Literature Machines: The Language of Technology and Difference

Abstract

Literature Machines investigates what it means to think about texts as literature machines, aiming in the process to re-think both what a machine does and what constitutes literature. But its central concept, the literature machine, does not imply that literature can be swiftly searched or broken down into algorithms. Rather, it suggests that literature should be understood as a machine that produces difference, revising our understanding of the machine and, more broadly, the language of technology. The essay theorizes the literature machine and its various dimensions — the way it produces meaning, its relation to affect, its potential politics, and what it reveals about the border between literature and philosophy — through readings of Maurice Blanchot, Marguerite Duras, Georges Perec, and Friedrich Nietzsche. Throughout, it engages with the thought of Jacques Derrida and other thinkers often associated with poststructuralism. Ultimately, Literature Machines makes the case for difference as the sine qua non of the literary, which it in turn theorizes as an epistemic quality that emerges in an event of reading. Through its own readings, the essay shows what we can understand about affect, subjectivity, and the essence of literature and technology when we approach texts as literature machines. In so doing, it also elucidates what we stand to lose when we forsake the difference-producing machine for the homogenizing machine, exceptions for patterns, and complexity for simplicity. To that end, it is also a critique of the epistemic norms of surveillance capitalism and emergent forms of reading in literary scholarship, most notably computational literary study.