86, 87, 89, 99, 100, 102, 104, 105, 108, 109, 112, 113, 117, 124, 138, 147, 153–156, 160, 163, 166–169, 173, 180,

 INDEX 

181, 185, 187, 213, 220, 226, 227, 232, 234, 235, 251, 252, 255, 261–265, 264n1 E Electronic surveillance, 4 Email, 51, 64, 65, 65n13, 72–81, 226, 249–257 Emancipatory, 2, 4, 32 Entrepreneurial individual, 206 Epistolary fiction, 28, 29, 40, 51, 76, 77 Ethics, 3, 13, 13–14n8, 14, 25, 30n13, 39–46, 196, 197, 263, 265, 266 Everyday life, 22, 23, 43, 54n4, 123, 173n33, 193, 197, 198, 209, 213 Experimental, 3, 4, 10–12, 14, 27, 28, 32, 35, 43, 52, 53, 55, 88, 89, 117, 125, 127, 133, 139, 154–156, 155n4, 160, 161n12, 165, 187, 227, 261, 262 F Female sexuality, 45, 226, 241, 243 and online social capital, 44 Feminist critiques, 249–250, 256 First wave hypertext theory, 5, 9, 234 Fourth wall, 43, 154, 187 Fuchs, Christian, 26, 34–36, 181, 206, 208, 209, 220 G Gache, Belén, 28, 29, 31, 38, 42, 43, 80n30, 153–187, 195n2, 262 Genre, 1, 2, 4, 13–15, 26–31, 27n11, 39–45, 51, 72–74, 73n23, 77, 78, 81, 117–121, 120n4, 120n5,

269

123, 125, 128, 130–133, 135, 138, 142, 144, 147, 148, 153, 155, 161, 174, 181n45, 187, 194, 197, 199, 199n5, 200, 211, 219–221, 261–264 Golden Age Spain, 29, 160, 195 Góngora, Luis de, 27–29, 42, 153, 157, 157n6, 160, 162–170, 167n21, 168n24, 170n27, 170n28, 171n30, 172, 173, 264 Google, 43, 75, 211, 212, 216–219, 244, 244n19 H Hardt, Michael, 34, 36, 181, 207 Hegemonic discourses, 4, 33, 43, 154, 174, 187 High and low culture, 17, 20, 29n12 Hyperlinking, 8, 42, 69, 85, 91, 99, 100, 102, 155, 212, 215, 219, 230–231n10, 232, 233, 237, 263 Hypertext, 1–46, 51, 62–64, 66, 69, 71–81, 85, 87, 89, 97, 99, 102, 104, 105, 118, 125n11, 127, 139–142, 139n23, 140n24, 154, 228–238, 250, 252, 261, 263 I Immaterial labour, 34, 36 immaterial labour of late capitalism, 33 Informational capitalism, 4, 33, 34, 43–46, 173, 173n33, 193, 194, 205, 209, 210, 213, 220, 221, 240 Informational economy, 34 Instability of reader positionality, 42, 148 Instability of the avatar, 42, 118, 124

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INDEX

Interactive platforms, 38 Interactivity, 9, 14, 136, 139, 140, 155, 173, 181n45, 183, 186, 214, 244 Intertextuality, 166, 171n31, 178, 231n10, 234 J Jigsaw puzzle, 139–141, 139n23, 140n24 Joyce, James, 26–28, 40, 85–95, 87n2, 88n5, 97–99, 101, 113, 261, 264 K Karaoke, 28, 29, 174, 177n36, 179, 186, 262 L Labyrinth labyrinthine structure, 44, 225, 242, 243, 257 Late capitalism, 2, 14, 24–26, 30, 33, 33n15, 34, 36, 38–40, 43, 45, 46, 58, 61–63, 75, 174, 176, 181, 183–187, 183n47, 204, 206, 207, 211, 218, 220, 230, 241, 250–253, 257, 261–263, 265 Latin American cultural studies, 23–25 Links, tracks and signals, 41 Literary allusiveness, 29, 42, 163, 262 Literary excess, 42 Literary experimentation, 1, 3, 4, 14, 26–28, 32, 33, 39, 41, 42, 45, 52, 52n3, 105, 117, 120, 126, 153, 155, 160, 261, 262 Literary precedents, 3, 29, 30, 32, 62, 81, 111, 117, 119, 125, 126, 128, 160, 262

M Mapping, 22, 41, 86, 103, 107–110, 114 Material conditions, 2, 4, 5, 23, 24, 26, 30, 32–39, 45, 61, 177, 182, 220, 249, 263 Mejia, Ulises, 34, 37, 38, 75, 244, 245 Metalepsis, 41, 80, 80n30, 112, 114, 138, 139, 142, 148, 187, 252, 262, 263 Metaphors of the internet, 41, 110 Metatextual, 1, 3, 26–32, 39–41, 43–45, 62, 66, 68, 69, 102, 104, 117, 129, 138, 139, 141, 143, 145, 148, 164–166, 195, 210, 212, 213, 225, 230, 233, 238, 251, 253, 261, 263 Minotaur, 28, 31, 44, 45, 225, 228–233, 228n8, 237–239, 241–243, 249–251, 256 Modernism, 26, 170 N Narrative metalepsis, 41, 42, 112, 118, 134, 138, 139, 142, 148, 234, 262 Navas, Eduardo, 28, 39, 43, 44, 182n46, 193–221, 262, 263 Navigation, 41, 107, 109, 110, 137, 139, 140, 227 Negri, Antonio, 34, 36, 181, 207 Newspaper, 29, 40, 51, 53–55, 54n4, 63, 64, 68–72, 76, 85 Non-linearity, 155, 236 Nota roja, 27, 29, 40, 51, 63, 63n9, 264 O Online social capital, 33, 44, 45, 225–257, 262, 265

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P Pasiphae, 44, 45, 225, 228n8, 232, 232n13, 238–249, 253, 254, 256, 257 Politics of Hypertext, 8 Pre-digital, 1, 26–28, 30, 40, 45, 51, 55, 76, 104, 106, 107, 111, 141, 153, 155, 156, 181, 194, 202n7, 221, 264 Print texts, 10, 11, 28, 52–53, 118, 154, 227 Produsers, 36, 39, 210, 220

Stability of character, 41, 118, 148 Statist capitalism, 43, 200, 205, 207, 210 Storyworld, 31, 66n14, 78, 80, 112, 139, 225, 230, 232–234, 236, 238, 249, 252, 262, 263 Stream of consciousness, 29, 30, 40, 86, 88, 97–110, 113, 261, 263, 264 Suárez-Villa, 34, 35, 174 Suárez-Villa, Luis, 36 Surrealism, 26, 58

R Readers as authors, 6, 12 Reading, 5, 10, 17, 33, 38, 53, 55, 62, 73, 85, 89, 94, 95, 111, 117, 119–121, 125n10, 125n11, 131, 134n20, 139, 143, 146, 158, 162, 163, 183, 186, 203, 207, 209, 212, 216n14, 237, 241, 241n18, 242, 244, 251, 252, 254, 265 Rodríguez, Jaime Alejandro, 28–30, 41, 42, 66n14, 80n30, 117–148, 262

T Tabloid journalism, 63n9 Technocapitalism, 2, 26, 32, 34, 35, 174, 200, 249–257 Technologics, 3, 13, 13n8, 14, 25, 26, 39–46, 263, 265, 266 Technology, 2, 4–6, 8, 8n4, 10–12, 12n6, 14, 16, 31–39, 44–46, 60, 62, 105, 110n13, 153, 154, 156, 174, 187, 194, 198, 202, 205, 206, 213, 217, 219–221, 235, 247 Text, 1–46, 53, 62, 64, 65, 67, 69, 77, 81, 85, 86, 90, 92, 99, 101, 102, 104, 105, 111, 113, 118, 119, 120n5, 124, 134, 138, 139, 141, 146, 147, 153–155, 157–164, 166, 168, 169, 173, 174, 179–181, 182n47, 183, 185, 186, 193, 194, 194n1, 196–205, 197n4, 209, 211–215, 213n12, 219, 220, 230, 232, 232n12, 235, 239, 243, 249, 250, 252, 253 Textual gaps, 30, 88–97 Textuality, 3, 5, 11, 12, 15n9, 27, 181n45 Trademark symbols, 42, 154

S Search engines, 38, 154, 194, 206, 212, 216–221 Shape-shifting, 42, 124–125, 130, 148 Slogans, 42, 68, 154, 173, 178, 178n39, 179, 181, 182, 185 Social media, 4, 36, 39, 44, 45, 185, 186, 194, 202, 203, 205–208, 210, 216n14, 217, 218, 220, 221, 226, 241, 244–250, 253, 255–257, 262 Spectacle, 43, 154, 182, 182–183n47, 187, 245, 253

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INDEX

U Unresolved endings, 30, 40, 85, 88, 96, 97 V Violence individual acts of violence, 42, 121–123, 128, 148, 240 systematic violence, 42, 148 Visualisation, 38, 43, 106, 153, 157, 193, 194, 202, 203, 209, 210,

210n10, 212, 214, 219, 220, 261–263, 265 W Whodunnit, 41, 117–148, 262 Woolf, Virginia, 97 Word clouds, 43, 193–194, 202–205, 202n7, 209–211, 214, 220, 221, 262 Writing systems, 4, 5, 31