Now You See It, Now You Don’t

Performing Literature in Transition

Abstract

Now that the book-based technology of literature is critically mutating, literary studies have the chance to look again at the material interfaces mediating its writing and reading performances. This historical juncture is bringing to light the contingent and performative nature of the literary as event. I propose to stage the encounter between text and matter, literature and contingency in three sites where the literary emerges and demerges as a property not inherent in an object but emergent in a relation: digitization; affect in reading; writing performance in contemporary art. My theoretical assemblage joins affect theory with Rancière’s promise of radical equality heralded by the “aesthetic regime”. I am looking for the non-specific heteronomy of the literary and its suppressed links with event, affect, aisthesis. My starting and end points are in Norwich, where Rory Macbeth has copied the text of Thomas More’s Utopia on the walls of a condemned building. Displaced and unreadable, it is the perfect resting ground where to start re-reading the ‘literary’.