Bloomsbury Internet Unconscious, The: On the Subject of Electronic Literature (International Texts in Critical Media Aesthetics)

Winner of the N. Katherine Hayles Award for Criticism of Electronic Literature from the Electronic Literature Organization There is electronic literature that consists of works, and the authors and communities and practices around such works. This is not a book about that electronic literature. It is not a book that charts histories or genres of this emerging field, not a book setting out methods of reading and understanding. The Internet Unconscious is a book on the poetics of net writing, or more precisely on the subject of writing the net. By 'writing the net', Sandy Baldwin proposes three ways of analysis: 1) an understanding of the net as a loosely linked collocation of inscriptions, of writing practices and materials ranging from fundamental TCP/IP protocols to CAPTCHA and Facebook; 2) as a discursive field that codifies and organizes these practices and materials into text (and into textual practices of reading, archiving, etc.), and into an aesthetic institution of 'electronic literature'; and 3) as a project engaged by a subject, a commitment of the writers' body to the work of the net. The Internet Unconscious describes the poetics of the net's becoming-literary, by employing concepts that are both technically-specific and poetically-charged, providing a coherent and persuasive theory. The incorporation and projection of sites and technical protocols produces an uncanny displacement of the writer's body onto diverse part objects, and in turn to an intense and real inhabitation of the net through writing. The fundamental poetic situation of net writing is the phenomenology of as-if. Net writing involves construal of the world through the imaginary. Review "Departing from all prior models of academic writing, Sandy Baldwin's The Internet Unconscious is the first book of digital criticism to meet its object on its own terrain. Written on the border of fiction, Baldwin's book enacts the phantasmagoric electronic text of scrambled authorship and algorithmic flirtation whose claim to the label literature is only the repetitive intonation of the impossible status of the literary in the digital age. Underpinned by an encyclopedic purview that stretches across philosophy, engineering, poetics, and fanboy familiarity with the forms and contents of digital production, this book is both unassailably expert and unabashedly experimental. I wish I had written it, though if Baldwin's premises about the ambiguity of electronic authorship are to be taken seriously, perhaps I did." --Aden Evens, Associate Professor of English, Dartmouth College, USA"Sandy Baldwin's compelling book implicitly asks you to read it aloud to capture its rhythm. This poetic and probing analysis rewrites how the computer constantly writes, while at once performing a phenomenological account of how we are constantly tuning into the various demands--and permissions--of the machine and the network. We operate in the imperatives of this milieu of media." --Jussi Parikka, Professor of Technological Culture & Aesthetics, Winchester School of Art, University of Southampton, UK, and author of Digital Contagions"Informative, bold, tender, political and philosophical. ... [Baldwin's] thinking is provocative and challenging. Through short meditations that sometimes explode into poetic prose, he opens fields of inquiry for scholars, writers, and artists." -Will Luers, Washington State University, Canada, Leonardo Interweaving the history of the network with the analysis of gestures such as sending an email, accessing a website or signing in, Baldwin demonstrates how 'we constantly enter into consensual relations with the opacity of a technical infrastructure' (58). ... With a poetic and oralizing expressiveness, and as synthetic as digressive, The Internet Unconscious is a humanist reflection on a post-human subject: digital inscription as a post-writing, and its retro-action on the human." - Materialidades Da Literatura About the