Skip to main content

Spoiler Alert: Notes

Spoiler Alert

Notes

Notes

Introduction: Spoilers Ahead

  1. Douglas G. Kenney, “Spoilers!,” National Lampoon, April 1971, 35. The difference between common knowledge and what’s readily knowable is worthy of emphasizing. In an age of total information, paper notation/citation itself may function as a spoiler alert, even as citations supplement what’s readily knowable with a paper trail of bibliographic facts.

    Return to note reference.

  2. Ernest Hemingway, The Snows of Kilimanjaro (New York: Scribner, 1995), 3.

    Return to note reference.

  3. Rivka Galchen, Little Labors (New York: New Directions, 2016), 34.

    Return to note reference.

  4. Jason Cohen, “Yes, Game to Thrones’ Final Season Will Kill Multiple Characters,” Comic Book Resources, March 13, 2018, https://www.cbr.com/game-of-thrones-season-8-who-dies.

    Return to note reference.

  5. Cleve R. Wootson, “There’s a Small Chance an Asteroid Will Smack into Earth in 2135,” Washington Post, March 19, 2018, https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/speaking-of-science/wp/2018/03/19/theres-a-small-chance-an-asteroid-will-smack-into-earth-in-2135-nasa-is-working-on-a-plan/?utm_term=.d84b264b80c8.

    Return to note reference.

  6. The Epic of Gilgamesh, https://www.cs.utexas.edu/users/vl/notes/gilgamesh.html.

    Return to note reference.

  7. John Maynard Keynes, The Collected Writings (Cambridge: Macmillan/St. Martin’s, 1971), 4:65.

    Return to note reference.

  8. Vladimir Nabokov, Pale Fire (New York: Vintage, 1989), 59. Cf. the baseline operational stability test for automatization-authentication in Denis Villeneuve, Blade Runner 2049 (Columbia, 2017).

    Return to note reference.

  9. Joan Hawkins, Cutting Edge: Art-Horror and the Horrific Avant-Garde (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2000), 77; see Seth Friedman, “Misdirection in Fits and Starts: Alfred Hitchcock’s Popular Reputation and the Reception of His Films,” Quarterly Review of Film and Video 29, no. 1 (2012): 91–93. Cf. Kenney, “The Movie’s Multiple Murders Are Committed by Anthony Perkins Disguised as His Long Dead Mother,” “Spoilers!,” 33.

    Return to note reference.

  10. Chris Richards, “Our Access to Music Is Unprecedented,” Washington Post, March 9, 2018, https://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/style/our-access-to-music-is-unprecedented-why-does-it-stress-us-out-so-much/2018/03/07/a00686e6-174a-11e8-b681-2d4d462a1921_story.html.

    Return to note reference.

  11. Kenney, “Spoilers!,” 33.

    Return to note reference.

  12. Flannery O’Connor, “The Life You Save May Be Your Own,” in Collected Works (New York: Library of America, 1988), 183.

    Return to note reference.

  13. Here I’m thinking of Matthijs van Boxsel, The Encyclopedia of Stupidity (London: Reaktion, 2005).

    Return to note reference.

  14. Kenney, “Spoilers!,” 35.

    Return to note reference.

  15. Richard Matheson, “Button, Button,” in The Best of Richard Matheson, 129–37 (New York: Penguin, 2017).

    Return to note reference.

  16. For a discussion of this trope, see Eric Hayot, The Hypothetical Mandarin (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009).

    Return to note reference.

  17. Richard Dawkins, The Selfish Gene (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1976), 192: “We need a name for the new replicator, a noun which conveys the idea of a unit of cultural transmission, or a unit of imitation. ‘Mimeme’ comes from a suitable Greek root, but I want a monosyllable that sounds a bit like ‘gene.’ I hope my classicist friends will forgive me if I abbreviate mimeme to meme. . . . It should be pronounced to rhyme with ‘cream.’”

    Return to note reference.

  18. Vilém Flusser, Into the Universe of Technical Images (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2011).

    Return to note reference.

  19. See Susan Blackstone, The Meme Machine (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), 19.

    Return to note reference.

  20. Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer, Dialectic of Enlightenment (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2002).

    Return to note reference.

  21. Ursula K. Le Guin, “The Wife’s Story,” in The Compass Rose, 327–34 (New York: Perennial, 2005).

    Return to note reference.

  22. Edward Said, introduction to Erich Auerbach, Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2003), xiii.

    Return to note reference.

  23. Auerbach, Mimesis, 7.

    Return to note reference.

  24. Auerbach, 23.

    Return to note reference.

  25. Auerbach, 482–83.

    Return to note reference.

  26. Auerbach, 552.

    Return to note reference.

  27. Auerbach, 530.

    Return to note reference.

  28. E. Beverly et al., “Students’ Perceptions of Trigger Warnings in Medical Education,” Teach Learn Med 30, no. 1: 5–14.

    Return to note reference.

  29. https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Extension:Spoilers.

    Return to note reference.

  30. See, e.g., Jordan Boyd-Graber, “Spoiler Alert: Machine Learning Approaches to Detect Social Media Posts with Revelatory Information,” https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/pdf/10.1002/meet.14505001073.

    Return to note reference.

  31. And where else would this sort of missive be published besides the Chronicle of Higher Education? See Amy Hungerford, “On Refusing to Read,” Chronicle Review, September 11, 2016, https://www.chronicle.com/article/On-Refusing-to-Read/237717.

    Return to note reference.

  32. E.g., Annesha De, “Who’ll Be the Winner: Human Intelligence vs. Artificial Intelligence,” Fossbytes, November 10, 2015, https://fossbytes.com/co-evolution-human-intelligence-artificial-intelligence; https://www.privacytech.fr/.

    Return to note reference.

  33. The image comes from the illustrator Andrea Danti’s portfolio on Shutterstock.

    Return to note reference.

  34. Robert Hertz, Death and the Right Hand (Oxford: Routledge, 2004).

    Return to note reference.

  35. Harlan Ellison, “Demon with a Glass Hand,” The Outer Limits, dir. Byron Haskin, first aired October 17, 1964.

    Return to note reference.

  36. Ellison.

    Return to note reference.

  37. Flusser, Shape of Things (London: Reaktion, 1999), 52.

    Return to note reference.

  38. Flusser, “Transformance,” http://muellerpohle.net/texts/project-texts/transformance/.

    Return to note reference.

  39. Flusser, Into the Universe of Technical Images, 23.

    Return to note reference.

  40. Ellison, “Demon with a Glass Hand.”

    Return to note reference.

  41. Flusser, Into the Universe of Technical Images, 3.

    Return to note reference.

  42. Thomas Pynchon, Gravity’s Rainbow (New York: Penguin, 1997), 237.

    Return to note reference.

  43. Ellison, Memos from Purgatory (New York: Open Road, 2014).

    Return to note reference.

  44. Ellison.

    Return to note reference.

  45. https://groups.google.com/forum/#!msg/net.movies/c09z1_ob-M/hTh1SpYoSa4J.

    Return to note reference.

  46. See https://fanlore.org/wiki/Trigger. There is a substantial, somewhat alarmist body of academic, quasi-academic, and journalistic materials—including readily available bibliographies—about the sociological and psychological basis of triggers, especially their role in the classroom. In this material, one quickly multiplies examples of conceptual convergence and analogies with spoilers/spoiler alerts. See, e.g., http://slideplayer.com/slide/10161940/.

    Return to note reference.

  47. https://www.newscientist.com/article/dn23732-mindscapes-transported-by-seizures-to-a-land-of-bliss/.

    Return to note reference.

  48. https://books.google.com/books?id=SAfJEptUvMUC&pg=RA1-PT414.

    Return to note reference.

  49. https://fanlore.org/wiki/Trigger.

    Return to note reference.

There Is Yet Insufficient Data for a Meaningful Answer: Inhumanism at the Literary Limit

  1. Vilém Flusser, Vampyroteuthis Infernalis: A Treatise, with a Report by the Institut Scientifique de Recherche Paranaturaliste (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2012), 67.

    Return to note reference.

  2. Flusser understands the problem as one of art or artifice, but because it concerns form, inscription, and scale, I think the literary may be a more apt way to think about it. See also Mark McGurl, “The Posthuman Comedy,” Critical Inquiry 38, no. 3 (2012): 533–53.

    Return to note reference.

  3. Flusser, The Shape of Things: A Philosophy of Design (London: Reaktion, 1999), 86.

    Return to note reference.

  4. Flusser, 87.

    Return to note reference.

  5. Flusser, Vampyroteuthis Infernalis, 66–67; Flusser, Shape of Things, 88.

    Return to note reference.

  6. See Lisa Gitelman, “Raw Data” Is an Oxymoron (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2013).

    Return to note reference.

  7. Rather than nature/culture, the problem of big data concerns singular/plural. Tellingly, data is seldom encountered in singular form. There’s so much of it. To revisit a critical commonplace, the singular datum means given in Latin in the sense of an input available for (further) processing. An Input-Output-Input model: freely it has been given to you, freely give. Date has a similar root, as Daniel Rosenberg reminds us, and metadata comes semantically overburdened. See Daniel Rosenberg, “Data before the Fact,” in Gitelman,“Raw Data” Is an Oxymoron, 15–40.

    Return to note reference.

  8. Claude Lévi-Strauss, The Raw and the Cooked (London: Pimlico, 1994). See Gitelman,“Raw Data” Is an Oxymoron, 2: “Raw data is both an oxymoron and a bad idea. On the contrary, data should be cooked with care”—the TED-like assertion by Geoffrey C. Bowker serves Gitelman’s collection more as a motto than a thesis. See esp. his afterword, 167–72.

    Return to note reference.

  9. Claude Levi-Strauss, The Raw and the Cooked (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1983), 1, 64.

    Return to note reference.

  10. See, e.g., Claude Levi-Strauss, From Honey to Ashes (New York: HarperCollins, 1973).

    Return to note reference.

  11. Michel Serres, The Parasite (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2007), 4.

    Return to note reference.

  12. See Dean Lockwood and Rob Coley, Cloud Time (London: Zero, 2012). Instead of reserving for raw something the illusion of uninterrupted, authentic experience, the agency of “fossil data” resembles the heap and its noises—the clamor of being.

    Return to note reference.

  13. Flusser, Shape of Things, 86.

    Return to note reference.

  14. Quentin Meillassoux, After Finitude (London: Continuum, 2008).

    Return to note reference.

  15. “Vilém Flusser: A Brief Introduction to His Media Philosophy,” https://monoskop.org/images/4/4b/Flussers_View_on_Art_MECAD_Online_Seminar.pdf. See also Siegfried Zielinski, Deep Time of the Media: Toward an Archaeology of Hearing and Seeing by Technical Means (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2008).

    Return to note reference.

  16. G. K. Chesterton, The Man Who Was Thursday (New York: Penguin, 2011), 40.

    Return to note reference.

  17. H. G. Wells, The Time Machine (New York: W. W. Norton, 2008).

    Return to note reference.

  18. H. G. Wells, Experiment in Autobiography (Boston: Little, Brown, 1962).

    Return to note reference.

  19. Justin Clemens and Dominic Pettman, Avoiding the Subject: Media, Culture, and the Object (Amsterdam: University of Amsterdam, 2004), 33.

    Return to note reference.

  20. H. G. Wells, The Sleeper Awakes (New York: Penguin, 2005).

    Return to note reference.

  21. Giorgio Agamben, Idea of Prose (Albany: SUNY University Press, 1995), 88.

    Return to note reference.

  22. Franco Moretti, Graphs, Maps, and Trees (London: Verso, 2005), 14.

    Return to note reference.

  23. Moretti.

    Return to note reference.

  24. Moretti, 17.

    Return to note reference.

  25. Agamben, Idea of Prose, 87.

    Return to note reference.

  26. The classic study of this concept is Karl Mannheim, “The Problem of Generations,” in Essays on the Sociology of Knowledge by Karl Mannheim, ed. P. Kecskemeti, 276–320 (New York: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1952).

    Return to note reference.

  27. Isaac Asimov, “The Last Question,” in The Complete Stories, vol. 1, 290–300 (New York: Broadway, 1990).

    Return to note reference.

  28. Jean-François Lyotard, The Inhuman: Reflections on Time (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1992), 8–9.

    Return to note reference.

  29. J. G. Ballard, Millennium People (New York: W. W. Norton, 2011), 4.

    Return to note reference.

  30. J. G. Ballard, introduction to Crash (New York: Picador 2001), 4.

    Return to note reference.

  31. See Samuel Francis, The Psychological Fictions of J. G. Ballard (London: Bloombury, 2011), 65–66.

    Return to note reference.

  32. Ballard, introduction to Crash.

    Return to note reference.

  33. Ballard, “The Message from Mars,” in The Complete Stories of J. G. Ballard, 1175–83 (New York: W. W. Norton, 2009).

    Return to note reference.

  34. Ballard, 1178.

    Return to note reference.

  35. Ballard, introduction to Crash, 5.

    Return to note reference.

  36. Ballard, “Message from Mars,” 1182–83.

    Return to note reference.

  37. Ballard, introduction to Crash, 5–6.

    Return to note reference.

  38. Wells, The Time Traveler (New York: Penguin, 2005), 98.

    Return to note reference.

  39. See Attila Torkos, Timeline for Robots and Foundation Universe, https://www.sikander.org/foundation.php.

    Return to note reference.

  40. Isaac Asimov, “The Last Question,” Science Fiction Quarterly, November 1956.

    Return to note reference.

  41. http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2008/07/we-knew-web-was-big.html.

    Return to note reference.

  42. Andrew Clark, “How Jerry’s Guide to the World Wide Web Became Yahoo,” Guardian, February 1, http://www.guardian.co.uk/business/2008/feb/01/microsoft.technology.

    Return to note reference.

  43. http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=what+are+you.

    Return to note reference.

  44. In 2009, this was the answer. As of 2019, it’s this: “Fundamentally, it is the vast collection of quantities and facts that I provide, compare, and calculate for my users.” http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=What+is+computational+knowledge.

    Return to note reference.

  45. http://www.wolframalpha.com/about.html.

    Return to note reference.

  46. http://www.wolframalpha.com/about.html.

    Return to note reference.

  47. http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=How+can+the+net+amount+of+entropy+of+the+universe+be+massively+decreased%3F.

    Return to note reference.

  48. http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=What+is+the+Answer+to+the+Ultimate+Question+of+Life%2C+the+Universe%2C+and+Everything%3F+.

    Return to note reference.

  49. http://www.wolframalpha.com/about.html.

    Return to note reference.

  50. http://www.wolframalpha.com/about.html.

    Return to note reference.

  51. Bruno Latour, Pandora’s Hope (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1999), 304.

    Return to note reference.

  52. Bruno Latour, Science in Action (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1988), 3.

    Return to note reference.

  53. Arthur C. Clarke, “The Nine Billion Names of God,” in The Other Side of the Sky, 3–14 (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1958).

    Return to note reference.

Pop Culture Today; or, Plasticman, Where Are You?

  1. For a selection, see Adolf Hitler, Norman Cameron, R. H. Stevens, and H. R. Trevor-Roper, Hitler’s Table Talk, 1941–1944: His Private Conversations (New York: Enigma Books, 2000). For confirmation that Hitler was a fan of King Kong, see Ernst Hanfstaengl, Hitler: The Missing Years (1957; repr., New York: Arcade, 1994), 221, as well as Volker Koop, Warum Hitler King Kong liebte, aber den Deutschen Mickey Maus verbot (Berlin: be.bra, 2015).

    Return to note reference.

  2. Leaving aside the complicated issue of possible toxic subtexts in Metropolis and their etiology (including the error of calling the director a fascist for representing a [quasi-]fascist dystopia in his film), Lang exited Nazi Germany on July 31, 1933, claiming later that his departure was motivated by an uncomfortable meeting with Reich minister of propaganda Joseph Goebbels, in which Goebbels, Lang claimed, expressed his admiration for his films and tried to draft him to the cause of chief Nazi film propagandist. See Gösta Werner, “Fritz Lang and Goebbels: Myth and Facts,” Film Quarterly 43, no. 3 (1990): 24–27. It is also worth mentioning that Lang’s mother was Jewish. For a discussion of the anecdote, see Tom Gunning, The Films of Fritz Lang: Allegories of Vision and Modernity (London: British Film Institute, 2000), 8–11.

    Return to note reference.

  3. Kracauer cites Hitler’s interest in Metropolis specifically—gleaned from another interview with Lang—but the thrust of his argument concerns the role of Weimar cinema in preparing the ground for Nazism, by externalizing “deep psychological dispositions” toward obedience to authoritarian domination through “subterranean content that, like contraband [crosses] the borders of consciousness without being questioned.” Siegfried Kracauer, From Caligari to Hitler: A Psychological History of the German Film (1947; repr., Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2004), 163–64.

    Return to note reference.

  4. Leslie Fiedler, The Devil Gets His Due: The Uncollected Essays of Leslie Fiedler (Berkeley: Counterpoint, 2008), 22.

    Return to note reference.

  5. Qtd. in Stefan Müller-Doohm, Adorno: A Biography (Cambridge: Polity, 2005), 182.

    Return to note reference.

  6. Jacques Rancière, “Why Emma Bovary Had to Be Killed,” Critical Inquiry 34, no. 2 (2008): 233–48.

    Return to note reference.

  7. Dominic Pettman, Infinite Distraction (Cambridge: Polity, 2016), 29.

    Return to note reference.

  8. Jacques Rancière, The Politics of Aesthetics (New York: Bloomsbury, 2013), 52, 30.

    Return to note reference.

  9. Pynchon, Gravity’s Rainbow, 179.

    Return to note reference.

  10. Andy Warhol, I’ll Be Your Mirror: The Selected Andy Warhol Interviews, ed. Kenneth Goldsmith (New York: Carroll and Graf, 2004), 18.

    Return to note reference.

  11. Robert Venturi, Steven Izenour, and Denise Scott Brown, Learning from Las Vegas (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1972).

    Return to note reference.

  12. Rancière, Politics of Aesthetics, 37.

    Return to note reference.

  13. Rancière, 54.

    Return to note reference.

  14. Pynchon, Gravity’s Rainbow, 206.

    Return to note reference.

  15. Rancière, Politics of Aesthetics, 54. See Janice Radway, Reading the Romance: Women, Patriarchy, and Popular Literature (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1984). On the relation between Bovary’s reading habits and popular reading practices around popular romance novels, see Dorothee Birke, Writing the Reader: Configurations of a Cultural Practice in the English Novel (Berlin: DeGruyter, 2016).

    Return to note reference.

  16. Rancière, Politics of Aesthetics, 51.

    Return to note reference.

  17. Rancière, 54.

    Return to note reference.

  18. Rancière, “Why,” 240.

    Return to note reference.

  19. Arthur Danto, “The Artworld,” Journal of Philosophy 61, no. 19 (1964), 5710584.

    Return to note reference.

  20. Danto.

    Return to note reference.

  21. Pynchon, Gravity’s Rainbow, 368.

    Return to note reference.

  22. Pynchon, “Is It Okay to Be a Luddite?,” New York Times, October 28, 1984, http://www.nytimes.com/books/97/05/18/reviews/pynchon-luddite.html. Referencing a slogan of the 1960s counterculture (“King Kong Died for Our Sins”), Pynchon describes “Kong” as the “classic Luddite saint,” the only “countercritter Bad and Big enough” to counteract “what would happen in a nuclear war.” The implication is that even Kong as the anxious and “irresponsible” apotheosis of “our” toxified pop cultural coprophelia can’t expiate “us” from the death cult of the military–industrial war machine.

    Return to note reference.

  23. Martin Bak Jørgensen, “The Precariat Strikes Back: Precarity Struggles in Practice,” in Politics of Precarity: Migrant Conditions, Struggles and Experiences, ed. Carl-Ulrik Schierup and Martin Bak Jørgensen (Amsterdam: Brill, 2016), 55.

    Return to note reference.

  24. Pynchon, “Is It Okay to Be a Luddite?”

    Return to note reference.

  25. Philip Armstrong, “Precarity/Abandonment,” in Nancy and the Political, ed. Sanja Dejanovic, 245–71 (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2015).

    Return to note reference.

  26. Vilém Flusser, Writings (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2002), 44.

    Return to note reference.

  27. Rita Felski, The Limits of Critique (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2015), 55.

    Return to note reference.

  28. Alexander Galloway, The Interface Effect (Malden, Mass.: Polity, 2012), 52.

    Return to note reference.

  29. Stuart Hall, “Notes on Deconstructing the Popular,” in Cultural Theory and Popular Culture: A Reader, ed. John Storey (London: Pearson, 1998), 442.

    Return to note reference.

  30. Oxford English Dictionary, s.v. “popular.”

    Return to note reference.

  31. Meaghan Morris, “Banality in Cultural Studies,” in Logics of Television: Essays in Cultural Criticism, ed. Patricia Mellencamp (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1990), 22.

    Return to note reference.

  32. Oxford English Dictionary.

    Return to note reference.

  33. Hall, “Notes on Deconstructing the Popular,” 442.

    Return to note reference.

  34. Hall, 443.

    Return to note reference.

  35. Morris, “Banality in Cultural Studies,” 30.

    Return to note reference.

  36. Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness (New York: Dover, 1990), 34.

    Return to note reference.

  37. Pynchon, Gravity’s Rainbow, 206.

    Return to note reference.

  38. Pynchon, 703.

    Return to note reference.

  39. Dennis Hall, “Signs of Life in the Eighteenth Century: Dr. Johnson and the Invention of Popular Culture,” Kentucky Philological Review 19 (2005): 14–15. Incidentally, Hall sees Donald Duck, not King Kong, as the pop culture egregore par excellence of the twentieth century.

    Return to note reference.

  40. Compare Morris, “Banality in Cultural Studies,” 40.

    Return to note reference.

  41. For a paradigmatic example, see Radway, Reading the Romance, 221.

    Return to note reference.

  42. Brantlinger and Naremore, Modernity as Mass Culture (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1991), 8–13.

    Return to note reference.

  43. Brantlinger and Naremore.

    Return to note reference.

  44. Brantlinger and Naremore, 8.

    Return to note reference.

  45. Gilbert Seldes, The 7 Lively Arts (New York: Dover, 2001).

    Return to note reference.

  46. See esp. Steven Connor, “Cultural Phenomenology, CP: or, A Few Don’ts by a Cultural Phenomenologist,” parallax 5, no. 2 (1999): 17–31.

    Return to note reference.

  47. This list borrows from the taxonomy proposed by Joshua Glenn and Rob Walker, http://significantobjects.com/. See also Aaron Jaffe, The Way Things Go (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2014).

    Return to note reference.

  48. Dwight MacDonald, “Masscult and Midcult,” in Against the American Grain: Essays on the Effects of Mass Culture, 3–75 (New York: Random House, 1962).

    Return to note reference.

  49. MacDonald, 65.

    Return to note reference.

  50. MacDonald, 54.

    Return to note reference.

  51. MacDonald, 37.

    Return to note reference.

  52. MacDonald, 54.

    Return to note reference.

  53. “Siskel and Ebert Defend Star Wars,” https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ky9-eIlHzAE.

    Return to note reference.

  54. George Yúdice, The Expediency of Culture: Uses of Culture in the Global Era (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2003). My reading of Yúdice is influenced by Francis Mulhern, Culture/Metaculture (New York: Routledge, 2000), and Peter Osborne, “‘Whoever Speaks of Culture Speaks of Administration as Well’: Disputing Pragmatism in Cultural Studies,” Cultural Studies 20, no. 1 (2006): 33–47.

    Return to note reference.

  55. Pynchon, Gravity’s Rainbow, 314.

    Return to note reference.

Imipolex S/Z

  1. Friedrich Kittler, “Pynchon and Electro-Mysticism,” Pynchon Notes 54–55 (2008): 108–21.

    Return to note reference.

  2. Roland Barthes, S/Z (New York: Hill and Wang, 1974), 23.

    Return to note reference.

  3. Barthes.

    Return to note reference.

  4. Barthes, 5.

    Return to note reference.

  5. Boris Groys, Under Suspicion (New York: Columbia University Press, 2012), 28: “The currency in which today’s author is being paid is no longer the readers’ agreement but their lack of rejection. Today’s reader accepts a text not by agreeing with it but only by not considering it personally offensive. The discourse of the flowing sense neutralizes every possible rejection by leaving a space for the other, as the saying goes—or, to put it differently, by not annoying potential readers unnecessarily.”

    Return to note reference.

  6. Groys, 30.

    Return to note reference.

  7. Groys, 28.

    Return to note reference.

  8. Pynchon, “Togetherness,” Aerospace Safety 16, no. 12 (1960): 6–8, http://www.pynchon.pomona.edu/uncollected/together.html.

    Return to note reference.

  9. Pynchon, Gravity’s Rainbow, 751.

    Return to note reference.

  10. Pynchon.

    Return to note reference.

  11. Flusser, Towards a Philosophy of Photography (London: Reaktion, 2000), 39.

    Return to note reference.

  12. Michel Foucault, Society Must Be Defended (New York: Picador, 2003), 241.

    Return to note reference.

  13. Vilém Flusser, Post-History (Minneapolis: Univocal/University of Minnesota Press, 2013), 20.

    Return to note reference.

  14. Flusser, 71.

    Return to note reference.

  15. Flusser, 57–59.

    Return to note reference.

  16. Timothy Morton, The Ecological Thought (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2012).

    Return to note reference.

  17. Flusser, Post-History, 47.

    Return to note reference.

  18. Bradley Babendir, “Peter Thiel’s Unfortunate World: On “The Know-It-Alls” by Noam Cohen,” Los Angeles Review of Books, February 11, 2018, https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/peter-thiels-unfortunate-world-on-the-know-it-alls-by-noam-cohen.

    Return to note reference.

  19. Flusser, Post-History, 61.

    Return to note reference.

  20. Pynchon, Gravity’s Rainbow, 436.

    Return to note reference.

  21. Flusser, Post-History, 54.

    Return to note reference.

  22. Foucault, Society Must Be Defended, 140.

    Return to note reference.

  23. Flusser, Post-History, 65.

    Return to note reference.

  24. Flusser, 21.

    Return to note reference.

  25. Flusser, 20.

    Return to note reference.

Conclusion: Updating as Modernity; or, Impermanent Test Dept.

  1. Siegfried Zielinski, [. . . After the Media] (Minneapolis: Univocal/University of Minnesota Press, 2013).

    Return to note reference.

  2. Walter Benjamin, “The Author as Producer,” in The Essential Frankfurt School Reader, 254–69 (New York: Continuum, 1988).

    Return to note reference.

  3. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Letterpress_printing.

    Return to note reference.

  4. http://univocalpublishing.com/.

    Return to note reference.

  5. Ian Hickman, Oscilloscopes (Oxford: Newnes, 2000), 1.

    Return to note reference.

  6. Encyclopædia Britannica (London: 1910), 20:347.

    Return to note reference.

  7. Jon Peddie, The History of Visual Magic in Computers (London: Springer, 2013), 292. See Friedrich Kittler, Optical Media (London: Polity, 2009), 191–92.

    Return to note reference.

  8. https://appliedvirtualitylab.files.wordpress.com/2015/10/ernst_experimenting-with-media-temporality.pdf.

    Return to note reference.

  9. Panel discussion, transmediale.12 “In/compatible” symposium, February 5, 2012, Haus der Kulturen der Welt, Berlin.

    Return to note reference.

  10. https://youtu.be/zCBIKXFrfNA?t=2m34s.

    Return to note reference.

  11. Gill Partington, “Friedrich Adolf Kittler, 1943–2011,” Radical Philosophy 172 (March/April 2012), https://www.radicalphilosophy.com/obituary/friedrich-adolf-kittler-1943-2011. See also https://propagandum.wordpress.com/2012/05/10/gramophone-film-typewriter-by-friedrich-kittler-%EF%BB%BFbook-review.

    Return to note reference.

  12. Mona Simpson, “A Sister’s Eulogy for Steve Jobs,” New York Times, October 30, 2011, http://www.nytimes.com/2011/10/30/opinion/mona-simpsons-eulogy-for-steve-jobs.html.

    Return to note reference.

  13. Zielinski, [. . . After the Media], 76.

    Return to note reference.

Next Chapter
About the Author
PreviousNext
Portions of this book were published in “There Is as Yet Insufficient Data for a Meaningful Answer: Information at the Literary Limit,” The Year’s Work in the Oddball Archive, ed. Jonathan Eburne and Judith Roof (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2016); “Pop Culture,” The Bloomsbury Handbook of Literary and Cultural Theory, ed. Jeffrey R. Di Leo (London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2018); and “Updating as Modernity; or, Impermanent Test Dept.,” Thresholds, http://openthresholds.org/.

Copyright 2019 by Aaron Jaffe
Powered by Manifold Scholarship. Learn more at manifoldapp.org