Between Nostalgic Resistance and Critical : Contemporary American Fiction on/of the Information Age and the Potentials of (Post)Humanist Narrative

Regina Schober

ABSTRACT

This essay examines four contemporary American novels on the information age and its ef- fects on (post)human identity and agency, transformations of knowledge, a changed media envi- ronment, and the role of America in transnational geopolitical complexities: Dan Chaon’s Await Your Reply (2009), Jennifer Egan’s A Visit from the Goon Squad (2010), Gary Shteyngart’s Super Sad True Love Story (2010), and Dave Eggers’ The Circle (2013). The four novels mark a recent trend in contemporary fiction in displaying a “metamodern” ambivalence between resist- ing a data-driven consumer culture while at the same time incorporating new media and thus expressing a pragmatic willingness to adapt to such a culture (Vermeulen and van den Akker). By doing so, the novels stage themselves as new media’s complementary ‘other’ that both critically observes and fills the voids left by an informational media culture.

Contemporary American novels commenting on a global information age are faced with a major dilemma: On the one hand, they try to make sense of a world particularly shaped by the complex flows of information and an “information technology paradigm” that pervades all processes of individual and collective ex- istence (Castells 70–71). On the other hand, such narratives critically reflect their own status in a changing media landscape, which (seemingly) threatens their ex- istence. In this essay, I will explore narrative modes and cultural functions of four recent American novels on/of the information age: Dan Chaon’s Await Your Reply (2009), Jennifer Egan’s A Visit from the Goon Squad (2010), Gary Shteyngart’s Super Sad True Love Story (2010), and Dave Eggers’s The Circle (2013). These novels explore the impact of digital media on human (self)conceptualizations, cul- tural values, and the function of language and knowledge in a contemporary me- dia environment. Written during the consolidation of Web 2.0 practices and the looming of a ‘big data’ epistemology, the four novels create possible scenarios of human-technology interaction in our present age, while implicitly commenting on their own function as an integral part of and as largely affected by such a culture. My analysis will proceed in three steps: First, I will examine how these narra- tives respond to and interact with the increasing practices of tracing, tracking, and mapping (posthumanist) identity. Second, I will investigate the functions of nar- rative within an epistemological culture and politics of increasing data visibility in relation to the ‘right to ignorance.’ Third, I will discuss the value of fiction in a seemingly disembodied culture. I will do so on the assumption that these novels are representative of certain tendencies in contemporary American fiction: First, they exhibit an ambivalent attitude towards the information age, both warning 360 Regina Schober against its dehumanizing effects, while displaying a particularly ‘American’ af- finity to new technology in embracing the new media’s potential.1 Second, fol- lowing Janet Abbate’s observation that “the meaning of the Internet had to be invented—and constantly reinvented—at the same time as the technology itself,” they are fundamental in constructing our concept of the internet (6). These narra- tives “actively shape what the technologies mean and what the scientific theories signify in cultural contexts” (Hayles, How We Became Posthuman 21), thus par- ticipating in “mak[ing] it new” (Chun, “Did Somebody Say New Media?” 3). Nar- ratives render new media readable, making them relevant by transforming pure information into contextual knowledge. Third, in embodying technology’s and/ or new media’s ‘other,’ they demonstrate a certain degree of resistance due to an increasing sense of existential anxiety, celebrating what Jessica Pressmann calls “the aesthetics of bookishness” as an “emergent literary strategy” of contempo- rary fiction to respond to a long discourse of the end of the book (465). Thus, they reflect a paradoxical moment in American literary culture, one that is marked by an apocalyptic sentiment, on the one hand, and an increased “longing for the literary experience” in the digital age, on the other (Collins 14). Discourses of the end of print novels (and the ‘death’ of the human, for that matter) coincide with a self-fashioning as the new media’s ‘other,’ as ‘embodied’ forms of informational organization superior to what Lev Manovich calls “the modular, numerical, and variable logic of the database” (228). Although the novels give different answers to these questions, they share a sense of urgency in their address, displaying awareness of their own literariness, which is (seemingly) at stake by the media developments portrayed. At the same time, the novels acquire a new sense of legitimacy through their shared gesture of defiance and self-assertion. In view of the ambivalence displayed towards these narratives, Alan Liu’s concept of “narratives of new media encounter” (2007) proves helpful. Accordingly, these narratives create spaces of a “thick, unpredictable zone of con- tact—more borderland than border line—where (mis)understandings of new me- dia are negotiated along twisting, partial, and contradictory vectors,” resulting in “unpredictable,” “reversible,” and fundamentally “messy” accounts (Liu 5, 9, 14). Furthermore, I claim that these four novels form part of a “metamodern” trend in contemporary fiction, an ambivalent negotiation between a modernist narrative of progress and a postmodernist distrust in such metanarratives (Vermeulen and van den Akker). “Increasingly abandoning tactics such as and parataxis for strategies like myth and metaxis, melancholy for hope, and exhibitionism for en- gagement,” contemporary fiction is marked by a pragmatic inconsistency between modernist techno-euphoria and a postmodernist skepticism towards human agen- cy in increasingly complex information environments (5). In their metamodern- ist aesthetics, the four novels thus only partly represent what John Johnston calls the postmodern “novel of information multiplicity” (3).2 Rather, they mark a new

1 As Paul Youngman has noted in his study on German fiction, American novels tend to ex- press less apprehension towards computer technology and the Internet than do German novels (3). 2 By “novels of information multiplicity,” Johnston refers to postmodern novels that reflect on a culture increasingly dominated by information technology and discourses influenced by Between Nostalgic Resistance and Critical Appropriation 361 tendency in reflecting informational discourses by acknowledging the posthuman as an inevitable truth rather than deprecating it as a futuristic specter. To a much lesser degree than postmodern novels do they use metatextual strategies to reflect on their own status as information systems with an inherently inscribed dynamics of proliferating multiplicity. Instead, they exhibit a particularly delicate relation- ship with the new media, oscillating between nostalgia for a bygone past and a pragmatic acceptance of a new media environment. Displaying an “unsuccessful negotiation between culture and nature,” these novels neither express a belief in the future nor do they believe in the end of the future, but they rather incorporate a metamodernist awareness that “history […] is moving rapidly beyond its all too hastily proclaimed end” (Vermeulen and van den Akker 7, 2). The four novels map out possible spaces of new media encounter for the indi- vidual, locating human agency in shifting dynamics of knowledge production and human-machine interaction. The protagonists are often left disoriented and disil- lusioned; yet they try to adapt to and appropriate digital media technology into their own frameworks of meaning making. Dan Chaon’s Await Your Reply centers around the (implicit) protagonist Hayden White who constantly re-invents him- self by using stolen identities. Employing an unmistakable intertextual reference to historian Hayden White, renowned for his theory on the “emplotment” of his- torical narratives, the novel rather blatantly positions itself within a constructivist discourse (280). The interlocking narratives of Hayden’s multiple personalities only gradually reveal his schizophrenic self and thus evoke questions of the condi- tions and the desire of self-knowledge in a world in which the boundaries between real and virtual have dissolved, creating complicated narratives of vagueness and evoking a new desire for a materially grounded ‘truth.’ Such a celebration of mate- riality is also central to Jennifer Egan’s A Visit from the Goon Squad. A classical network narrative, the novel assembles loosely-interconnected stories about indi- viduals working in and around the industry in a non-linear sequence.3 What connects the different characters is a sense of nostalgia, most eminently embodied by music manager and ‘connector’ Bennie Salazar who, out of a sense of longing for a pre-digital era of music making, stages a final revival concert for aging rock musician Scotty Hausmann. Such a nostalgic attachment to a bygone media age is also at the core of Gary Shteyngart’s satirical novel Super Sad True Love Story. The novel’s protagonist information theory and cybernetics by “registering the world as a multiplicity and by articulat- ing new multiplicities through novel orderings and narrativizations of heterogenous kinds of information” (3). Often, these novels explore deterritorialized and collective forms of the self as fragmented and heterogeneous (263-64). 3 An emerging mode of storytelling in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, the ‘net- work narrative’ reflects a growing awareness for interconnectedness in a complex world, while exploring the role of contingency in the lives of the individual. Defined by film scholar David Bordwell as narratives that deploy multiple and interwoven plotlines in non-linear temporal order, network narratives depict what he calls “converging-fates plots” to suggest coherence and resolution through chains of cause and effect (98). Or, as Wesley Beal puts it, the network nar- rative “mediates the dialectic of totalization and fragmentation with linking mechanisms that draw atomized nodal formations into a constellar system” (5). 362 Regina Schober

Lenny Abramov, a melancholic middle-aged Russian American, is confronted with the economic, political, and cultural collapse of the United States, all the while trying (and failing) to establish a meaningful relationship with Eunice, a Korean American girl engrossed in the materialistic hollows of a digital consumer culture. Eunice’s potential of invigorating Lenny via her own youth turns out just as futile as the promise of his employer, the Post-Human Services division of the Staatling-Wapachung Corporation, to enable immortality through life-enhancing bioengineering. Dave Egger’s The Circle, too, addresses the issue of corporate media and information control and its impact on human relationships and politi- cal freedom. Told from the perspective of young female employee Mae Holland at the fictitious Internet corporation The Circle, the novel explores the dystopian implications of the company’s doctrine of ‘complete information’ and transpar- ency reverting into totalizing control and surveillance. All four novels focus on character development and their (quest for) individu- alization, thus emphasizing the existential question of whether the ‘human’ can be reclaimed in an increasingly posthumanist world with decentralized structures of power and cognition as well as a massive reliance on information technology. Yet, what makes these novels ‘humanist’ is that individual agency, however con- strained and restricted, is never completely invalidated but (re)inscribed into the texts, if only as an aspired ideal. Thus, the novels are just as much metamodern- ist as they are (neo-)realist. Although partly verging on social satire, explorative imagination, and dystopian projection, they cannot be labeled science fiction, for they do not create speculative, alternative storyworlds but rather they allude to already existing or highly probable scenarios. Employing neorealist modes of ‘tra- ditional’ storytelling with more or less linear plots (with minor exceptions in A Visit from the Goon Squad and Await Your Reply), a focus on the experience of actors, relatively consistent story worlds, and a tendency towards verisimilitude, they follow their protagonists in a recognizable or, at least, imaginable world. Rather than evoking a sense of “cognitive estrangement” (Suvin 4), as would be the case in science fiction, these novels produce an effect of what I would call “strange recognition” in view of the relevance and accuracy of the storyworlds de- picted. They accept such a world, without glorifying it; yet, they criticize its impli- cations without total aesthetic detachment. What is more, the novels call for moral action without, however, suggesting that social change can easily be achieved by the individual. For Malcom Bradbury, “close to the heart of realism is a moral conception of humanism. Realism, still, has much to do with the representation of felt human experience and the sentient character in the realm of narrative art” (1). Although Bradbury’s connection between realism and humanism has to be re- viewed with regard to these novels, they share with realism a foregrounding of human experience coupled with the creation of immersive realistic effects that may enable a deeper level of identification and thus, empathy, with fictional char- acters, their motives, dreams, and anxieties than radically nihilistic postmodern fiction does. Thus, if these novels reflect a current moment of our digital media environment, they do so under the pretext that the human still matters, that tech- nology has not subsumed subjectivity within its logic of decentralized flows of in- formation but that new and productive forms of the posthumanist self need to be Between Nostalgic Resistance and Critical Appropriation 363 explored, identified, and imagined. Such imaginative spaces, oscillating between anxiety and optimism, thus follow the same trajectories of existential quest as the novels’ protagonists, carefully testing the functions of writing, knowing, and being at the beginning of the twenty-first century.

From Inforg to Corporate Cyborg: Trac(k)ing the Human and/as Self-Knowledge

A Visit from the Goon Squad begins with a seeming paradox: entitled “Found Objects,” the first chapter focuses on young music business secretary Sasha, whose quest for self-discovery is just as strong as her interest in ‘finding’ or steal- ing objects. “It began the usual way,” the novel opens, metatextually commenting on the traditional narrative of self-exploration through self-recognition: “Sasha was adjusting her yellow eye shadow in the mirror when she noticed a bag on the floor beside the sink” (Egan 3). Yet, diverging from “the usual way,” the narrative presents the mirror not only as a means for self-reflection but literally turns it into an object among others. Coupled with Sasha’s introspection is her view outside, into the world of objects that she yearns to possess. Sasha’s explanation of her cleptomania reads like a direct application of Bruno Latour’s stance that “objects too have agency” as associated with Actor Network Theory (73): it is not Sasha who decides to steal, but “that fat, tender wallet, offering itself to her hand” (Egan 3). The novel’s posthumanist perspective locates the self or, at least, the search for the self in the relational networks of human and objects, self and technology. Yet, although the self does not possess sole agency, it does not dissolve in a radically distributed network. Rather, human consciousness remains in a superior position, able to reflect on itself and to (attempt to) make sense of the complex web of en- tangled agencies. The human has become an elusive and increasingly precarious concept in our informational environment, not only because digital technology has more and more inflected its meaning towards the posthuman but also because our dominant mode of retrieving information is determined by search engine technology. In a culture in which ‘to search’ is almost synonymous with ‘to know,’ “search engines have come to play a central role in corralling and controlling the ever-growing sea of information that is available to us” (Halavais 2). However, as Halavais notes, their operating mechanisms are seldom fully understood, making them the black box of our modern epistemological quests. Perhaps out of a skeptical attitude to- wards the epistemological value of search engines, Sasha decides against ‘track- ing’ the personal and professional background of her therapist, permitting that, of course, “these questions could have been resolved on Google in less than a minute, but they were useful questions (according to Coz), and so far, Sasha had resisted” (Egan 4). She knows that her search for Coz’s and for her own identity is more complex than the standardized algorithm of a search screen suggests. De- fying a culture that values quantified subjectivity, Sasha adheres to a traditional concept of self-discovery, based on geographical, interpersonal, and experiential journeys that go beyond the supposedly omniscient power of data statistics. 364 Regina Schober

Compared to A Visit from the Goon Squad, Await Your Reply more overtly ad- dresses the postmodern theme of elusive identity. Hayden’s constant wish to rein- vent himself renders the search for identity an experiential and ultimately circular struggle. His coping mechanism, however, is not to accept what sometimes celebrates as the fragmented and schizophrenic self (Jameson 26-31) or of the self as “fluid, emergent, decentralized, multiplicitous, flexible, and ever in progress” (Turkle 263-64), but to deliberately exploit the idea of self-invention through identity theft. “An invader arrives in your computer and begins to glean the little diatoms of your identity,” the authorial voice of conscience addresses the reader in an interposed chapter, “Your name, your address, and so on; the vari- ous websites you visit as you wander through the Internet, your user names and passwords, your birth date, your mother’s maiden name, favorite color, the blogs and news sites you read, the items you shop for, the credit card numbers you enter into the databases” (Chaon 88). What is addressed here is a core fear of human beings, not only because identity theft represents a financial security risk but also since it exposes what is most valuable to us and where we are most vulnerable, our integrity and existence as individuals. However, the postmodernist theme of identity loss is subsequently problematized and placed within a contemporary posthumanist discourse:

Which isn’t necessarily you, of course. You are still an individual human being with a soul and a history, friends and relatives and coworkers who care about you, who can vouch for you: they recognize your face and your voice and your personality, and you are aware of your life as a continuous thread, a dependable unfolding story of yourself that you are telling to yourself. (88)

The narrator challenges a strictly informational definition of human identity as a collection of personal data and information, pointing out its contextualized em- bodiment. What is at stake in identity theft, the novel argues, is not the notion of identity itself, but only a particularly humanist notion of identity based on the sepa- rability between information as mind/consciousness and the body as mere ‘shell.’ Mark Poster thus demands that “critical discourse must find the bases for a happier inscription of the self in its conditions of coupling with machines, in its media un- conscious” (114-15). Such a “happier inscription” can be found in the authorial per- spective of the interposed chapter itself. It embodies the retrieval of central agency as critical conscience in its resistance to the ‘success’ of Hayden’s (and at the same time the novel’s) multiplication. The narrative thereby challenges a postmodern- ist notion of the fragmented self on which our fear of identity theft is grounded in a misperception of an atomized, decodable identity, embodied in the delusion of multiperspective narration. The novel’s authorial commentary (re)installs human agency by explicitly referring to the technological conditions of the digital and con- nected self, thus challenging established categories such as identity (whether frag- mented or coherent). Human agency is located neither in the fragmented nor the integrative potentials of identity. Rather, it emerges in the relational quality of the self from which meaning temporarily crystallizes into moments of reflection and awareness. It is the function of (meta)commentary to open up such spaces of critical deliberation in order to create momentary integrations of dispersed selves. Between Nostalgic Resistance and Critical Appropriation 365

Such a self-reflexive statement on the retrieval of the (post)human through (embodied) narrative also forms the basis of Super Sad True Love Story and The Circle. Both novels negotiate the effects of a culture obsessed with digital and thus, quantifiable, data on human experience and (self-)definition. They question the validity of the ‘quantified self’ movement to locate the human in the infor- mational realm of digital data and discuss the consequences of an informational epistemology for concepts of the human, as addressed in Await Your Reply.4 In both novels, young female adults represent the new generation of media-savvy “inforgs” completely attuned with, yet highly susceptible to the dangers of the new corporate power over personal information (Floridi 9). Super Sad True Love Story’s Eunice Park compensates her insecurity and disorientation in a dysto- pian and politically unstable United States with compulsive online shopping on her data streaming mobile media device. The device’s absurd name “äppärät” mocks the facilitating function of the apparatus as tool, as “technological ex- tension […] of our bodies” (McLuhan, Understanding Media 5). In the sense of Michel Foucault’s use of the term “apparatus” or “dispositif,” the äppärät alludes to the strategic formation of discourses, institutions, and laws that exert power over the individual and over knowledge, in short “strategies of relations of forces supporting, and supported by, types of knowledge” (196). The kind of knowledge produced by the äppärät consists of digital data, “buzzing with contacts, data, pictures, projections, maps, incomes, sound, fury,” constantly mapping, retriev- ing, analyzing, and scanning data from the user’s environment (McLuhan, Un- derstanding Media 4). Yet, all these data, as suggested by the intertextual refer- ence to Shakespeare’s Macbeth create “a tale / Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, / Signifying nothing” (Act 5, sc. 5). The äppärät becomes a technical interface that absorbs both contextual data as well as the user’s consciousness, limiting the realm of experience to immediately ‘translatable’ code and thus ren- dering it completely useless. “The world they needed,” Lenny scorns the young generation’s media dependency, “was right around them, flickering and bleeping, and it demanded every bit of strength and attention they could spare” (84). Lenny condemns a media environment in which the äppärät is not only an ‘extension of man’ but also his amputation. By reducing human perception exclusively to the binary information readable to the smart machine, the äppärät confines both physical and emotional processes of human consciousness within the techno- logical apparatus of its own epistemology, thus metonymically representing the increasingly informational processes of knowledge production based on search engines. Shteyngart’s äppärät exemplifies how quantitative self-knowledge may lead to data surveillance and political discrimination. Humans, in Shteyngart’s dystopian world, are defined and measured by a data profile, which reduces personal infor- mation to a database automatically generated by the äppärät:

4 In current debates, the ‘quantified self’ refers to the practice of collecting and analyzing personal data through digital technology. The term is connected with a movement that promotes a usage of self-tracking devices for personal health goals (and economic profit), as explained on the website (www.quantifiedself.com) and in Gary Wolf’s articles in Wired and his 2010 TED-Talk. 366 Regina Schober

LENNY ABRAMOV ZIP code 10002, New York, New York. Income averaged over five-year-span, $289,420, yuan-pegged, within top 19 percent of U.S. income distribu- tion. Current blood pressure 120 over 70. O-type blood. Thirty-nine years of age, lifes- pan estimated at eighty-three (47 percent lifespan elapsed; 53 percent remaining). Ail- ments: high cholesterol, depression. (88) Not coincidentally, Lenny’s credit ranking, extracted from so-called “Credit Poles,” is followed by his health history (52). In Shteyngart’s neoliberal dystopia, digital health data are just as valuable as is credit information. Both are part of a particular knowledge discourse that favors quantitative over qualitative infor- mation, evaluating a person’s (credit/health) well-being and thus their ability to contribute to America’s survivability in an environment of external threats. In the quantified self logic, observational procedures of the natural sciences like ‘mea- suring’ and ‘tracking’ become predominant tools for understanding and ‘map- ping’ the human body. These data are easily decontextualized, relatable, and thus subject to (potentially misleading) correlation. Both Lenny’s financial and health data are announced first in absolute, then in relative terms, comparing Lenny to the statistical average of the entire population. Individuality becomes a set of sta- tistics, a person’s character defined by credit ranking, a person’s body by its health status. Easily broken down, assembled, accessed, and put in relation to one an- other in the modular logic of digital media, these data purport to give quick access to a human’s worth in relation to the entire population, the worth of being young and financially successful, thus carrying highest potential for consumer capitalism that values healthy and productive ‘individuals.’ Such a dystopian vision of defining the self through quantitative data is also behind the business idea of “TrueYou” as depicted in The Circle: “one account, one identity, one password, one payment system, per person” (21). Calling to mind social media platforms such as Google+ or Facebook, this vision of creating a co- herent identity is presented as a liberating attempt to counteract the Internet’s plu- ralistic and decentralizing tendencies in order to simplify the web and ‘return’ to a seemingly consistent identity: “The era of false identities, identity theft, multiple user names, complicated passwords and payment systems was over. Anytime you wanted to see anything, use anything, comment on anything or buy anything, it was one button, one account, everything tied together and trackable and simple” (21). However, The Circle dismantles the liberating quality of an allegedly coherent identity as just another way to enhance the company’s centralized position of pow- er. For the novel’s protagonist Mae, the convenience of creating one online identity comes at the cost of being required to share personal files and health data in the company’s cloud and thus to subjugate herself to a private company that acquires total data sovereignty. The corporization of personal data turns the human into a database from which statistical predictions can be inferred and made valuable for capitalist interests. Dan’s description of the company as “a humanplace” reads like a cynical reminder that, to be human, according to the Circle’s , means primarily to participate, share, and become incorporated by the company, thus to become what Andrea M. Matwyshin has called a “corporate cyborg” (Eggers 47; Matwyshin qtd. in Harrasser 82). Instead of becoming more ‘human,’ Mae turns into the most blatant example of a heteronomous subject in all novels. Between Nostalgic Resistance and Critical Appropriation 367

Mae’s provision of personal data is not quite the same as Hayden’s loss of identity in Await Your Reply since she more or less complies with the company’s policy. Yet, The Circle’s concept of the human builds on a notion of disembodied subjectivity similar to that portrayed in Await Your Reply and Super Sad True Love Story. Not only does the wish for uniformity neglect the fundamentally di- verse, multiple, and processual nature of human identity, but it also neglects the obscure and ambivalent modes of embodied human experience and behavior that elude the clear binary logic of data. If “selfhood is an information pattern, rather than a material substance,” Steven Shaviro notes, the notion of individuality is at risk, since “the network induces mass replication on a miniaturized scale and […] I myself am only an effect of this miniaturizing process” (13). In such a numerical and calculable world in which everything and every- one can be tracked, mapped, and measured, both Super Sad True Love Story and The Circle express a nostalgic yearning for ‘essentially human’ attributes that seem to elude such systematic binary logic of access/non-access. It may not be surprising that the title Super Sad True Love Story ironically alludes to the ‘core’ human emotion of love. Lenny momentarily succeeds in finding what he considers ‘true love’ in his relationship with Eunice. He does so in an environ- ment in which love is either dehumanized by entirely functional definitions as a physical process that, as Lenny’s boss Joshie argues, “is great for pH, ACTH, LDL, whatever ails you” or by instantly remediated emotions, such as in Noah’s public announcement that he is “streaming Lenny’s love for this girl Eunice Park in real time” (64; 91). Lenny, however, searches for an idealized form of romantic love that is unconditional, private, and, ‘authentic.’ His desire for ‘true’ experience in a predominantly medialized environment extends to the almost compulsive search for such a ‘true’ moment with Eunice. Only in a short glimpse of the aftermath of a street riot and after Noah’s death does he describe her as “perfectly true,” before she relapses into her old consumer-oriented, media- absorbed self (259). The irony of the novel’s title therefore lies not only in the failure of the love story but also in the failure of the word ‘true.’ The novel thus clings to an idealized notion of a pre-mediated ‘truth’ while at the same time deconstructing it through ironic detachment. While Super Sad True Love Story locates the ‘human’ in a lost ideal of human relationships, The Circle inscribes its humanist values of individual , au- thenticity, and privacy into the dialogic structure of the novel. Mae’s increasing captivation by company values is challenged through the recurring confrontations with her ex-boyfriend Mercer, especially, who functions as a critical conscience just like the spiritual leader of the same name in Philip K. Dick’s Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? (1968). In an educational manner, Mercer deconstructs Mae’s obsession of quantifying her world as meaningless: “I think you think that sitting at your desk, frowning and smiling somehow makes you think you’re actu- ally living some fascinating life. You comment on things, and that substitutes for doing them” (261). Intriguingly, both Super Sad True Love Story and The Circle create a gendered dichotomy between ‘traditional’ and ‘media-progressive,’ with impressionable young women succumbing to the corporate logic of data public- ity and slightly older men who cling to ‘traditional values’ functioning as critical 368 Regina Schober correctives and embarking on often didacticist attempts to ‘educate’ these young girls. One of the most elusive, non-trackable of such figures is The Circle’s Ty, one of the company’s co-founders who resists the strategy of ‘closing the circle,’ thus being forced to literally live below the company. Under the pseudonym Kalden, he reveals himself to Mae, attempting to instill in her a critical conscience and thus to take action against the totalitarian direction the company is taking. It is exactly his elusiveness that makes him both attractive and eerie to Mae. Kalden/Ty represents the blind spot of the company’s surveillance system and thus constitutes—at least for a certain while—a form of indirect power: “His invisibility began to feel intentional and even aggressive,” Mae attests, express- ing her growing unease with the subversive element that so blatantly violates the Circle’s transparency policy and thus also challenges her newly adopted belief system (172). Although The Circle presents young girls as especially vulnerable to media/corporate manipulation, men are not particularly empowered by infor- mation technology, either. So, do the novels present the ‘crisis of the human’ as a metaphor for a ‘crisis of man’ in which the future belongs to (young) women who manage to adapt better to new technology or do they confirm patriarchal power relations in which ‘humanist’ values represent a form of superior knowledge which especially resides within ‘older’ men? Hayden White, Lenny Abramov, and Ty— they all more or less fall victim to the overpowering systems of the information apparatus. This could be read as a diagnosis of the end of patriarchal America. At the same time, the novels do contain an implicit gender bias, since it is predomi- nantly these men who offer glimpses of resistance, embodying a sense of yearning for accessing what can be considered the ‘human’ part of our existence. The question of who we are, these novels seem to suggest, cannot satisfactorily be answered through data mapping, tracking, or streaming but only through criti- cal contemplation, reflection, and introspection. The novels offer various strate- gies of retrieving the human in an increasingly posthuman information world, thus expressing an “(often guarded) hopefulness” of metamodernist narratives (Ver- meulen and van den Akker 2). From the reflexive quality of The Circle’s dialogic aesthetics, to the repossession of human integrity in Await Your Reply, from the (ironic) evocation of ‘true’ human affect to (partial) resistance in Super Sad True Love Story, to the decentralized logic of object agency in A Visit from the Goon Squad, they allow us to engage in a dialog with characters who offer more or less successful modes of dealing with new forms of knowledge in a continuous quest for self-knowledge. Thus, they act upon our responsibility, in Donna Haraway’s sense, our ‘ability to respond’ to the “fruitful couplings” that we as inforgs invest in (516).

Information Mapping and the Desire for Ignorance

In the information age, concepts of subjectivity have changed just as much as have modes, conceptions, and environments of knowledge. Knowledge has be- come an increasingly precious and sometimes unwarranted good in an economy, political environment, and culture largely dependent on disarranged and decon- textualized flows of information. The epistemological problem that all four novels Between Nostalgic Resistance and Critical Appropriation 369 invest in is the conflict between traditional notions of knowledge as structured, stored, and accessible information that lends the subject sovereign agency, and increasingly posthumanist notions of knowledge as emergent and increasingly based on quantifiable data-mining technology. Such a in knowl- edge culture is reflected in relation to mechanical notions of reading as ‘data scanning’. Both Mae, who “plowed through the messages,” and Eunice, who is strangely fascinated by Lenny reading a book, “And I don’t mean scanning a text like we did in Euro Classics,” represent approaches towards ‘reading’ that are presented as superficial, meaningless, and dehumanized (Eggers 101; Egan 142). Aligning itself with recent discourses that idealize ‘slow reading’ as “an advan- tage” in the age of information overload, “a pleasure when reading fiction and an aid to comprehension when deciphering a complex text,” Super Sad True Love Story scornfully depicts the practice of speed reading as dissatisfying and ulti- mately ineffective experience (Miederna 7). Mae, in particular, struggles with the exhaustive nature of scanning, organizing, and navigating the sheer unmanage- able layers of information that stream onto her computer screen. Her constant multitasking, the “double consciousness” of the information age, leaves no time to process, understand, and interpret, thus to form ‘reflected knowledge’ (Shaviro 8). Presented as a deliberate corporate strategy to dehumanize Mae, The Circle’s critique of data scanning relies on a traditional humanist concept of knowledge as rational understanding. It is not without irony then that the main and perhaps most obscure campus section is called ‘Enlightenment,’ corrupting the liberating function of knowledge by equating it with ‘complete’ knowledge. Await Your Reply most explicitly incorporates the theme of limited, insecure, and distributed knowledge within its formal structure. At times, the novel reads like a text puzzle of what Nick Montfort has described as interactive fiction (IF), an electronic text in which the user/reader tries to solve riddles by wandering through often dark rooms and utilizing objects through interaction with a pro- grammed algorithm. Consider, for example, Lucy’s exploration of the old house in which she intermittently lives with George:

She wasn’t sure how to respond. She thought: She thought: Then he shut the door. (180)

These short-clipped sentences resemble IF commands in which even the act of thinking is written out as user-action, evoking a programmed response built into the algorithm of the computer program. George, in this case, is conceptualized as the parser who carries out a computational response—the “reply” awaited by Lucy (and which she cannot give herself, either) is built into the program code of the system. The computer expects a response that lies beyond human understand- ing, representing the communicational incompatibility of human and machine in terms of existential questions that go beyond the programmed framework of the epistemological system. Lucy’s insecurity is paradigmatic for a sense of disorien- tation which has been considered a particular “aesthetic quality” (Van Hulle 148). Frequently, this is an explicit theme of interactive/digital fiction as “riddle” or “potential narrative,” since its non-linear and non-teleological mode installs a 370 Regina Schober form of openness in the reading process that imbues it with a sense of uncertainty and confusion (Montfort 4, 15). Lucy’s ‘reading’ of the world thus becomes a problem-solving approach that conforms to the IF procedure of locating objects and “trying to draw a map for herself, looking out into a great expanse like a pilot over an ocean, looking for a place to land” (Chaon 180). Yet, the practice of mapping, as an increasingly preva- lent form of displaying huge amounts of data, is not presented as an overly produc- tive form of knowledge in all four novels. For Lucy, “still no clear plan emerged” after creating a cognitive map of her increasingly complex world (180). Neither is Lenny in Super Sad True Love Story able to understand his parents better from “deploying the satellite powers of [his] mind, [he] zoomed in on the undulating green roof of their humble Cape Cod house” (Shteyngart 39-40). Both characters remain lost in the dark realms of their epistemological quests, feeling increasingly disempowered by the abstractions of their mental maps, thus challenging what Fredric Jameson describes as the function of mapping in a late capitalist society, mainly to “grasp out positioning as individual and collective subjects and regain a capacity to act and struggle which is at present neutralized by our spatial as well as our social confusion” (54). As Wendy Chun has noted, “we are now forever mapping, forever perform- ing—and so, we are told, forever empowered—and yet no less able to foresee and intervene decisively into the world we live in” (42). To expect a traditional notion of ‘knowledge as understanding’ from the map as an abstracted, distributed set of data turns out to be ineffective. The epistemological concerns of our current in- formation age produce a different kind of knowledge, one located in the recursive logic of interactive fiction, which resists formal closure and continuously produces or makes visible contingency, thus paradigmatically embodying the human quest for (self‑)understanding in a world of distributed human-machine agency. While remaining skeptical about the heuristic potentials of mapping, the nov- els deliberately produce an epistemological counter model to the mapped data streams that pervade their story worlds. As the information-based knowledge deduced from data mapping aims at displaying total information, the cultural knowledge generated by the novels is based on the exact opposite, namely on a re- duction of complexity, while at the same time infusing another layer of aesthetic/ cultural complexity that emerges from their ‘messy’ inscriptions. In contrast to the database, narrative “always contains more than indicated by a table of contents or a list of chapter contents” and thus creates “the ethos of the unknown” (Hayles, How We Think 177-78; Liu qtd. in Hayles, How We Think 179). Narratives produce a certain sense of order and closure by establishing cau- salities, while opening up the liminal spaces in between coded information. Such conflicting notions of knowledge are displayed in the dystopian world of The Circle in which information transparency and access are valued as ideal forms of liberation. The mass installation of surveillance cameras is only another step in eliminating the boundaries of information, since “everything we do here,” as CEO Bailey announces, “is about knowing the previously unknown” (63). Mae becomes a ‘transparent eyeball’ herself, creating her own completely transparent identity and thus literally embodying the company’s dogma “ALL THAT HAP- Between Nostalgic Resistance and Critical Appropriation 371

PENS MUST BE KNOWN” by wearing a camera around her neck that mediates all of her experiences in real life (67). Such a total disclosure of her private self is not a performative form of self-assertion but an expression of non-sovereignty. Subscribing to the illusion of self-liberation through social transparency, Mae sub- mits herself to the corporate and non-transparent rules of data storage, usage, and dispersal. She naively engages in what Foucault describes as the self-regulatory mechanism of the panopticon in which “he who is subjected to a field of visibility, and who knows it, assumes responsibility for the constraints of power; he makes them play spontaneously upon himself; he inscribes in himself the power relation in which he simultaneously plays both roles; he becomes the principle of his own subjection” (202-03). Sousveillance through wearable media devices, then, does not function as “inverted surveillance” in which “individuals feel more self-empowered [by] invert[ing] an organization’s gaze and watch the watchers by collecting data on them” (Mann, Nolan, and Wellman 336). Rather, (potential) observers build a surveillance mechanism into the individual’s own framework of consciousness, creating a collective public, yet an invisible authority. The dystopian world of The Circle depicts total corporate surveillance as the result of an unconditional quest for knowledge, as explored in Mae’s public denouncement after a minor miscon- duct or the broadcast of her own and later of her parents sexual activity to the fatal helicopter chase of Mercer. Total access to information is dismantled not as liberating and empowering but, on the contrary, as a (self-)destructive weapon that threatens individual freedom, dignity, and rights. The Circle’s total information transparency becomes a drastic example of the increasing mass of knowledge in the information age which, according to Peter Wehling, points to the limits of the value of information and knowledge, render- ing not information but non-information and the right not-to-know as increasing- ly valuable factors for retaining agency (96). Both The Circle and Super Sad True Love Story point out the benefits of what popular wisdom considers ‘ignorance is bliss.’ While Mae finds moments of comfort in the opaque depths of the ocean “knowing she would not, and really could not, know much at all,” Lenny, who is increasingly irritated with the intrusive quality of “smoky data spilling out of a total of fifty-nine äppäräti,” finds his recluse in Italy, the birthplace of both his narrative journey, but also, in a romanticized view, of Western civilization (Egg- ers 270; Shteyngart 90). Here, he hopes, he can return to a pre-digital silence, to find “a place with less data, less youth, and where old people like [himself are] not despised simply for being old” (326). Yet, Lenny has to realize that globalization allows for no such recluses. Invited to a dinner party, he has to witness how “the Italians were having a go at it,” how the culture he had previously idealized for its clinging to traditional values, is in the process of Americanization, yearning for a culture of youth slang and empty data obsession (326). Lenny might not have found the peace he was looking for, but at least temporar- ily, he is given a break: “For a while at least, no one said anything, and I was blessed with what I needed the most. Their silence, black and complete” (329). Conclud- ing with this final sentence, the novel indeed leaves an almost reassuring void that functions as a sense of closure—a narrative closure which is all the more effective 372 Regina Schober and meaningful in a world of unceasing data flows, endless mapping, and a desen- sitizing persistence of information availability. The knowledge that Super Sad True Love Story and the other novels suggest as an alternative is the knowledge of when to stop, when to unplug the endless spills of data that surround us in an age where ‘big data’ and ‘big brother’ are increasingly perceived as synonymous.

The Books that Smell: The Value of Fiction in an Age of Data Streaming

In all four novels, a desire to not know is intricately connected with a self-reflex- ive nostalgia for a bygone past in which material presence is favored over access, selection over ubiquity, and ‘authentic’ experience over simulation. Both Lenny in Super Sad True Love Story and Benny in A Visit from the Goon Squad express a longing for analog culture, for supposedly ‘real’ experience in a digital information age. While Lenny “celebrate[s his] Wall of Books,” (in capital letters!), music man- ager Benny is drawn to old tapes that convey the “muddiness, the sense of actual musicians playing actual instruments in an actual room” (23). He senses a loss of quality in digital music, in the “bloodless constructions” which predominantly aim at “precision, perfection” (24). Digital music and digitization of analog music, for Benny, “sucked the life out of everything that got smeared through its microscopic mesh. Film, photography, music: dead. An aesthetic holocaust!” (24). Benny’s comment extends Friedrich Kittler’s metaphor of the vampiric, life- sucking quality of the typewriter as an emblem for mechanical reproduction into the digital age. It is no longer the typewriter’s “inscription into the real” of ­Dracula’s bite marks but exactly the marklessness of digital media which lacks all traces and which has the totalizing capacity to induce a large-scale genocide (66). The ‘lifelessness’ of digital music, for Benny, correlates not only with the moral decay of the music industry tailored to the “postpiracy generation, for whom things like ‘’ and ‘creative ownership didn’t exist,” but also with the sensory feebleness of his own physicality (28). An increasing sense of sexual and emotional impotence feeds into a general loss of agency which is only revital- ized by the “raw, almost-threadbare sound” of a new, yet unknown and unfeasible band he has discovered and which evoke “sensations [that] met with a faculty deeper in Benny than judgment or even pleasure; they communed directly with his body, whose shivering, bursting reply made him dizzy” (31). The hierarchy of cultural values inscribed into Benny’s concept of “music” suggests a clear-cut dualism between old, analog, ‘real’ and new, digital, ‘fake’ music. Intriguingly, however, cultural distinction is only seemingly (or only partly) dependent on the sonic quality of his experience and mainly on institutionalized taste. As a music producer, Benny possesses the cultural authority to define what music is and to establish it as aesthetically valuable. Benny thus paradoxically discloses the mal- leability of his own nostalgic yearning for materiality by displaying how this is nonetheless embedded in frameworks of economic and cultural power. Yet, it would be too easy to read this desire for authenticity as a self-reflexive nostalgia to dismiss new forms of digital textuality in terms of a narcissist resent- ment for the ‘new.’ Slavoj Žižek states that “our ultimate lesson is that the Real is Between Nostalgic Resistance and Critical Appropriation 373 simultaneously the exact opposite of such a non-virtual hard core: a purely virtual entity, an entity which has no positive ontological consistency” (“The Cyberspace Real”). In this vein, the novels both yearn for ‘real’ experience while ironically de- constructing it as a fetish, a pretentious collective obsession with material objects purely for the sake of possessing their materiality. Whether Sasha’s cleptomaniac fixation and worship of “found objects”; Eamon Bailey’s “three-story library” holding “ten thousand books, most of them bound in leather, arranged tidily on shelves gleaming with lacquer” (The Circle 26); Benny’s self-prescribed rejuvena- tion therapy of gold flakes that “seemed true for a second [but which eventually] melted away” (A Visit from the Goon Squad 37); or Lenny’s frustration with his books, “their immateriality, how they had failed to change the world” (Super Sad True Love Story 309), the novels leave their characters just as disillusioned with a nostalgic clinging to a supposedly ‘purer’ past as they lament the ethical void of a digital consumer culture. That the four novels display an ambiguous relationship with the new media also shows in their own textuality. Although representing material counterparts to the assumedly non-material new media they depict, they incorporate the new media into their own print textuality and thus also formally negotiate the ways information and knowledge may have to be reconsidered in an age of media transformation. In terms of formal innovation, A Visit from the Goon Squad offers perhaps the most interesting of new media syntax. A succession of different short stories, a newspaper article and a Powerpoint Presentation, the novel alludes to the multime- dia of the Internet with different file formats requiring the reader to switch between different forms of ‘reading,’ from textual-linear to non-linear to the visual reading of diagrams and flow charts. Evoking metatextual awareness, the novel thus creates a non-chronological network of different modes of information. These links resemble the hypertextual structure of the Internet in that characters function as links which, once ‘activated,’ open up further narrative windows in which they then become focalizers. This narrative form creates an associative and emergent sense of community: “It was one of those days when every intersection brings up another familiar face,” Alex says while gathering the anonymous community for the concert in NYC, “old friends and friends of friends, acquaintances, and people who just look familiar” (336). Through “converging-fates plots” the novel creates intersec- tions between separate lives and stories and merges them in seemingly coherent figurations of association, similar to our own personal experience of ‘reading’ the Internet (Bordwell 98). Although we know of the sheer endless complexity of its hy- perlink structure, our experience is limited to only a fraction of this universe, often following the same well-trodden paths again and again. At the same time, the novel self-reflexively highlights the contingency of narrative, while offering one potential pathway, thus mediating between the finite closure of traditional narratives and the openness of distributed knowledge systems. At the same time, the novels experiment with the malleability of language. The frequent use of neologisms in The Circle (e.g. to zing; Participation Rank; Luv- Luv; CircleMoney; PastPerfect; SoulSearch) and Super Sad True Love Story (Life Lovers Outreach Coordinator; äppärät; High Net Worth Individuals; UnitedCon- tinentalDeltamerican; AlliedWasteCVSCitigroup; AssLuxury) points to the need 374 Regina Schober to find a new language for a new media environment, while satirically expressing the emptiness and non- of such recombinatory compounds, which ex- emplify the shifting flows of capital, ideas, and people. A Visit from the Goon Squad makes a more conciliatory case for the transformation of communication if, however, emphasizing the necessity of a new media literacy. In another example of an intergenerational conversation between Alex and Bennie’s young female assistant Lulu, the novel creates an analogy between Lulu’s youth language and Alex’s daughter’s first words, both marked by fragmented and abridged syntax and a modular style. The novel thus rather optimistically stresses the progressive potential of a new media culture, suggesting that we are only just learning a new language that corresponds with the transformation of our media environment. Super Sad True Love Story, in contrast, idealizes the purity of children’s language as an unspoiled and ‘authentic’ form of ‘human’ communication before it evapo- rates into the illiteracy of a youth culture determined by the surplus of data and visual images: “I relished hearing language actually being spoken by children,” Lenny describes the experience of strolling through his New York neighborhood. “Overblown verbs, explosive nouns, beautifully bungled prepositions. Language, not data. How long would it be before these kids retreated into the dense clickety- clack äppärät world of their absorbed mothers and missing fathers?” (51). Not only is the contrast between “language” and “data” associated with a loss of innocence but also with the loss of parental guidance and responsibility. For Lenny, America’s economic decline is thus not so much a question of ‘word cas- ing’ and semantic shift, but the result of political failure on the part of the Ameri- can government. Lenny’s anger towards the hypocrisy of books is at the same time a frustration with a dying America. After the total incorporation of America by foreign creditors, Lenny’s books feel “cold to the touch” (321); they are just as frail as the old people that are forced out of his building. Death becomes a favored op- tion, one that carries more appeal than the ‘almost dead.’ An art opening, para- doxically staged as a welcoming party for a Chinese central banker, brings the cruelty of the not-letting go to the fore, showing ghastly images of tortured or soon-to-be-murdered people who are forced to stay alive and thus witness the hopelessness of their existence. “Dead is dead,” Lenny laconically comments on the artworks, “we know where to file another person’s extinction, but the artist purposely zoomed in on the living, or, to be more accurate, the forced-to-be-living and the soon-to-be-dead” (315-16). “America 2.0” does not equal a ‘new Ameri- ca,’ as the American Restoration Authority (ARA) suggests, but only an artificial life-prolongation of an already dead patient. Yet, Lenny’s proclamation “I am going to die” (subverting his initial echo of his company motto “I am never going to die,” metafictionally connected with the decision that this will be his “last entry” is not actually his last entry (1, 302). Like America, he is kept alive, yet yearning for the “silence, black and complete” (329). So, can this desire for silence also be read as a yearning for the end of fiction? Here, the novel’s self-ironic gestus creates another ambiguity: It does not (want to) settle between an awareness that the great narrative of ‘America’ no longer exists, that what has been known as America has capitulated to the dehumanizing logic of a media driven capitalism and cannot be rescued, yet at the same time there is a Between Nostalgic Resistance and Critical Appropriation 375 self-preservatory quest for believing in the power of narrative to recreate a sense of national identity. In this way, Super Sad True Love Story gives the perhaps most paradoxical answer to the question of which function (American) fiction can have in a global information age. Written in a realist mode without formal rupture, The Circle comments more explicitly on potential and desirable political functions of narratives. In line with the didacticist mode of the entire novel, Eamon Bailey’s fish tank experiment symbolically proves the failure of neoliberalism and its media equivalent, an un- regulated Internet. The “fucking shark that eats the world” is symptomatic of cor- porate greed for total information control, yet the company itself has gotten out of control, mutating into a monster that turns against humanity in its almost unstop- pable automatism (480). “I didn’t intend any of this to happen,” Ty ponders, “And it’s moving too fast. This idea of Completion, it’s far beyond what I had in mind when I started all this, and it’s far beyond what’s right. It has to be brought back into some kind of balance” (480). This is exactly where narrative comes in for Ty. He represents the ambassador of fiction’s critical conscience, teaching Mae (yet another) lesson: “Mae, I want you to imagine where all this is going,” he says (482), pointing to the key function of fiction as experimenting field of exploring possible threats (Fluck 14), unintended systemic flaws, and the inbuilt self-destructional tendencies of the information age. Ty concludes his moral lesson with a manifesto entitled “‘The Rights of Hu- mans in a Digital Age’,” which reads like an antithesis to the “Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace,” published in 1996 by John Perry Barlow, founding member of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, and advocating total freedom in this “global social space we are building to be naturally independent of the tyran- nies you seek to impose on us.” The Circle, in turn, declares the failure of cyber liberalism, making a claim for reconsidering human rights within the Internet’s concept of liberty: “‘Not every human activity can be measured’,” Ty’s manifesto begins, “‘The ceaseless pursuit of data to quantify the value of any endeavor is catastrophic to true understanding.’ ‘The barrier between public and private must remain unbreachable’” and, finally, resonating with Super Sad True Love Story’s call for non-existence, ‘We must all have the right to disappear’” (485). Although this declaration is never publicly announced nor fulfilled, The Circle makes a decidedly self-reflexive statement: if the capitalist-driven system of information control, whether corporate or governmental (or both) develops into a grotesque disfiguration that threatens the existence of (what is commonly associated with being) human, it is ’s task to point to such dangers, “slow all this down” and to create spaces of reflection and introspection (480). Although the novel im- plicitly clings to such a humanist notion of rationality, it also challenges the capac- ity of humans to exert control on information corporations. Ty’s mission to bring this message across fails exactly because he relies on Mae, an individual who only seemingly has the power to change the system—a corporate and informational cyborg, she is already deeply engrossed in the transparency dogma of the Circle, unable to recognize the potential dangers of the system. Unambiguous in its mor- alistic tone, The Circle yet refuses to offer a positive outlook on the future of American democracy and narrative fiction. 376 Regina Schober

A similarly dystopian view on the state of America is presented in Await Your Reply, in which a dried up reservoir in Nebraska creates a postapocalyptic vi- sion of the United States in a post-information era. Disillusioned and disoriented, Lucy attests that “now she could easily imagine the United States was already gone; the cities were burnt and the highways glutted with rusting cars that had never made it out of town” (124). Her isolation and lack of knowledge in the des- ert of Nebraska mirror the lack of relevant knowledge in the inundating, yet not invigorating depths of information overload, corrupted by the “ruin lifestyle” of a dislocated consumer generation (230). Yet, the novel suggests at least the pos- sibility of reversal: “I have to change direction,” Miles/Hayden constantly thinks (140). Even though his quest for meaning is circular and non-fulfilling, the novel lays open the possibility of turning around, questioning the inevitability of human subjugation to a dehumanizing consumer culture. Like Await Your Reply, A Visit from the Goon Squad embraces, at least on a formal level, the epistemological potential of the new media. Although it explicitly laments the loss of ‘authentic- ity’ in the information age, the novel also calls on human responsibility to (re-) instate value. “It is in ourselves that we should rather seek to find those fixed places, contemporaneous with different years,” the epigraph from Marcel Proust reads. Benny’s nostalgia for a seemingly ‘purer’ past without digital information is deconstructed as a false construction of a pre-9/11 America. To make sense of national identity, the novel suggests, means to look forward and to take into ac- count the potential of change in the persistent construction of the self.

Conclusion: (Re)claiming the Field

The four contemporary American novels discussed reflect the implications of the new media for human agency, knowledge, and their own mediality, while dis- cussing the impact of the global information age on America’s position in shift- ing transnational entanglements. That all these dimensions of socio-cultural and political transformation are, as Liu suggests, “channeled symbolically and /or instrumentally through narratives of media change,” reflects the prominent role fiction ascribes to processes of (re)cognition, experience, and representation of our world through mediation—all of which are fundamental capacities ascribed to the human, as the central category in these novels (5). To reclaim the ‘human’ means to reclaim the importance of narrative as a means to reflect on the shifting functions of human subjectivity. These relational subjectivities neither fully claim autonomy nor do they succumb to the totalizing control of technological systems. The novels are thus situated in a complicated field of recognition, affirmation, and critique of distributed systems of human and non-human agency, cognition, and power. Rather than proclaiming the end of the human in apocalyptic tales of tech- nological determinism, they engage, however critically, with a literary project that imagines “human survival” (Hayles, How We Became Posthuman 291). In doing so, they mirror the state of novels as “natural symbionts” rather than as “natural enemies” of new media, and, ultimately, of America in a transnational context of Between Nostalgic Resistance and Critical Appropriation 377 increasing geopolitical complexity (Hayles, How We Think 176; Manovich 225). If the human is not regarded as necessarily being threatened but rather supple- mented and enhanced by technology, then the same may be true for (print) novels. If “what’s missing [in the network society] is what is more than information: the qualitative dimension of experience or the continuum of analog space in between all those ones and zeroes,” the novel may fill exactly this blank space, retrieving the intangible and uncategorizable voids left by digital information (Shaviro 249). It is exactly this discourse of recovery, resistance, and resilience that is devel- oped and interrogated in these novels in their self-preserving quest for existence. Yet, they create and evoke different responses to the existential threat that the new media pose. Unwilling to surrender, they remind their readers of the value of nar- rative in an age determined by database and big data, while negotiating forms of cohabitation in an increasingly diverse and fluid information ecosystem. Despite the nostalgic and often decisively critical depiction of the new media in these nov- els, they develop strategies to re-position themselves in a new media environment by formulating cultural functions as complementary media products and second- order observation systems. Thus, they confirm an existential optimism inherent in Marshall McLuhan’s prediction that “[a] new medium is never an addition to an old one, nor does it leave the old one in peace. It never ceases to oppress the older media until it finds new shapes and positions for them” Essential( McLuhan 278).

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