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    Bots: A Posthuman Novella Glitched from an Essay on Surrealism and A. I.
    Bots: A Posthuman Novella Glitched from an Essay on Surrealism and A. I.
    Bots: A Posthuman Novella Glitched from an Essay on Surrealism and A. I.
    Ebook113 pages1 hour

    Bots: A Posthuman Novella Glitched from an Essay on Surrealism and A. I.

    By Justice Koolhaas

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    About this ebook

    ‘Bots’ was originally an essay that examined how life and the language to express it are getting so boxed-in by work patterns that they are becoming robotised. Instead of the revolution in life promised by surrealism’s ‘automatic’ creative methods, wrote Koolhaas, we now have new kinds of automation that amount to its opposite: economic slavery. However, her faulty vintage word processing machine had other ideas.
    One of its function keys had a bug that corrupted her text files. Rather than get her university support team to ‘patch’ the problem, she used it to solve another problem: how to find a new paradigm of consciousness in literature that accounts for changes in what we understand to be ‘consciousness’ that are brought about by technology. She soon abandoned her essay and corrupted her text files with abandon. A posthuman novella was born.
    And yet, to call ‘Bots’ a novella is misleading. Its jumpiness is legion: one moment it reads like an essay, the next it is a fictional account; one moment an unspecified narrator speaks in monologue, the next we encounter a dialogue between unannounced characters. Their identities – clearly based on historical figures in the history of computing – are far from clear. They recount their struggles with unnamed robotics administrators in detail, yet bizarrely so. Post-industrial English cities form the backdrop to the ensuing techno-poetics as they drift from anxieties to allusions to equations to words accidentally created by a malfunctioning machine.
    Better known as a cultural theorist, Koolhaas achieved in ‘Bots’ the most extreme book since James Joyce’s ‘Finnegans Wake’, Virginia Woolf’s ‘The Waves’ or Harry Mathews’s ‘Tlooth’. C. M. Cohen does an excellent job in setting out the novella’s context. Writers will discover how the novella’s ‘glitch’ approach to writing is an exciting avenue for exploring new possibilities in working with technical failure. Cultural theorists will find a new addition to posthumanism from a surprising source: the thought of Maurice Blanchot. Blanchot’s notions of anonymity, freedom, community, and the ‘limit-experience’ open up angles to the posthuman that readers of Sherry Turkle, N. Katherine Hayles, and Donna Haraway will recognise as original and highly productive. Most of all, readers in general will find the introduction illuminating and the novella itself their ‘shock read’ for 2016.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherJustice Koolhaas
    Release dateJun 12, 2016
    ISBN9781310063176
    Bots: A Posthuman Novella Glitched from an Essay on Surrealism and A. I.
    Author

    Justice Koolhaas

    Born in Bloemfontein in 1940, Justice Koolhaas was raised in Utrecht and Lausanne. Her twin, Patience, died shortly after birth. Justice always felt that her philosophical interests were a search for presences that haunt everyday life beyond the reach of conventional rationality. Her recently discovered oeuvre extends theory in the humanities and arts beyond its existing frontiers and expectations.She came top her class at the Sorbonne. She studied under Roland Barthes and was privately admired and supported by several European intellectuals. Despite this, she found few doors open to her in the academy. Her sense of foreignness became integral to her work, particularly her adherence to writing in Dutch, which kept her out of print, along with other more personal reasons. Since her death in 2011, her family has committed to ensuring that all her work is published posthumously. Its purview hybridises disciplines ranging from philosophy to sociology to anthropology to cultural studies to media studies to her most beloved subject area of all, art. Her span of theorists, writers and artists includes Pierre Bourdieu, Hélène Cixous, Guy Debord, Jacques Derrida, Tracey Emin, Donna Haraway, G.W.F. Hegel, Martin Heidegger, Franz Kafka, Julia Kristeva, Barbara Kruger, Jean-François Lyotard, Karl Marx, Marshall McLuhan, Friedrich Nietzsche, Plato, Arnold Schwarzenegger, Hannah Wilke, Frank Zappa, and Slavoj Žižek.C.M. Cohen completed his linguistics PhD in 1980. He worked as an interpreter for the U.N. for 23 years before acting as a consultant translator whose clients have included the South African government, the Commonwealth Games committee, the Antarctic Survey, and several mining corporations. He is now retired. His friendship with Koolhaas, along with his professional experience outside academia, bring a deep empathy in his translations and introductions of her highly stylised literary and philosophical legacy.

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      Book preview

      Bots - Justice Koolhaas

      Bots

      By Justice Koolhaas

      Smashwords Edition.

      Copyright 2005 Justice Koolhaas.

      Introduction copyright 2016 C. M. Cohen.

      Acknowledgements

      The research and translation for this text was assisted by private donations. On this occasion, a cover price has been added to help offset the production costs.

      The translator would like to, as ever, thank Sofietje and Jan. Special thanks to our intern, Volker Schultz, for help with translating from Afrikaans, and clearing the additional typos that arose in this project. Those weekend shifts made an immeasurable difference.

      Cover design: D. Janssen.

      Table of Contents

      Introduction

      Chapter 0: What is Manifest?

      Chapter 1: Collegiate

      Chapter 2: Sous Sioux

      Chapter 3: Robots

      Chapter 4: B$ll

      Chapter 5: Business

      Chapter 6: Conflict

      Chapter 7: All About Ada

      Textual Connexivities

      Also by Justice Koolhaas

      Introduction

      Foreword: Extreme Fiction is an Extreme Sport

      The first time I read James Joyce’s Finnegan’s Wake, I was careful when telling my friends and colleagues about it. My fear was that they might think I had not read it, or that if they thought I had, then they would think I was a crank, or a liar, or worst of all, pretentious. The book is among those that are notorious for the extremities they go to in defying expectations readers might have about what makes a fiction a fiction. Authors such as Samuel Beckett, Virginia Woolf, William Burroughs, Gertrude Stein and Georges Bataille have shocked for decades with their fractured narratives, invented words, and unorthodox writing techniques. Authors such as Harry Mathews, Clarice Lispector, and Raymond Roussel have shown that the spirit of extreme experimentation is not limited to better-known literary figures.

      Reading a new book that has a growing reputation for difficulty (and let us be honest – downright weirdness) always feels like an adventure that you will be prepared for by your previous reads from the bizarre bazaar. The true measure of that new book’s value is when your preparedness turns out to be nothing of the sort. This is what makes telling anybody that you have (finally) read it the next challenge. Will they collapse in laughter as you read them excerpts from something so unfamiliar and outlandish? Will they say that you are mad? Or will they go quiet and nod, a sure indication of jealousy at someone being ‘ahead of the curve’? One thing is for sure: a new and tough book is always a conversation piece.

      My conversations about Bots started after finishing reading the manuscript on my fourth attempt. My difficulty in ‘getting it’ had vexed the executors of the Koolhaas estate. They were anxious that I select one of her fictions to add to her growing body of publications. The danger in that body consisting only of cultural theory was that she could get pigeonholed and consequently not read as an author of fiction.

      That danger has now passed. Bots, for all its peculiarities, is here, and its shortness helps to harness its out-thereness. I hope that my introductory material, something that I obviously did not have the benefit of, will also prove helpful in setting out the theoretical context that Koolhaas operated in. Her blurring of literature and philosophy is worthy of Maurice Blanchot and is a clever addition to posthuman thought. Although her novella is not a theoretical text, my introduction nonetheless and by necessity offers some detailed analysis with references listed, as usual, under Textual Connexivities. The less theoretically minded and the out-and-out confident can always bypass my introduction and ‘dive in’.

      Whatever your response is to her novella, it will give you plenty to add to your conversations about serious literature.

      C. M. Cohen

      Lausanne, 2016.

      A New Posthuman Paradigm in Literature

      It is becoming a well-worn maxim that machines are getting more like humans while humans are getting turned into robots. One need only read the news to discover how the latest developments in artificial intelligence, or ‘A.I.’, are inching computers eerily closer towards attaining human consciousness. This narrative trope gives us a tradition in sci-fi in which we will (inevitably) find ourselves at war with machines. The narratives that pervade this tradition are often encoded within a Christian account of the end-of-times. The messiah is an essential figure in this brand of sci-fi. He, for he is typically a man, leads a fight against the forces of evil represented by the machines. Cybernetic crossbreeds of humans and machines therefore have to be forced into either a ‘good’ or ‘evil’ box to service the religious black-and-white subtext to an erstwhile appearance of secularity and reasoning that ‘extrapolates’ today’s technology into the future. Some variations on the machines-getting-more-like-humans theme include the converse humans-getting-turned-into-robots theme. For example, in The Matrix (Wachowski 1999), Neo is born into a humankind that is wired into a slavery to machines from which he must save both himself and that humankind. Ultimately, the man vs machine narrative is a conflict that uses simplistic depictions of ‘good’ and ‘evil’ so that a messiah can embody the supremacy of the dominant social group/s in the culture the story is written for.*

      Good vs evil narratives have doubtlessly survived the millennia as a way to define ethics and normalise ‘behaviour’. Inserting robots has proven to be a way to capitalise on something that works. Although not strictly sci-fi, Bots offers a compelling alternative.

      The philosophical current beneath this move can be understood by recourse not to the usual ‘posthuman’ cultural theorists – Sherry Turkle, N. Katherine Hayles, Donna Haraway, and so on – but to the novelist and essayist, Maurice Blanchot. His writings are not usually associated with posthumanism at all. And yet Koolhaas frequently referenced him in the margins to her manuscript. So, loth as I am to exclude these references, and keen to explain their relevance, I have decided to briefly explain them away here in the introduction.

      To begin with the heroism we noted above, it was something that implied for Blanchot that which:

      ‘appear[ed] not only small-minded but mistaken. … Great historical figures, heroes, great men of war no less than artists shelter themselves from death in this way … it is vain to want to remain oneself above and beyond one’s disappearance … and, moreover, the opposite of what one wants, which is not to subsist in the leisurely eternity of idols, but to change, to disappear in order to cooperate in the universal transformation: to act anonymously and not to be a pure, idle name.’ (Blanchot 1982: 94)

      Note the importance in the above of the ‘act’ over the ‘name’, the verb over the noun, the event over the object. The ideal to the ‘hero’ or the ‘great work’ – the desire to immortalise one’s name: all these things attempt to evade the inevitability of death. These are instantly recognisable to us as vain objectives. Blanchot set against this an ideal, a depersonalised approach to creative work that could be said to characterise Koolhaas’s lifelong attention to being a marginal writer:

      ‘Any true action, accomplished anonymously in the world and for the sake of the world’s ultimate perfection seems to affirm a triumph over death that is more rigorous, more certain.’ (Ibid.: 94/5)

      Indeed, we can go further. Anonymity in authorship, losing oneself in one’s textual production, describes Koolhaas’s ‘mistakes’ in copying and then

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