What presence should not convey: post-hermeneutic practices in Networked Media

Abstract

By tackling networked text, both literary (electronic literature) and para-literary (text produced in social media and other online platforms), the paper seeks to broaden the understanding of current cultural and literary phenomena as they emerge in digital media. Can the logic of phatic communication be indicative of a fundamental shift, one wherein abstraction/meaning is replaced by a renewed interest in materiality/sensation/presence? Or does communication via social media announce the demise of both meaning and presence? One of the main objectives of my doctoral research was to approximate Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht’s aesthetics of presence to the recent phenomenon of electronic literature (digital-born literary objects spanning from hypertexts of the 1980s to contemporary interactive immersive textual installations). I argued that because works of electronic literature tend to reflect on the medium of their inscription, often celebrating technique over legibility and interactivity over interpretation, they are amenable to the logic of presence —- here understood as the “other” of meaning. Through close readings of electronic textual objects (generative text, interactive installations, virtual reality poems, etc.), I described how breaks in signification could be seen as symptomatic of a non-hermeneutic/postmetaphysical trend in digital aesthetics. The current paper revisits the problematic relationship between electronic literature and the non-hermeneutic field and extends the logic of presence to nonliterary networked texts, such as the automated autobiographies in Facebook’s Timeline and the micro-narratives in Twitter. I contend that, to a large extent, communication through social media operates through a distorted logic of presence, where “being in sync,” to use Gumbrecht’s expression, becomes equated with the pressing of the “like” button, the ubiquitous empty gesture of our time.