Fountain of Shadows: Schizo-poetics in convergence culture

Nathan Jones

Research output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceedingChapter

Abstract

How does it feel to read a text which is emerging only as a result of its assimilation into a converged culture? Where can radical language operate from, when everything in the world is exactly the same?

This essay and creative text looks at the role of poetics in turning language into a tactical differential technology, and the continuing necessity of the figure of the schizo in cultural critique – drawing on a tradition which has utilized depathologised schizophrenia since 1970s, and bringing it into contact with what has been described by media theorists such as Henry Jenkins as convergence culture: the increasingly complex relationships between three concepts - “media convergence, participatory culture, and collective intelligence.” Making use of unconventional type and formatting decisions to emblematize the simultaneity of ‘writerly’ and ‘readerly’ impulses in a performative language practice, I look at the ways a Schizo Culture identified by thinkers around the 1970s, can be read alongside our Convergence Culture as media converge in digital space, and then look at the ways contemporary writers are melding and revisiting schizoid language practices for a convergent era.
Original languageEnglish
Title of host publicationTorque #1
Subtitle of host publicationMind, Language and Technology
EditorsNathan Jones, Sam Skinner
PublisherLink Editions
Pages78-89
Number of pages12
ISBN (Print)978-1-291-99147-5
Publication statusPublished - 2014

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