Engl507

Log 2: Against Hermes?

On page 62 of Excommunication, Alexander Galloway writes:

hermeneutic interpretation and immanent iridescence are, at the turn of the millennium, gradually withering away; ascending in their place is the infuriation of distributed systems. In other words, and in more concrete terms, we can expect a tendential fall in the efficiency of both images and texts, in both poems and problems, and a marked increase in the efficiency of an entirely different mode of mediation, the system, the machine, the network.

As the second entry in your research log, please use approximately two hundred words (total) to respond to the following two sets of questions:

• Generally speaking, are you persuaded by Galloway's observation? For instance, do you find the assumptions under which he is working compelling?
• Regardless of whether you agree with Galloway, what might be some of the implications of his claims? What kind of scholarship can or might "infuriation" produce? How might literary or cultural criticism change? Here, feel free to speculate or conjecture a bit, especially since we have not yet examined some of the machine- or system-based examples he references.

Don't worry about exhausting too much effort on this one. It shouldn't consume more than thirty to sixty minutes of your time. I'm just curious to hear your initial impressions, before we start unpacking things in more detail this semester. Thanks! Get in touch with questions.