Beyond the Idea of Nation: The Political Domicile of Digital Literature in the Interzone

Verónica Paula Gómez

Freie Universität Berlin

veronica.gomez@fu-berlin.de

Beyond the Idea of Nation: The Political Domicile of Digital Literature in the Interzone

Literature and Location: The Redefinition of a Political Domicile of Writing

In my book Domicilios de la literatura digital. De la idea de Nación a la de interzona (Gómez 2024), I begin by studying the way in which literature is rooted in the political idea of the nation during modernity, especially in Europe, while marginalizing other developments and cosmovisions. This initial explanation poses a new question that concerns us today: How is this relationship between literature and location diametrically transformed by the emergence of so-called digital literature?

Being interactive, performative, hybrid, and hypertextual, this “born digital” (not digitized) literature implies not only a migration of supports (print to digital), but also entirely new creations based on the use of networked computers. I will briefly define these literary artifacts as a set of characteristics related to the emergence of new word technologies in the contemporary world. Digital literature presupposes experimentation that can use both programming language and digital media. The experimentation with the language of code refers to a writing that transforms different formats into the same numerical code, allowing the combination of verbal material, images, videos, and sounds. In the vast majority of cases, this brings forth non-linear texts. At the same time, however, experimentation with media refers to the use of web- and platform-based resources to create transmedial, multimedial, or intermedial texts. Due to this literature’s overlaps with the materiality of the letter, it requires a new political domicile. I tried to identify and name this domicile as an interzone (Gómez 2022; 2024).

I investigate the relationship between literature and location as a political domicile of writing (Derrida 1997). With the political domicile of writing, I follow Derrida’s teaching in that the process of domiciliation is not only topological, but also nomological – that is, it affects not only the place (topos) but also the law (nómos). It is thus a “toponomological” function of consignment, understood not only as “the fact of assigning a residence [...] or in a place and on a support, but also here the act of consigning by gathering the signs” (1997, 11, emphasis in original).

This link between literature and location has undergone numerous transformations over time due to important geopolitical aspects. Consequently, disputes, alliances, and conflicts have affected the intellectual field and artistic movements, allowing certain policies on territorialities, technologies, and languages. Thus, the interventions of literature in particular and of the arts in general enable the critical appropriation of the location. This is evident in the case of the novel as a form of national belonging throughout the last centuries in Europe.[1] However, the nation often uses the novel to privilege certain identities while marginalizing others.

I will now engage in a gesture of imitation, akin to a strand of cultural sociology that conceives of the literary object in terms of a stock exchange (Casanova 2001). Here, value is determined by the possession or absence of certain forms of capital. By drawing a parallel to economic science, the relationship between literature and location is expressed through an equation of departure and one of arrival that vary in each of its determinants: territorialities, technologies, and languages.

LITERATURE & LOCATION = TERRITORIALITIES + TECHNOLOGIES + LANGUAGES

We can now go further and study the specific relation between modern literature and the hegemonic idea of nation (Anderson 2006; Balibar 1991; Gellner 2001). The equation is presented as a sovereignty (Portinaro 2003) linked to the legal-rational domination in a certain territory (Weber 2015), a technological form of mass reproduction, the press (Febvre and Martin 1962), and a homogenizing national language (Goldchluck 2013). These determinants allowed the birth, consolidation, and expansion of what we have come to know as national printed literature. This function could be represented as follows:

LITERATURE & IDEA OF NATION = SOVEREIGNTY + PRINT SUPPORT + NATIONAL LANGUAGE

I propose to analyze the process of transformation that is currently taking place in the context of an emerging digital literature (Hayles 2008), which would require to search for another idea in which to inscribe itself. The cyberspace transforms the modern organization of territoriality with digital support. In turn, this support brings forth “born digital” pieces that use the inter/transmedia languages available through the development of new technologies affecting literary phenomena:

DIGITAL LITERATURE                  CYBERSPATIAL                  DIGITAL        INTER/TRANSMEDIA

AND INTERZONE   =          TERRITORIALITIES           +          SUPPORT    +         LANGUAGES

By introducing the term interzone, I question the basis of identity constructions that reproduce national fictions. The interzone is a category that considers the multiple and manifold ways in which technopoetics (Kozak 2015) are consumed on the internet. At the same time, this allows us to imagine the discursive possibility of a new “fiction of truth” (Lewkowicz 2012). As part of the cyberspace, it is a decentralized structure of social relations and forms of production which both functions as and expands human identity. Although its mobile and uncertain nature invokes the immateriality of information, the interzone plays with its embodiment: “Materiality of the artifact can no longer be positioned as a subspecialty within literary studies; it must be central, for without it we have little hope of forging a robust and nuanced account of how literature is changing under the impact of information technologies”[2] (Hayles 2002, 20).

How do literary practices change when the production and consumption on the web are governed by interzonal coordinates that do not respond to the same modern borders? In an interzone, borders are presented as spaces of negotiation and production of meaning, not as an essentialization of identity limits as formerly assumed by the territoriality of national literatures. I will pursue this argument by analyzing two e-lit pieces of work: Writers Are Not Strangers (2018) by Lynda Clark and novelling (2016) by Will Luers, Hazel Smith, and Roger Dean.

The Novel in the Digital Era: Beyond the National Belonging

How do digital technologies redefine the relationship between the novel and the political sphere? We could speculate and say that the use of digital technologies through languages redefines the political domicile of the novel by creating new non-linear fictions in the interzone. The novel has been the paradigmatic form of printed national literature for the last three centuries, and it eventually became the dominant aesthetic form: “It was the novel in which formerly foreign languages met on the same ground to form an unstable mixture of ideas and styles, and to represent peoples who had been different but were now forced to create the basis for a common life.” (Brennan 1990, 73, my translation). Similarly, Benedict Anderson’s concept of an “imagined community” links the novel to the age of print, an age in which homogeneity and solid narratives of History built nations and brought together national languages. I will counter this by arguing that the kind of novel possible in the digital age is (also) related to the conditions of production and consumption of its time: a fluid, turbulent, and rich heterogeneity of languages (natural, artistic, coded) and blurred/uncertain identities.

This brings me to Writers Are Not Strangers, an interactive “novella” that explores the relationship between readers and writers (both players). The idea is to play with a combinatorial text that derives its structure and computational techniques from videogames. This means that the reader/player interacts with the machine in what Espen Aarseth called “ergodic” texts in his pioneer book Cybertext (1997). This “laborious” form of requires the reader/player to interact and experiment with the text. Due to the text’s heterogeneity, this has consequences for the massification of reading and writing strategies in the socio-political sphere. Thus, digital literary texts like this “novella” require a double reading: a “close reading,” as with printed books, and an “interactive reading,” the manipulation of and interaction with the physical object, including ludic and ergodic tasks.

Writers Are Not Strangers, a metacritical story about writing in the digital age of social media and quantification, centers on the character of Alix, a YouTube videographer and short story writer. The reader rates the stories on a scale of 1–10. The more the reader plays the game, the more the story breaks the “fourth wall” by commenting on how it feels to read other people’s rankings and assessments of writing. This metacritical element turns the reader into a judge determining the writer’s work through their ratings.

Figure 1. Screenshot of a random rate in Writers Are Not Strangers by Lynda Clark (2018).

The proposed paths affect the well-being of the main character. In this way, the novella speculates how the act of rating can be used creatively. Thus, both the critical gesture towards this action and the use of the technical imaginary that brings forth the action itself show how this literature’s location defies regulations of national sovereignty in favor of an interzone.

By confronting reader/player with their choices, Writers Are Not Strangers offers not only multiple endings, but also multiple beginnings. If the reader/player plays at different moments, they will be able to choose between a mixture of randomization and adaptation thanks to the creative possibilities of programming languages in text generation that are typical for the new paradigm that dominates the cyberspace.

Figure 2. How readers can choose between options in Writers Are Not Strangers by Lynda Clark (2018).

This shows how programming languages are also a possibility for literature in another way: During modernity, national languages in printed literature were central to spreading the location of literature and its implications for the myth of a homogenous identity. But nowadays digital literature operates beyond national belonging within the fluidity and ubiquity so characteristic of an interzone. This makes Writers Are Not Strangers a kind of novella born from the digital age in cyberspace. It problematizes its materiality and uses the same language that creates an increasingly quantified system, which ultimately subsumes artistic intent.

On the other hand, novelling by Will Luers (video, design, and coding), Hazel Smith (text), and Roger Dean (sound) is a recombinant digital novella that combines text, video, and sound into a collaborative, multi-authored work beyond the authorship as a theoretical category from which the modern novel emerged together with the idea of the nation as the political domicile of writing.

Figure 3. novelling by Will Luers (video, design, and coding), Hazel Smith (text), and Roger Dean (sound) (2016)

It is a generative work that algorithmically orders and spatially arranges fragments of media in six-minute cycles. The interface changes every thirty seconds, but the user can also make it change by clicking on the screen at any time. The project raises questions about the acts of reading and writing fiction and inhabits the liminal space between the two activities that can be considered an interzone.

novelling is inspired by early eighteenth-century experimental novels such as Laurence Sterne’s Tristram Shandy, a traditional reference in the genealogy of digital literature. At the time of its publication, Tristram Shandy sold many copies, but critics did not consider it valuable enough to be included in the literary canon. The use of space and ink on the page, the long silences, and the extravagant punctuation, among other aspects, were not only very ludic but also criticized the hegemonic materiality of print. And yet, it became a classic within the experimental tradition and a reference for novelling. In fact, novelling brings up the history of the novel while questioning its conventions based on plot, character, and words alone. The variable and deterministic system of selection and arrangement produces a fluid, ever new, and potential narrative typical of an interzone that speaks the language of new technologies and raises their possibilities:

Figure 4. Fragments from novelling (2016). A still from a video that shows children swinging on a swing.

To conclude, we can also think that the neologism that is also the title, novelling, refers specifically to the verb of writing a novel in present continuous, which can also be considered a progressive action that doesn’t end as long as readers are involved in its cycles. The reading performance is crucial for for this kind of literature,  similarly to works of the historical avant-gardes.

The Novel as a Form or the Form of a Novel

Due to its close relationship with the idea of the nation in Europe, the novel as an aesthetic form held a hegemonic place in modern literature. In this sense, it was materially supported by the printing press, which is a way of politically “gathering the signs.”. Having expressed this relationship, we can draw a parallel to the digital age. Whereas the novel was traditionally understood as an aesthetic, even hegemonic form imposed upon content, digital literature’s material aspects as related to media languages (sound, kinetic, visual, etc.) not only condition the novel’s very creation but also precede its content. The explicit ways in which Writers Are Not Strangers and novelling work with materiality demonstrate how the critical use of a new medium affects the political belonging of the literary artifact.

Technology once again occupies a central place in the analysis of the political domiciliation of the form that the novel modulates. In case of digital literature, however, it takes the form of the languages of this interzone: combinatory, ergodic, multimodal, transmedia, collective. This new reality should be read in light of the crisis of concepts such as nation, authorship, national language, and linearity. We thus need to rethink the terms we use to talk about these productions and how it affects the political aspects of reading and writing.

Works Cited

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