Tactics of the Human
Experimental Technics in American Fiction
Laura Shackelford
Publisher: University of Michigan Press
Imprint: University of Michigan Press
Published: 01/2015
Pages: 274
Subject: Literary Criticism - American/General, Social Science - Media Studies
Print ISBN: 9780472052387
eBook ISBN: 9780472900169
DESCRIPTION
Tactics of the Human returns to American fiction published during
the 1990s, formative years for digital cultures, to reconsider
these narratives� comparative literary print methods of critically
engaging with digital technologies and their now ubiquitous
computation-based modes of circulation, scenes of writing, and
social spaces. It finds that fiction by John Barth, Shelley
Jackson, Leslie Marmon Silko, Ruth L. Ozeki, and Jeffrey Eugenides,
by creatively transposing digital writing, material formats, and
spatiotemporal orientations into print, registers shifting
relations to technologies at multiple sites and scales. Grappling
with the digital practices catalyzed by post� World War II
biological, information, and systems theory, these literary
narratives tactically enlist, and enable speculative diagnoses of,
emerging relations to digital technologies. Their experimental
technics comparatively retrace emerging relations to the digital as
these impact American nationalisms and their transnational economic
networks; processes of gendering and racialization that remain
crucial to differential discourses of the human; and as they enter,
unnoticed, into micropractices of everyday life and lived space. In
the midst of expanding technoscientific processes of digital de-
and re-materialization that render multiple, charged boundaries of
the human increasingly plastic, Tactics of the Human illustrates
why it is ever more crucial to query and assess the divergent
(re)understandings of the human now categorized, quite loosely, as
posthumanisms with particular attention to women's, subalterns� and
other knowledges already considered liminal to the human. It
identifies here and pursues strains of systems thinking, informed
by feminist, new materialist, queer, and subaltern understandings
of material practices, revealing why these are so pivotal to
ongoing efforts to assess current limits to digital technics and
expand upon their biological, cultural, social, and poetic
potentialities.
REVIEWS
“More than a series of close readings in the posthumanist imagination, this will be one of the first books to consistently bring out the relevance of social systems theory and cognitive contexts for an understanding not of 'fictions' only, but of fictionality in the contemporary lifeworld and mediaverse. The promise of the book is not just to apply certain critical 'approaches' to certain works (although the readings of digital hypertext show just how appropriate systems and cognitive frameworks can be, for emerging literatures in new media). Rather, the author has helped to relocate the literary as such, through a systems theoretical and material feminist perspective that goes beyond 'diversity' and beyond the competition among media thought to be distinct, towards a principled reciprocity (between the literary system and the vast non-literary environment; and also among bodies and subjectivities). Shackelford's Tactics of the Human participates in what are potentially transformative interventions in the field of contemporary literary studies.”
—Joseph Tabbi, University of Illinois, Chicago
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