Claudia Benthien: “Into the Black Box: Hypercommunication, Digital Infrastructures and the Critique of Digitality in Book Poetry”

Abstract:

Contemporary poets reflect on digitalization by formulating an internet critique that goes beyond mere observations of current practices of hyper-communication and connectivity. Their poems demonstrate technical knowledge about invisible digital infrastructures, in particular the hardware of data flows, e.g., the transatlantic deep-see data cables financed by technology giants like Meta Platforms (formerly Facebook) and Microsoft. One of the aesthetic strategies employed is the use of alienation effects integrating abbreviations, shortcuts, strike-throughs, and elements of (usually hidden) computer code. Another strategy is confronting intimate conversations between two lovers or close friends within a poem with “disturbing” factual language about programming or dystopian ecological disasters caused by, e.g., malfunctioning server farms. Thus, contemporary poets “dive” into the black box of the internet and disclose their findings paradoxically in the form of poems printed in the “analogue” medium of the book.

Claudia Benthien is professor of German literature and cultural theory at the University of Hamburg and presently Principal Investigator of the ERC project “Poetry in the Digital Age”. She is a widely published specialist in German literature and culture from 1600 to the present whose work focuses on cultural theory, gender studies, intellectual history, aesthetics as well as intermedial studies. Among her book public publications are Skin: On the Cultural Border between Self and the World (Co­lum­bia UP, 2002); The Literariness of Media Art, written together with Jordis Lau and Maraike M. Marxsen (Routledge, 2019) and Public Poetry. Lyrik im urbanen Raum [poetry in urban spaces] (De Gruyter, 2022), written together with Norbert Gestring. She is also the editor of the new book series Poetry in the Digital Age (De Gruyter).