Steve Tomasula

The Art and Science of New Media Fiction

Edited by David Banash

NEW YORK • LON DON • NEW DELHI • SY DN EY

Bloomsbury AcademicAn imprint of Bloomsbury Publishing Inc

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Illustrations ixAcknowledgments xiAbbreviations for Steve Tomasula’s Major Works xii

Introduction: Composition, Emergence, Sensation: Science and New Media in the Novels of Steve Tomasula David Banash and Andrea Spain 1

Part One Bodies, Signs, Codes, and Books

1 The Work of Art after the Mechanical Age: Materiality, Narrative, and the Real in the Work of Steve Tomasula Mary K. Holland 27

2 “The Material is the Message”: Coded Bodies and Embodied Codes in Steve Tomasula’s VAS: An Opera in Flatland Anthony Enns 51

3 Encoding the Body, Questioning Legacy: Reflections on Intersemiotic Experiments in Steve Tomasula’s VAS: An Opera in Flatland Françoise Sammarcelli 75

4 Steve Tomasula’s VAS, or What if Novels Were Books? R. M. Berry 99

Part Two Genealogies of Representation

5 Literary Archeologies in Steve Tomasula’s The Book of Portraiture Flore Chevaillier 117

6 Beyond Human Scale: Steve Tomasula’s The Book of Portraiture N. Katherine Hayles 133

Contents

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Contentsviii

7 Mining the Gap: Word, Image, and Loss in Tomasula’s The Book of Portraiture Birger Vanwesenbeeck 147

Part Three New Media and the Novel

8 Touch and Decay: Tomasula’s TOC on iPad Kathi Inman Berens 167

9 Intermediality in Steve Tomasula’s TOC: A New Media Novel: A Semiological Analysis Anne Hurault-Paupe 183

10 Ontological Metalepses, Unnatural Narratology, and Locality: A Politics of the [[ Page ]] in Tomasula’s VAS & TOC Lance Olsen 209

Part Four Writing Wonder

11 A Book, an Atlas, and an Opera: Steve Tomasula’s Fictions of Science as Science Fiction Pawel Frelik 227

12 “Do We Not Bleed?” “The Color of Flesh” in a Pop Cyborg World Anne Larue 241

13 Enumeration and the Form of the Short Story in Steve Tomasula’s Once Human Françoise Palleau-Papin 259

14 Steve Tomasula’s Work of Wonder Anne-Laure Tissut 273

Afterword 285

Contributors 305Bibliography 310Index 320

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IntroductionComposition, Emergence, Sensation:

Science and New Media in the Novels of Steve Tomasula

David Banash and Andrea Spain

Composition is aesthetic, and what is not composed is not a work of art. However, technical composition, the work of the material that often calls on science (mathematics, physics, chemistry, anatomy), is not to be confused with aesthetic composition, which is the work of sensation. Only the latter fully deserves the name composition, and a work of art is never produced by or for the sake of technique.

Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari

In 1965, the English novelist J. G. Ballard became the prose editor for Ambit, the avant-garde literary magazine. Asked to explain his guiding principles for selecting new work, Ballard replied, “I wanted more science in Ambit, since science was reshaping the world.”1 Ballard was not being ironic, nor was he talking about science fiction as it is usually practiced. He was looking for work that would somehow engage the unprecedented changes in human perceptions and experiences of everyday life that science was inevitably producing. These alterations of life and its organization were brought about not only because of the new realities of nuclear war, the space age, and the discovery of DNA, but also by more subtle changes, like statistics and computer modeling that reshaped psychology and sociology. At stake was the very definition of the human. Ballard was also keenly aware that whenever possible every new scientific discovery and technical advance was exploited by capitalists and circulated by emerging media, also helping to utterly transform practices of everyday life. Ballard believed that most writers of his time were sadly disconnected from this revolution in perception and meaning; they were either oblivious to it or actively disavowing it in rehearsals of romanticism, realism or modernism that merely echoed the revolutionary

1 J. G. Ballard, Miracles of Life: From Shanghai to Shepperton, An Autobiography (London: Fourth Estate, 2008), 211.

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Steve Tomasula2

aesthetics and pleasures of decidedly past moments. What Ballard sensed was the need for modes of writing that would produce a literature that addresses and even performs these transformations in perception, scale, and practice. Today, in addition to Ballard’s postwar realities, the new innovations and impacts of genetics, digital networks, and big data are accelerating these changes. One way of grasping the work of Steve Tomasula is to see him as the very writer Ballard imagined, a novelist willing to abandon the comforts of tradition and invent ways to encounter and represent a new world. The aim of this collection is to bring together contributors who demonstrate the myriad ways Steve Tomasula writes a literature that is equal to the complexity of these new realities.

To date, Tomasula has written four novels, each more formally innovative than the last. VAS: An Opera in Flatland (2002) takes on the biotech revolution and brings the innovations of new media into the pages of a codex. IN&OZ (2003) is a meditation on art, design, and life under the sign of the commodity. The Book of Portraiture (2006) is a genealogy of representation that moves from the invention of the alphabet to the bleeding edge of the bioart movement. TOC: A New Media Novel (2009) reverses the movement of VAS, becoming a novel that exists outside the codex by using the resources of digital new media to meditate on life and time. A collection of Tomasula’s stories, on themes including disability, cyborgs, courtly romance, surveillance societies, anatomy, and scientific methods, has been collected in Once Human: Stories (2014), and just as with his other print novels, the influences of new media are everywhere to be found. In addition, Tomasula is a prolific essayist, and he has written critical work on experimental writing, representation, bioart, and design. Indeed, had he never written a novel, his critical work would make him a leading figure in these fields. However, it is his work as a novelist that has won Tomasula a devoted readership who see his books as uniquely addressing the problems and possibilities of our era. While the contributors to this volume will offer sustained and nuanced readings of all these works, this introduction contextualizes Tomasula broadly, sketching the constellation of science, art, and new media that can help us navigate his fictional universe.

Life sciences

At first glance, Steve Tomasula’s novels seem impossibly hip. As one flips through the pages, the images, typography, and unabashed will to experiment are all there, creating a dramatic first impression. And yet the careful reader moving at novel-speed through these texts will also find that these stories,

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Introduction 3

with their dizzying leaps into historical contexts that generate the genealogies of our new scientific and technological realities, unfold through plots that could often be best described as Edwardian comedies of manners. One might say that if the first impression of Tomasula is that of a cutting-edge experimentalist, the careful reader will slowly realize it is also impossible to grasp his work without remembering the novels of E. M. Forster. Like Forster, in all of Tomasula’s work it is the small, recognizable, and often domestic conflicts and desires of his characters that become enmeshed with larger forces of change and evolution that drive the plots along. It is from these quotidian, often trivial frictions that Tomasula is able to hang such diverse images, typography, and design. Of course it is tempting to say this is how science fiction has always operated, taking the struggles of the individual and connecting them to the cosmic, but it would be difficult to think of Tomasula’s work as primarily science fiction for several reasons.2 Firstly, there is almost always a strong sense of the domestic and the rather drab realities of an everyday life, be it that of a court painter, an early psychologist at the turn of the century, or a humble mechanic in our contemporary moment. Secondly, rather than imagined futures, his characters much more often struggle with imagined pasts, as Tomasula contextualizes their small and present problems as the expression of vast historical forces, from the invention of writing to the very evolution of an animal capable of speech.3 Thirdly, rather than imagining the impact of a particular technology, as much science fiction from the golden-age to cyberpunk so often does, Tomasula works from a deeper and more coherent insight that drives along his work and that is touched on in almost every essay in this volume: that the evolutionary forces and material expressions of biological life are enmeshed in every cultural expression, so that both the biological and the cultural exist in feedback loops whose resonances produce the worlds we experience. This insight drives not only the plots of most of his novels, but indeed their very innovative forms.

Tomasula’s emphasis on language’s similarities to processes of evolution should not be mistaken for the most often repeated interpretations of Jacques

2 Tomasula’s work does have much in common with the science fiction that is co-extensive with the postmodern novel, including science-fiction writers like Samuel R. Delany, William Gibson, or Octavia Butler. For a sustained discussion of this issue, see Pawel Frelik’s essay in this volume.

3 For an elaboration of aesthetic work expressing the “facts” of historical forces, see Andrea Spain’s work on Henri Bergson and Gilles Deleuze’s concept of “the event” in “Event, Exceptionalism, and the Imperceptible: The Politics of Nadine Gordimer’s The Pickup,” MFS: Modern Fiction Studies 58.4 (Winter 2012), 747–772. See also “Sensation and the Art of Capture,” Trickhouse 7 (2009), accessed September 1, 2014, http://www.trickhouse.org/vol7/guestcurator/andreaspain.html on imperceptible forces in contemporary experimental writing and visual art

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Steve Tomasula4

Derrida’s claim that “There is nothing outside the text,”4 or Jean Baudrillard’s world of simulation, in which “the map precedes the territory.”5 In the dominant reception of both these poststructuralist formulations, différance as the movement of language and simulacra as the multiplication of images in a series of infinite regress are the result of a decidedly human activity, and this cultural circulation of code produces the ephemeral worlds of meaning that we experience. However, in this reading of poststructuralism, the operation of meaning is always virtual, detaching representation from the material world, lifting sense away from the referent. Hence the charges of linguistic idealism. This over-emphasis on the discursive was perhaps essential to deconstruct the idea of “the theme of God’s book (nature or law, or indeed natural law).”6 Tomasula, however, revives the idea of “the book of nature,” but he does not do so in the spirit of a naive and totalizing faith in some transparent and absolutely available, stable presence. Instead, Tomasula sees the cultural production of meaning and the physical realities of nature meeting on the plane of the human body, and not merely a body understood as an inert surface of social inscription. Through his deep and thoroughgoing readings of the history and philosophy of science, as well as his continued scholarship in contemporary science proper, Tomasula’s writing answers the charge posed to cultural theorists by philosopher Elizabeth Grosz:

We need to understand not only how culture inscribes bodies—a preoccupation of much social and cultural theory in the past decade or more—but, more urgently, what these bodies are such that inscription is possible, what it is in the nature of bodies, in biological evolution, that opens them up to cultural transcription, social immersion, and production, that is, to political, cultural, and conceptual evolutions. We need to understand, with perhaps more urgency than in the past, the ways our biologies work with, and are amenable to, the kinds of cultural variation that concern politics and political struggle.7

At the heart of all his work, Tomasula takes up the ways in which the biological and the cultural are enmeshed. Unlike earlier theories of culture

4 Jacques Derrida, Of Grammatology, trans. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1997), 158.

5 Jean Baudrillard, Simulation and Simulacra, trans. Sheila Faria Glaser (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1994), 1.

6 Derrida, Of Grammatology, 16.7 Elizabeth Grosz, The Nick of Time: Politics, Evolution, and the Untimely (Durham: Duke

Univ. Press, 2004), 2. Also see her chapter “Vibration, Animal, Sex, Music,” in Chaos, Territory, Art: Deleuze and the Framing of Earth (New York: Columbia, 2008), 25–62.

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Introduction 5

that sought to create a firewall between the prison house of language and the forces of bodily materiality (i.e., the natural world), Tomasula’s work seeks to break down that wall in artistic practice, elaborating the ways in which the radical contingency of both nature and culture are caught up within one another. In essence, his books operate as if it is not possible to think about representation without also thinking the body and the entire history of evolution out of which “the cultural” emerges. This points to a much broader and far more interesting reading of Derrida’s formulation, “there is nothing outside the text.” As Grosz would have it, “Darwin’s own account uncannily anticipates Derridian différance”8 because both evolution and language operate not through stable and immutable identities (the book of nature) but rather through bodies that endlessly differ in processes of emergence and proliferation, processes in which species and languages themselves can only be grasped as open-ended, variating systems that have no teleology. To grasp the unfolding of life as variation, for Grosz, “we need to understand the body, not as an organism or entity in itself, but as a system, or series of open-ended systems, functioning within other huge systems it cannot control, through which it can access and acquire its abilities and capacities,”9 as the body clearly does through systems including language and art. These systems are the processes of evolution itself that give rise to our bodies and through which culture is itself evolving and feeding back into the process of the evolution that is its condition of possibility.

In all Tomasula’s works, a refrain declares the simultaneous operations of life and representation. It is at the center of VAS, the book itself bound in a facsimile of skin, both a representation and a body. The narrator, Square, has to rethink his whole life through the history of eugenics and the newer science of genetics, so much so that at one point the narrative dissolves into a representation of the genetic code of an entire gene, some twenty-five pages of AGCT permutations. In VAS Square realizes that editing sentences and editing bodies are similar operations of emergence, each process as unstable and malleable and open to différance as the other. This twin-movement of life and representation can be found in less expected moments in Tomasula’s work. In IN&OZ, the protagonist, Mechanic, has an epiphany that transforms him into an artist. It happens when he is hard at work, repairing an automobile transmission. He removes its cover and stares into the gears, suddenly seeing much more than a banal machine:

Though he has seen gears like this thousands of times before, it had never once occurred to him how eloquently their polished metal

8 Grosz, The Nick of Time, 21.9 Grosz, The Nick of Time, 3.

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Steve Tomasula6

teeth explained his life: their mesh and power ratios may as well have been engineers, and foundry men, all on a shaft, with machinists, and mechanics, as his father had been, and the farmers, and cooks, as his mother had been, who fed the factory workers, and highway builders who made it possible for everyone to get jobs that brought into existence the need for marvels such as cars which needed transmissions which needed gears which needed him.10

In this metaphor, Mechanic imagines the teeth of the gears as the bodies of the workers who produced not only the car, but the entire culture that is implied by the car’s existence. And yet this is not just the function of the objects of culture. The objects are caught up with bodies, with mechanical and sexual reproduction, so Mechanic imagines his mother, and father, and their ancestors, a whole chain of life’s emergence in a churning feedback loop with the culture that produced them and the variable bodies that enable the future reproduction of bodies and machines. In a very important way, the metaphor breaks down by dissolving the machine’s presumed identity into complex, interlacing systems of organisms, the machinic, affects, and effects. Material cultural production—machines, factories, agricultural production and distribution (via the bodily labor of farmers, cooks, and mothers)—together with the virtual (generative affective life, desire, gendered imaginaries, and strains of the reproductive family), becomes “a complex power ratio,” a mesh that brings about the contingency of his birth: complex cultural and biological variation “brought into existence the need for marvels such as cars which needed transmissions which needed gears which needed him.” It is not that his ancestors are like the parts of the machine; they in fact pass between life and the machinic, and produce consistencies in life, compositions. For Tomasula, metaphor passes into the literal if only we change the scale of our vision. In their chapter, “1837: Of the Refrain” in Capitalism and Schizophrenia, Deleuze and Guattari describe such overlapping, vibratory systems as “milieus”:

the living thing has an exterior milieu of materials, an interior milieu of composing elements and composed substances, an intermediary milieu of membranes and limits, and an annexed milieu of energy sources and action-perceptions. Every milieu is coded, a code being defined by periodic repetition; but each code is in a perpetual state of transcoding or transduction. Transcoding and transduction is the manner in which

10 Steve Tomasula, IN&OZ (Madison: Ministry of Whimsy, 2003), 19–20.

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Introduction 7

one milieu serves as the basis for another, or conversely is established atop another milieu, dissipates in it or is constituted in it. The notion of the milieu is not unitary: not only does the living thing continually pass from one milieu to another, but the milieus pass into one another; they are essentially communicating.11

The point that this is not nature versus culture but nature opening out to culture is powerfully underscored when Mechanic turns to yet another metaphor to explain the power of this shift in scale and vision of the world. Mechanic imagines that he is “a child, who upon overturning a rock and finding grubs reducing a apple to dirt is able to think for the first time, ‘That apple is I’ ” (IN 20).

The child’s image of the apple is one of interlacing systems. What the child realizes is that, like the apple, he too will be undone, just as Mechanic’s quotidian sense of himself is undone—quite literally decomposed—by his vision of contingency and emergence that suddenly reveals a very different plane of composition at a scale that Tomasula will call the posthuman. For Mechanic, this is a traumatic realization that creates an impasse, and the only way to move forward is to become an artist; art becomes a strategy for life. What we share with the grubs and the apple is our participation in a process made possible in part by our shared genetic code and its openness to variation, composition and decomposition. In his essay “Visualization, Scale, and the Emergence of Posthuman Narrative,” Tomasula writes,

Since the advent of Dolly the sheep—another watershed moment in how we see ourselves—much has been written about the material of the posthuman, and indeed it is easy to slide from a discussion of discourse into one of material concerns, for the two seem to form a Möbius strip that forces us to consider the individual person—even the body—in much more flexible terms than we have been accustomed. It is becoming increasingly easy to speak of human bodies as we have spoken of textual bodies—those “material-informational” entities Hayles refers to—for the very real cut-and-paste-and-burn mentality that has migrated to our bodies has translated on the literal body a vocabulary of instabilities generated by the proliferation of body texts: imitation, pastiche, influence, quotation, irony, puns, or significantly, plagiarism and copyright infringement.12

11 Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, vol. 2, trans. Brian Massumi (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987), 313.

12 Steve Tomasula, “Visualization, Scale, and the Emergence of Posthuman Narrative,” Sillages critiques 17 (2014): 15–16.

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Steve Tomasula8

One of the most important inspirations for Tomasula’s fiction, and a frequent subject of Tomasula’s essays, is the bio-artist Eduardo Kac, most famous for his work Alba, a genetically manipulated rabbit that glows fluorescent green. Kac has also created work, such as Genesis, that uses the genetic code as a text that is then transformed through the process of evolution. Kac himself coined the name “BioArt” to describe these new forms. Whether biological or aesthetic, that which was understood as relatively stable code is undone, and zoë and technē are realized as simultaneous processes of transcoding, or even better, transduction.13 Both meanings of “transduction” should be heard at once when conceptualizing cross-coding in Tomasula’s work: it must be simultaneously understood as a biological process by which “DNA is transferred … into another cell via a viral vector” and a physiological conversion of one sensory stimulus to the form of another. Tomasula plays with this crucial double sense, thinking the transduction of bio-text and the insinuation of altered code back into bodies as a process that rewrites bodily sense, but bodily sense also enters into the process of evolution and affects selection, so the two form a complex feedback loop. This process of multidimensional transduction happens almost as easily as re-writing sentences, again demonstrating the force of historical processes of representation in the unfolding of life’s variation. As Manuel Delanda writes,

Whether the system in question is composed of molecules or of living creatures, it will exhibit endogenously generated stable states, as well as sharp transitions between states, as long as there is feedback and an intense flow of energy coursing through the system. As biology begins to include these nonlinear dynamical phenomena in its models … the notion of a “fittest design” will lose its meaning … . As the belief in a fixed criterion of optimality disappears from biology, real historical processes come to reassert themselves once more.14

In his essay “Genetic Art and the Aesthetics of Biology,” Tomasula surveys the surprisingly long history of the bioart movement, locating its origins in ancient practices of breeding and flower cultivation that are recognized first as modern art in 1934, when photographer Edward Steichen mounted a show of genetically altered delphiniums at the Museum of Modern Art.15

13 Oxford English Dictionary, online ed., s.v. “Transduction.”14 Manuel De Landa, A Thousand Years of Nonlinear History (New York: Zone, 1997) 14.15 Steve Tomasula, “Genetic Art and the Aesthetics of Biology,” Leonardo: The Journal of the

International Society for the Arts, Sciences and Technologies 35.2 (2002): 143.

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Introduction 9

Tomasula also points out that the techniques used by artists like Kac are not really so new, having been used in labs to do everything from cancer research to developing new seeds since the 1970s.16 What is new is using such techniques to make art, and the art then raises a host of ethical and legal questions that are never asked behind closed corporate doors where profit is the guiding principle. As Tomasula puts it, art that addresses the fact that genes can now be rewritten like sentences emphasizes the everyday reality that “change is occurring, whether artists join in the discussion or not.”17

Sensation and art

As evidenced by the work of philosophers like Elizabeth Grosz, N. Katherine Hayles, and many others, as well as scholarship about media such as Edward Tufte’s The Visual Display of Quantitative Information to Lev Manovich’s The Language of New Media, there is no shortage of conceptualization about how science and technologies are transforming everyday life and the meaning of the human. In a sense, this raises a question: why is there a need for the kind of novels that Tomasula writes? Moreover, given the utterly transformed mediascape we inhabit, why the novel at all? Clearly, Tomasula’s populations of readers suggest his work speaks to a necessity, an urgency, to render visible ephemeral relations and material forces informing our lives that previously we could only intuit. Tomasula facilitates a transduction between technological milieu (genetics, digital networks, etc.) and those of discourses of science, literature (including genre), and artistic practice, in which “not only does the living thing continually pass from one milieu to another, but the milieus pass into one another … are essentially communicating.”18

For Deleuze and Guattari, the milieus of science, philosophy, and art are distinguished by the compositions (or “blocks of consistency”) they create: science creates percepts; philosophy creates concepts; and art creates affects. As they put it in What Is Philosophy, while science gives us “figures and partial observers” in order to make perceptual life more predictable, it is art that organizes and makes available to us “the force of sensation.”19 Rather than serving to regulate and understand percepts as science hopes to do, Tomasula’s novels incarnate not only concepts for the new worlds in which

16 Tomasula, “Genetic Art and the Aesthetics of Biology,” 143.17 Tomasula, “Genetic Art and the Aesthetics of Biology,” 144.18 Gilles and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, 313.19 Gilles Deleuze Félix Guattari, What Is Philosophy, trans. Graham Burchell and Hugh

Tomlinson (London: Verso, 1994), 216.

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Steve Tomasula10

we live, but capture the sensations of these worlds in profound and powerful ways. While we may at some intellectual level understand that genetic engineering is happening or that we are the outcome of an inscrutable process of evolution, Tomasula creates work through which we can sense the force of the reality in which we now live. Even more importantly, this aesthetic sense might diversify our perceptual and affective capacities which then become the motor for further bodily diversification. In other words, through the form of the novel, Tomasula counters Mechanic’s initial despair at facing the compost of “God’s book,” making alternative sense and sensation available to his readers through what we call in the last section of this collection, “the work of wonder.”20

Despite the formal innovations that animate his work, Tomasula composes novels that have deep roots within the tradition of this bourgeois form. The word “novel” that appears in the subtitle of almost every book he has written is in part certainly a question of marketing, indeed, of searching for or even shelving his books. However, we want to affirm that the form of the novel carries far more weight than mere marketing department shorthand, that Tomasula must be understood as a novelist. Tomasula is most often thought of as a writer of the flesh, that is to say, of overlapping textures, especially because of how he thematizes and performs an interest in surfaces. Again, while the cover of VAS itself mimics the textures and tones of the skin, the collage elements create unreadable layers of image, text, and code that overwhelm and interrupt the narratives. Indeed, many critics figure Tomasula as a writer who is best understood as a painter or a typographer or designer. And yet, when Deleuze and Guattari distinguish the novelist from the painter, they emphatically state it is the house and its rooms that define the novel:

Everything begins with Houses, each of which must join up its sections and hold up compounds—Combray, the Guermantes’ house, the Verdurins’ salon—and the houses are themselves joined together according to interfaces, but a planetary Cosmos is already there, visible through the telescope, which ruins or transforms them and absorbs them into an infinity of the patch of uniform color.21

20 Pivotally anticipating critical theory’s turn to new materialisms, Paul Trembath’s early essay on aesthetic sense emphasizes the double meaning of sense, particularly resonant in the French sens and difficult to hear in translation. Trembath argues that sens at once evokes the bodily senses as well as sense as meaning. See Paul Trembath’s “Aesthetics without Art or Culture: Toward an Alternative Sense of Materialist Agency,” Strategies: A Journal of Theory, Culture And Politics 9–10 (1996): 122–151.

21 Deleuze and Guattari, What Is Philosophy.

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Introduction 11

In Mikhail Bakhtin’s sense, the novel creates chronotopes, as well as the peculiar, historically specific subjects that emerge in and through them. For Tomasula, interiorities produce subjects, but as the characters repeatedly answer to the refrains of bounded and scripted spaces they are also radically open to disorganizing, cosmic forces, and his characters repeatedly answer to the refrains of bounded and scripted spaces. In VAS, we first come upon Square and Circle in their house, staging a domestic drama that will blast Square out beyond those rooms, connecting him finally with “opening, mixing, dismantling, and reassembling increasingly unlimited compounds [of percept and affect] in accordance with the penetration of cosmic forces.”22 And yet, Square will end his story first in a box seat at the opera and then finally in a surgical theater. Take Mechanic in IN&OZ, who begins “in the Garage behind his house” (IN 9), there encountering that penetration of cosmic forces that will drive him from his home into an entirely new relation to the world only to settle for a toll booth that gives him both a “home” and an expansive view of the city with OZ in the distance. In The Book of Portraiture, the ancient trader traveling with a caravan has a sort of house as he sits on his carpet and scratches the first alphabet across the sand. He is so surprised by his invention that “[t]he sight of it caused him to get fully out of his carpet” (Book 8). From the carpet that functions as his portable home, delimiting the space of a human subject, the trader, like Mechanic and Square, senses these cosmic forces: “And he trembled to find himself among their number, for he could see this curse for the power it held, a spell or a power he could multiply” (Book 10). Even the least domestic of his novels, TOC, itself has rooms, from the box where the reader must vote to the hospital room and its drama of relation, and then beyond to all the frames for the screen, room after room. Whether or not Tomasula’s characters settle in bounded spaces of the home, each of his novels dramatizes the negotiation of its rooms, lines of exit, and infinite refrains of interiorization.

Deleuze and Guattari’s theory of art and the novel thus offers a powerful way to both locate Tomasula in the tradition of the novel, and to explain the formal power of his work. His work almost always begins in the delimited spaces of everyday sociality, be that the carpet of the caravan trader or suburban Flatland. Through the narratives of these characters, and the complex counterpoints that Tomasula collages together with readymade quotations, illustrations, fragments of scientific research, music, and a vast pastiche of genres ancient and modern, the recognizable bourgeois subject of the novel is revealed to be caught up in vast forces of history, of evolution, of their feedback, and Tomasula carries us along until we can no longer think

22 Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, What Is Philosophy, 188.

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Steve Tomasula12

of them as the bourgeois “human” at all. Still, his accomplishment is that he does not achieve this at the level of argument or opinion. His characters are not flimsy puppets for exposition. As Deleuze and Guattari put it, “What matters is not, as in bad novels, the opinions held by characters in accordance with their social types and characteristics but rather the relations of counterpoint into which they enter and the compounds of sensations that the characters either themselves experience or make felt in the becomings and their visions.”23 In other words, it isn’t what Square, or Mechanic, or the Vogue Model, says, or what happens to them, or even how they feel about any of it, that matters. Tomasula succeeds as novelist because he puts us in touch with the sensations of their worlds.

New media and scale

Tomasula’s novels emphasize a radical openness to other media while still managing to retain their formal consistency. The emphasis on the refrain as that which lends compositional consistency enables a shift in understanding the novel in relationship to new media. In a resonant example thinking through the novel’s relationship to cinema and the periodic press, Deleuze and Guattari find a consistency in works like John Dos Passos’s U. S. A. Trilogy even as it opens to the outside of its form writing that a “novelist like Dos Passos achieves an extraordinary art of counterpoint in the compounds he forms with characters, current events, biography, and camera eyes, at the same time as a plane of composition is expanded to infinity so as to sweep everything up into Life, into Death, the town cosmos.”24 Just as earlier novels incorporated the diary, the letter, and the illustration, the form of the novel can open itself to take in more and more. So, rather than a radical break with the novel, Tomasula might best be understood as developing the form. Again, in “Visualization, Scale, and the Emergence of Posthuman Narrative,” his essay on the novel, Tomasula writes,

… but in an age of interlocking subdivisions and identical restaurants, in a world that each year generates 100,000,000 Miracle Slacks™, each of which had to be filled by “HELLO! MY NAME IS:_______________,” in a country of actuary tables, and service manager uniforms (filled out by Service Managers), hip-hop fashions (filled out by Hip Hoppers), personalized mail-order catalogs, look-a-like Sports Heroes, News

23 Deleuze, What Is Philosophy, 188.24 Deleuze, What Is Philosophy, 188.

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Introduction 13

Teams and other types—that is, to paint a portrait of our time, do the particulars of name matter? What seems important is the ways in which millions of interactions made of individual movements, motives, desires and fears call into being patterns as surely as temperature, pressure and vapor form snowflakes, and snowflakes form storms, and storms create climates and other patterns—a Weltanschauung, as humans once called their cultural climate.25

The world that Tomasula describes is no longer that of Dos Passos’s newspapers and cinema camera, and certainly not the world of the handwritten letter or the illustrated novel of the nineteenth century, for it is also the world in which

people … no longer seduce one another face-to-face but Facebook to Facebook; nor do they—when they go to war—face off in linear trenches but launch attacks with pilotless drones or a bricolage of the weapons that have emerged from the openness of society: cell phones to coordinate attacks; ATM machines and borderless currencies; a postmodern world of tomato-fish hybrids and cow-human embryos.26

This is a world that is made possible by a vast array of digital technologies that have transformed the scales, speeds, and distances of human life. The computer, its digital codes, and the interactive networks it enables are usually seen as the dividing line in old versus new media worlds.27 Tomasula’s rhetorical question is, “To depict such a world, do the techniques of 19th century oil painting suffice?”28 Obviously they do not, as Tomasula seeks other scales to find the patterns that will create sense in this new context.

Given all this, it is still somewhat surprising to affirm that the vast majority of Tomasula’s work is not strictly new media at all, with the exception of works like TOC and the “Cyborg” edition of VAS. In general, Tomasula’s novels are codexes, operable without electricity or digital network connections. And yet, as the title of this collection affirms, it is not really possible to read Tomasula without the horizon of new media. It is the digital and networked

25 Tomasula, “Visualization, Scale, and the Emergence of Posthuman Narrative,” 17. (emphasis added).

26 Tomasula, “Visualization, Scale, and the Emergence of Posthuman Narrative”, 17.27 However, even here one should be careful. For instance, while Lev Manovich sees the

digital as generally a good dividing line between old and new media, he is very careful to point out the huge continuities old and new media share. See Lev Manovich, The Language of New Media (Cambridge, MA: MIT University Press, 2002), 52.

28 Tomasula, “Visualization, Scale, and the Emergence of Posthuman Narrative,” 17.

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world that has allowed us to track to the patterns so important to his work, and in other cases it is new media that is driving forward the storm of patterns Tomasula perceives. Then there is the design of the books themselves. While theoretically possible without the aid of software, it would become almost a practical impossibility and certainly prohibitively expensive. Thus though arguably not new media themselves, Tomasula’s books are most certainly the products of new media technologies. In this way, Tomasula has much in common with Dos Passos, a writer who did not reproduce images in his novels, but without the existence of film and its montage style Dos Passos would not have perceived or written as he did. Further, just as we cannot read Dos Passos without the horizon of cinema, it is impossible to read Tomasula without the horizon of hypertexts, video games, digital networks, bioart, and all the other new techniques of representation and interpretation these kinds of technologies make possible. As Deleuze and Guattari say of novels like U. S. A. Trilogy,

The composite of sensations, made up of percepts and affects, deterritorializes the system of opinion that brought together dominant perceptions and affections within a natural, historical milieu. But the composite sensation is reterritorialized on the plane of composition, because it appears within interlocked frames or joined sections that surround its components.29

In their reading, the mass of perceptions, feelings, moods, actions that take place in life are “deterritorialized” by the writer until they are caught again in the novel form, “in interlocked frames or joined sections,” the writer’s cultural climate that is greater and more intense than the sum or its parts sensible. In a similar way, we can think Tomasula’s relation to new media. Sense made possible by new media is deterritorialized, brought into the form of a novel that enables us to grapple with the counterpoints of these new technologies. Conversely, in Tomasula’s TOC, his new media novel, the consistency of the novel as a form reterritorializes the new media forms, bringing transcoding sensation from the novel into the world of new media. In this way, the meaning and force of Tomasula’s work is never merely given in the way the pages of a codex are designed or how a text like TOC is encountered on a digital device.

Debates about form, devices, operability, genre, and more will play out through the pages of this collection. Bringing all this together in this codex allows the essays to both resonate and lend counterpoints, allowing us to

29 Deleuze, What Is Philosophy, 196–197.

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Introduction 15

perceive in Tomasula’s work and discourses about it the larger movements of our contemporary milieus in their complexity. In this, we hope to make possible a precision in our apprehension of the ways art, and Tomasula’s novels, might capture the seemingly imperceptible material and virtual facts of sensation.

From bodies and genealogy to media and wonder

In the above, we have tried to locate Tomasula’s work in the broadest contexts of science, art, the history of the novel, and new media. In what follows, the contributors to this volume will offer nuanced readings of all of Tomasula’s major texts, providing both a far finer-grained contextualization of the issues we have sketched here, and much more far-reaching offerings of interpretations, arguments, and formulations of the problems that all readers of Tomasula’s innovative work must wrestle with. The chapters are divided into four sections: 1) Bodies, Signs, Codes, and Books; 2) Genealogies of Representation; 3) New Media and the Novel; and 4) Writing Wonder. While each section tends to emphasize one of Tomasula’s major works, just as important is the organization of thematic and conceptual concerns as the collection moves from issues of representation and the body to the aesthetic of wonder.

In Part One, “Bodies, Signs, Codes, and Books,” each contributor investigates the ways in which Tomasula’s signs and bodies, mixtures of representation and life, raise a host of philosophical questions and also interpretive problems. As they demonstrate, not only are the ethics of the body in play, but so are our methods of reading and making meaning. While raising issues that persist in all of his work, the first section of this collection focuses primarily on VAS: An Opera in Flatland and IN&OZ.

In “The Work of Art After the Mechanical Age: Materiality, Narrative, and the Real in the Work of Steve Tomasula,” Mary K. Holland demonstrates through careful close readings how Tomasula’s work understands the limitations of art and science as strategies to unveil the Real. At the same time, she highlights Tomasula’s sense of what “the work art can do in an age defined by information systems, reproducibility, and technological manipulation of the material world and the body.” For Holland, Tomasula insists that art cannot grant any kind of unmediated access to the Real, but because art can make mediation visible through a meta-commentary on its making, the work celebrates an aesthetics of labor in which biological, material, and aesthetic reproduction are co-extensive. As Holland has it, Mechanic realizes “being as constituted by labor, function, the body, and home, and

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of the self crucially in relation with the Other.” At the same time, Holland reads Tomasula’s critique of scientific objectivity, showing how his plots and formal innovations reveal science to be deeply inflected by ideologies that give partial and often destructive meaning to its labors despite its ability to predict and manipulate the material world. She concludes by linking these critiques to the forms of Tomasula’s books, arguing that his break with the realist novel performs the very critiques of both art and science that his plots thematize.

In “ ‘The Material Is the Message’: Coded Bodies and Embodied Codes in Steve Tomasula’s VAS: An Opera in Flatland,” Anthony Enns situates Tomasula’s VAS within posthuman conceptualizations of the subject. Rather than seeing Tomasula as celebrating new posthuman realities or expressing only a questionable nostalgia for an older humanism, Enns shows that VAS is inconsistent, at turns celebrating and at others offering deeply pessimistic and critical perspectives on our growing abilities to treat the body as text. For Enns, “The novel thus attempts to strike a balance between these opposing viewpoints by representing bodies as malleable, rearrangeable, and rewritable assemblages of codes.” Enns argues that rather than resolving these contradictions at the level of the concept, the book uses its innovative typography and visual elements as a “new kind of literary language that integrates poststructuralist theory with new information and biotechnologies, which allows the novel to combine divergent and seemingly contradictory notions of the ‘posthuman.’ ”

It is precisely the densely textured and often fractured, even sometimes illegible, pages of VAS that Françoise Sammarcelli takes up in her chapter, “Encoding the Body, Questioning Legacy: Reflections on Intersemiotic Experiments in Steve Tomasula’s VAS: An Opera in Flatland.” In a series of finely textured close readings, she examines Tomasula’s and his designer Stephen Farrell’s use of the page. Sammarcelli writes, “The book thus redefines the question of legacy in a complex of formal and epistemological dynamics. Like the double helix of DNA or language and lineage, the quotational-textual and the visual threads constantly interact through the masterful use of typographic art.” In her reading, the complexity of VAS thus performs its larger argument about inheritance, not only of a genetic code but also of representational forms. As Sammarcelli has it, “What is at stake is not denying one’s heritage but exhibiting or overcoding one’s sources, whether past or present: the body of the text thus emphasizes its relations with intertext and paratext.” That is to say, inheritance is not destiny, but nor can it be lightly discarded. Her readings gesture toward Tomasula’s sense of the fraught, contradictory, and sometime illegible ways our future emerges from the confusion of our past and our present.

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Introduction 17

While Tomasula’s work is thus often presented as an example of a revolution in design, in “Steve Tomasula’s VAS, or What if Novels Were Books?” R. M. Berry takes up the problem of interpretation through Sigmund Freud’s concept of transference and Walter Benn Michael’s critique of “the affective turn” in literary and cultural criticism. For Berry, the very experiments with the page that critics like Enns and Sammarcelli show us present difficult problems of interpretation that cannot be answered merely by turning to the horizon of new media. He writes, “Unlike those who interpret Steve Tomasula’s fiction as a representation, enactment, or reflection of cognition under conditions of digitalization and biogenetic engineering, I understand the novel VAS as a solution to the problem of meaning’s disembodiment, and I take understanding it to entail understanding the difference between these interpretations.” For Berry, Benn Michel’s critique of affect theory largely holds, which is to say that even on a given page of VAS an embodied experience or affective relationship to the materiality of the text always relies on a romantic appeal to the subjective experience of reading. However, as Berry points out, what Michaels “does not acknowledge” is “the organic relationship of experiencing to becoming experienced.” It is the history of this becoming, which Tomasula manages to incarnate in the form of the book that, for Berry, “means to know at every turn, forgetting the pain of knowing no better, that one is on the page one is on, that what happens happens on the plane of trying to tell it, and how could anyone fail to know this?”

Part Two, “Genealogies of Representation,” takes up The Book of Portraiture and the ways in which Tomasula historicizes different modes of representation in the full sense of the term. Originally, Tomasula conceived VAS as merely a chapter in this larger project, although it took on a life of its own. The Book of Portraiture thus provides a complex frame for epistemic concerns in VAS that lends a much deeper and more nuanced reading to Tomasula’s other work. Each chapter in this section emphasizes how Tomasula underscores the role of particular historical artistic forms and practices and how their technologies function in our everyday lives.

In “Literary Archaeologies in Steve Tomasula’s The Book of Portraiture,” Flore Chevaillier contextualizes The Book of Portraiture in a broad overview of Tomasula’s work, including his major novels, his short stories, and his critical essays. Additionally, she draws on her own interview with Tomasula to connect this book to his ongoing critique of representation. She follows this with nuanced close readings of The Book of Portraiture, demonstrating the ways in which Tomasula creates a continuity between our contemporary consciousness of the perils, limits, and seductions of technologies of representation within their larger history. She demonstrates

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that while Tomasula’s work may be made possible by the emergence of new media, his critique of new media must be read back into a critique of every form of human representation. In other words, as unprecedented as our technological contexts might be, we face the same problem that representation has always presented—its inability to forward a full presence even as it asserts one—though in new and even less immediately tangible forms. As Chevaillier puts it, “In this context, the impossibility of representation underlined by Velázquez, although still relevant today, has taken on another layer of paradoxes.”

In “Beyond Human Scale: Steve Tomasula’s The Book of Portraiture,” N. Katherine Hayles argues that the model of quantum mechanics might well be our best way to grasp the meaning of Tomasula’s works, particularly the ways in which he handles narrative. Hayles begins with an analysis of Tomasula’s essay “Visualization, Scale, and the Emergence of Posthuman Narrative,” to position The Book of Portraiture as an attempt to narrativize forces and patterns that coordinate human life but are not readily visible at human scale. She writes, “If I were to describe this aesthetic in my own terminology (rather than Tomasula’s), I would relate it to quantum entanglement, the spooky correlation between subatomic particles that spans space and time; although many interpretations have been proposed, no one understands it completely.” Her readings show how the components of the book, specifically the chapters, relate in these eery ways, acting at a distance (“spukhafte Fernwirkung”) where different moments in the history of representation and human life interact with and inform the present. Thus, the book can only hint at “webs of connections too vast to grasp in their entirety, too tangled to represent directly.” She names this a “posthuman aesthetic of entanglement.” Most importantly, rather than a sense of mastery that might “reveal … a design we can comprehend,” Hayles concludes on a much more cautious and challenging realization that Tomasula’s work demonstrates that at most we get “stray bits of data that just happen to reflect or repeat other bits,” signaling that we have arrived at an “ongoing impossible-to-represent history of representation.”

While Tomasula is most often characterized as a cutting-edge, avant-garde figure, Birger Vanwesenbeeck’s essay “Mining the Gap: Word, Image, and Loss in Tomasula’s The Book of Portraiture” suggests instead that we might best think of Tomasula as a late postmodernist. Focusing on the history of art, Vanwesenbeeck situates Tomasula’s work in the history of ekphrasis, or the “paragone, the agonizing conflict between word and image, whose centuries-long tradition includes the invention of writing, where iconic symbols are turned into arbitrary signifiers.” Vanwesenbeeck develops a richly nuanced reading of how iconic and indexical signs, images, and bodies

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Introduction 19

are enmeshed in The Book of Portraiture, and he then concludes by situating Tomasula’s problematics as grappling with the drive to “still the movement of time” with the image, even while answering to the experimental upheavals of the historical avant-garde and early postmodernism. Taking up the challenge to write in the face of these innovations, experiments, and critiques with a full awareness of the impasses they have created, Vanwesenbeeck argues that Tomasula has developed a way to be “late” in large part through strategies of ekphrasis. Or, as Vanwesenbeeck puts it, “To the extent that it marks an attempt to still the movement of time, ekphrasis may be regarded as the master trope for lateness in literature.”

Part Three, “New Media and the Novel,” focuses in a more pointed way on Tomasula’s engagement with the technologies that are transforming literature. While most of Tomasula’s works are arguably old media, the contributors to this section investigate TOC: A New Media Novel, Tomasula’s fully digital work. TOC demands new strategies and practices of reading, and the contributors to this section do groundbreaking work in surveying its digital landscape and its technical infrastructures. While mapping out its complex semiological systems of gestures, shapes, images, sounds, and movements, these contributors offer broad interpretations of the work’s theme of time. They also demonstrate the ways in which the techniques and materials of TOC find their way back into the pages of Tomasula’s codexes, showing just how important it is to take account of new media in order to grasp Tomasula’s seemingly old media.

Kathi Inman Berens’s “Touch and Decay: Tomasula’s TOC on iPad” addresses the ways in which all new media is caught up in the technological infrastructures that support it. Thus, rather than a thematic reading of TOC, she considers its existence as an object enabled by quickly evolving technical contexts that render it surprisingly unstable. As she observes, “TOC’s medial evolution prompts me to propose a device-specific reception history examining what’s at stake in porting desktop-born works into the touch-intensive mobile environment.” In the second part of her essay, she connects the “touch and gesture as reinflected elements of TOC” to the themes of the work itself, and she reads the emphasis on time and mortality in TOC as, in part, evoking the inevitable obsolescence of the artwork itself.

Where Berens deals with TOC as in physical entity subject to software and hardware updates, Anne Hurault-Paupe offers a systematic and wonderfully detailed analysis of the virtual objects that comprise TOC. In “Intermediality in Steve Tomasula’s TOC: A New Media Novel: A Semiological Analysis,” she argues that given its complex use of media, both old and new, readers lack the kinds of tested and well-understood methods of interpretation that serve the traditional novel. While those methods of reading were developed

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over centuries, TOC disrupts these established procedures and demands the invention in reading, as each reader must “consider how the interaction of linguistic, graphic and auditory elements turns the reader/viewer into a semiological investigator in search of a system for interpreting the novel.” Her essay offers comprehensive survey of TOC’s semiological systems, whether those of geometric shapes that individual users can manipulate at times but can’t control at others or the system of voice-overs highlighting the complex implications of gendered voice-overs, audio narrative, or that of a sudden indistinguishable cacophony. Hurault-Paupe also draws attention to the semiotics of the geographic textures of scenes, such as sand, water, peeling paint or swirling stars, in all, creating a much needed map into its fictional world. She demonstrates that the new media features of the text are not mere illustrations or elaborations, but must be grasped as actively constituting the meaning of the text. In the final pages of her essay, she then performs the kind of improvisational reading for which these interlacing systems call.

Lance Olsen concludes Part Three with his essay “Ontological Metalepses, Unnatural Narratology, & Locality: A Politics of the [[Page]] in Tomasula’s VAS & TOC.” In a wide ranging meditation on both works, Olsen identifies and formulates the challenges of reading Tomasula’s work, both at the level of its material embodiment as well as its narrative invention. He emphasizes how the possibilities of new media find their way back into the more traditional pages of Tomasula’s print works, writing that “turning a page in VAS is like clicking a link in TOC: a surge of disorientation followed almost immediately by a surge of reorientation, a Heideggerian concealment followed almost immediately by a Heideggerian unconcealment, as our eyes and hands constantly figure out what to do next, where to settle, how to proceed.” For Olsen, Tomasula’s work is most successful exactly when it is forcing readers to reinvent or simply improvise acts of reading. In this, Olsen formulates what so many contributors to this collection value in Tomasula’s challenging forms: their ability to create new subjects, new populations within highly specific chronotopes, who deploy variable modes of reading texts that allow—or rather demand—so many materials resonate in spooky, “quantum” ways, as Hayles put it. Her metaphor is something akin to what Olsen names metalepsis, the leap from one level of narration to another, the story within the story. He writes, “metalepsis is the primary mode of narrative jamming in both VAS and TOC because, no matter which others are brought to bear in the texts, the participant is continually aware (as part of an ergodic operation of which s/he isn’t aware when traversing normative narratives) that s/he is part of the corporeal event.” That corporeal event is also what is at the heart of analyses such as R. M. Berry’s insistence on the embodied nature of experience and

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Introduction 21

meaning for both Tomasula’s characters and readers. Olsen’s essay thus picks up refrains and sets up resonances with the other contributors.

Part Four, “Writing Wonder,” expressly addresses the role of the fantastic and the aesthetic of wonder that animates all of Tomasula’s work. While primarily focusing on his most recent book, the collection of stories entitled Once Human, the contributors in this section all seek to show the profound aesthetic force of the fantastic in Tomasula’s work. They argue that these elements of the fantastic break the continuum of the realist novel. To adequately grasp Tomasula, they argue that we must both contextualize Tomasula in the traditions of the science fiction, the fantastic, and an aesthetic of wonder.

Pawel Frelik begins this section with his essay “A Book, an Atlas, and an Opera: Steve Tomasula’s Fictions of Science as Science Fiction.” He surveys Tomasula’s reception, noting that his work is never fully received as science fiction. He attributes this in part to the ways in which writers, readers, and institutions of publishing maintain artificial demarcations between genres. Frelik then demonstrates that it is essential to think of Tomasula’s work through the genre of science fiction and its “megatext,” the wealth of themes and figures from the whole tradition. As he says, rather than merely writing about the future in a prose style and page layout not significantly different than that of Henry James or Ernest Hemingway, Tomasula’s work “redresses this lacuna in its attempt to adjust the form to the content and to convey not only the discourse of the future but also a sense of what living in it could be like.” In this, Frelik makes a compelling case that Tomasula’s writing is more directly engaged and formally radical than the texts that are typical of the genre. In other words, rather than writing descriptions of a probable future, Tomasula uses the form of his text to make readers perform a sense of that future. Read in this way, science fiction is a critical dimension of Tomasula’s work, and his work could also be seen as a formally revolutionary development in the genre of science fiction itself.

In “ ‘Do We Not Bleed?’ The Color of Flesh in a Pop Cyborg World,” Anne Larue offers both close readings and a broad contextualization of Tomasula’s story “The Color of Flesh” from Once Human. Elucidating the story’s complex evocation of gender, race, disability, and queer sexualities through the figure of the cyborg, she argues Tomasula revivifies popular culture from Japanese manga to Hollywood blockbusters via the cyborg feminist theory of Donna Harraway and Beatriz Preciado. Her work expresses how deeply connected Tomasula’s experimental work is to popular culture that now occupies our globalized screens. In her reading, Tomasula actualizes the latent, fantastic, and potentially revolutionary content of our globalized cultures, a potential that is usually carefully repressed, elided, or framed as

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cultural imaginaries that serve the interests of the twin ruling ideologies of patriarchy and global capitalism. Through a collaboration with painter Marie Tomasula, even as “The Color of Flesh” takes on politics of racial discrimination in contemporary police states, according to Larue, the Tomasulas reappropriate manga’s sexist imaginaries, forcibly directing readers to re-experience these fantasmatic materials of popular culture in a mode of queer wonder.

Françoise Palleau-Papin takes up the fantastic dimensions of lists, summas, and alternative histories in “Enumeration and the Form of the Short Story in Steve Tomasula’s Once Human.” Beginning with the paradox between the traditional form of the short story and the outsized role that enumerative lists play in these stories, Palleau-Papin argues that enumeration both seeks to stave off narrative death and to cope with the perplexing and incomprehensible influence of the past on the emerging present. In this way, she “follows Giorgio Agamben’s theory that the ‘contemporary’ is not an historical framework centered on the present, but an anachronistic consideration of one period from another, seen with both proximity and estrangement.” Palleau-Papin thus conceives Tomasula’s narrative strategies as enactments of the problem of time and history, and she positions Tomasula as a writer of what might be best grasped as a speculative science fiction. As she writes, “Cluttering his text with repetitions and echoing patterns, Tomasula immerses his readers in an experience of dissociation, often uncomfortably so, but not without rewards, the main one being that it allows us a glimpse into the contemporary.”

Fittingly, this collection’s final essay is Anne-Laure Tissut’s “Steve Tomasula’s Work of Wonder.” Arguably, an aesthetic of wonder unites all of Tomasula’s work, accounting for the kind of pulsing, positive energy that animates his texts even as his subjects and themes are so often troubling or simply pessimistic. Despite the catalogue of horrors and dangers his books narrate (eugenics, violence, failures of communication), their evocation is of “a world which would seem to have been conjured up by magic and thriving on the supremacy of its distinct order, of divine origins or at least suggesting some mysterious otherness.” Tissut contextualizes Tomasula in a tradition of wonder that runs through American literature, and she argue that “while the writers of wonder deny the benefits of education and even refuse it, calling for a continued state of naivety or a return to such state, Tomasula would seem to stand closer to Rousseau, who celebrated the child’s virgin gaze as but a first step towards knowledge, a prime condition that needs to be overcome.” She thus connects him to an alternative tradition of wonder, “ranging from Plato’s Theoetetus to François Cheng’s Five Meditations on Beauty.” Wonder

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Introduction 23

here has a kind of theological dimension, not one evoking a god but instead summoning an awe of the diversifying world of nature, human creation, and inquiry that Tomasula conjures on the page for his readers. For Tissut, Tomasula’s work of wonder thus creates a humanism that produces a “clear-sighted vision relying on the strength of a continued faith in people despite a sometimes bitter clairvoyance. The thought-provoking aesthetics of his work are likely to arouse in readers an intense curiosity indefectibly bound to the respect of otherness, and a propensity to cultivate humility in the acute awareness of our finitude.”

In the Afterward, David Banash interviews Steve Tomasula, posing questions emerging from the problematics explored by contributors to this volume. Banash asks Tomasula to elaborate on various aspects of the contemporary cultural climate within which he and his work are embedded and through which both have been transfigured: the optimism of technologists and cross-coding; the reception of his work as science fiction; his understanding of an aesthetic of wonder; his turn to metaphors of old media performance; his personal relationship to science and its discourses; the periodization and consistencies of experimental work; and the work of literature and aesthetics as different from that of science. His answers are as provoking and challenging as any work in the volume, lending refrain to counter-points as well as compositional consistencies to our sense of his work.

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