dematerialisation in literature

luka

Well-known member
and what you mean about the internet. the internet is still people. so if youre passionately outraged at such and such not liking your instagram post are you feeling passionately about the internet, or about other people and your status and etc
 

Corpsey

bandz ahoy
I guess SOME people... Feel PASSIONATE about THE INTERNET

Most people I know (and I know most people) feel ambivalent about it.
 

Corpsey

bandz ahoy
and what you mean about the internet. the internet is still people. so if youre passionately outraged at such and such not liking your instagram post are you feeling passionately about the internet, or about other people and your status and etc

Interesting

The passionate feelings are there but they're short-lived. In my case, anyway.
 

luka

Well-known member
you told me you cant sleep any time someone has a pop at you on here! you just lie awake fantasising about some violent revenge! that's quite passionate!
 

IdleRich

IdleRich
Yeah sorry I'm probably not being very clear! Thanks for taking the time to ask for clarification. I think #1 and #2 of your take are right on, though I'm gonna push back on "middlebrow" and say that the critical mentality which equates accessibility with compromised quality is itself a product of modernism, specifically the aristocratic, Mandarin, "pure" aesthetics folks like TS Eliot championed. In that light, and given the theoretical discrediting of formalism (incl. New Criticism, aesthetic autonomy, etc), I don't think we should take modernist taxonomies of taste too seriously.
Yeah that was a bit snidey... for what it's worth I don't agree with Self at all and I rather enjoyed Freedom./
 
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IdleRich

IdleRich
I guess SOME people... Feel PASSIONATE about THE INTERNET
Most people I know (and I know most people) feel ambivalent about it.
I feel ambivalent in that I think some things about it are really good and some are really bad - that doesn't mean I don't feel passionate about it.
 

sus

Well-known member
i don't say that we're no longer interested in other people, just that the bonds are far weaker and shorter lived and the depth and intensity of our relationships has been greatly reduced, hence the kind of affectlessness of Less than Zero etc. it's a situation which is challenging to anyone wishing to write the social novel.

To be fair, Franzen is writing about upper-middle class Boomers living in a suburb of Minnesota. I can still imagine it's accurate and representative to portray gossip over barbeque sessions and white wine + appetizers before the kids' grade school theater recitals. As for us urbanites who dropped outta that way of life...
 

sus

Well-known member
btw I think the Internet showed "dematerialization" for the confused, incoherent, and facile anti- stance it was
 

luka

Well-known member
well we don't quite have a social field in that way any more, at least, not unless we live all our likes in a Kazak village surrounded by deep forest. all our aquantinces are casual, even our own famlies. friendships are fleeting and superficial. romances likewise. we rarely stay in one job for long and even if we do our workmates move on.

"You can’t make tragedies without social instability. The world’s stable now. People are happy; they get what they want, and the never want what they can’t get. They’re well off; they’re sage; they’re never ill; they’re not afraid of death; they’re blissfully ignorant of passion and old age; they’re plagued with no mothers or fathers; they’ve got no wives, or children, or lovers to feel strongly about; they’re so conditioned that they practically can’t help behaving as they ought to behave. And if anything should go wrong, there’s soma. Which you go and chuck out of the window in the name of liberty, Mr. Savage. Liberty!” he laughed. “Expecting Deltas to know what liberty is! And now expecting them to understand Othello!"
 

woops

is not like other people
How far you can remove it from the physical in terms of content? That does seem like an endpoint to me. There's a quote on the back of my copy of the trilogy which refers to it as a "terminal style" -

"In the trilogy, Beckett is creating his own death in prose, quarrying right down to that subterranean country of his heart. . . . What remains is a terminal vision, a terminal style and, from the point of view of possible development, a work at least as aesthetically terminal as Finnegans Wake."

-- A. Alvarez
just bought a book of his essays its going to be alot
 

version

Well-known member
the word and dematerialisation go hand in hand in a sense as the word creates environments, creates emotional, physiological responses etc out of thin air. puts you in that sweltering hotel room, venetian blinds drawn and ceiling fan churning the air.

I'm still working my way through that eight hour or so interview with Deleuze and in 'I for Idea' he says writers create percepts, webs of sensation, and that the hope is that these webs gain independence and outlive those who experience them.



If you run with this then maybe the obstacle of the internet is its limit on sensation, or at least the traditional sensations. Perhaps new ones are being born, but we're currently stuck with the same sensory organs and there isn't much room for sight, smell, taste, touch and hearing when sat at a computer or scrolling through a phone. The screen flattens and shrinks and there's only so much you can say about sitting around, tapping keys, in front of one.

It's also something a lot of people are experiencing more or less every day, so there's a dullness and uniformity to it. Everyone has their perception of things, but there isn't too drastic a range of sensory experience when scrolling through Twitter or Instagram.
 

version

Well-known member
I dunno whether I'll end up reading it, but Dennis Cooper's The Sluts sounds like an intriguing attempt to incorporate the internet into a novel.

"Set largely on the pages of a website where gay male escorts are reviewed by their clients, and told through the postings, emails, and conversations of several dozen unreliable narrators, The Sluts chronicles the evolution of one young escort's date with a satisfied client into a metafiction of pornography, lies, half-truths, and myth."
 

IdleRich

IdleRich
I dunno whether I'll end up reading it, but Dennis Cooper's The Sluts sounds like an intriguing attempt to incorporate the internet into a novel.

"Set largely on the pages of a website where gay male escorts are reviewed by their clients, and told through the postings, emails, and conversations of several dozen of unreliable narrators, The Sluts chronicles the evolution of one young escort's date with a satisfied client into a metafiction of pornography, lies, half-truths, and myth."

This sounds like the "obvious" way to approach writing an internet novel - that's not at all to say that it would be easy to do well, or even at all - after all there is a big difference between identifying the form a solution will take and saying what it actually is. But doing something like applying the techniques of Pale Fire across multiple narrators in (sort of) different media looks like the way to go - although, if I'm right in saying it adapts the technique used in Pale Fire then how modern can it be? I guess it depends how far it adapts them really.

A bigger here is, we're asking for books that adequately capture the experience of the internet age, and this appears to be a book about the internet. Or actually I'm probably being too harsh there, in fairness it looks as though it's a book that attempts to capture the experience of the internet by writing about the internet, or setting the whole thing on the net. Which is cool as far as it goes, but isn't the whole point of an "internet age" that all of life feels like the internet - I mean, of course a novel made out of emails feels like being on the internet, surely the ultimate aim here is to write a novel based in "normal life"' ie in which people do stuff outside the internet - maybe they go on it too - and yet the book somehow reads in such a way that the reader feels that it is like being on the internet. I dunno how that would be done though, maybe needs a new, as yet uninvented, technique which is why I can't see how to do it. Or are we just back to Burroughs...?
 

version

Well-known member
Some people's "normal life" involves a lot of being on the internet, and it sounds like the Cooper's aiming for something specific rather than simply being The Great Internet Novel.

Also, an issue we run into when looking to simulate the internet via the novel is some of the core problems thrown up by it were already present, it's just turbocharged them. People were worrying about too much information and how to discern truth long before we got online.
 
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