Digitale Mittler und literarische Vermittlungen. Clemens J. Setz’

Bot. Gespräch ohne Autor
Authors: Binczek Natalie 
Published: July 2023

How ›literary mediation‹ is observed from the perspective of literature is discussed in this paper on the basis of Clemens J. Setz’ Bot. Gespräch ohne Autor. It is described here as a network of multiple operations and interconnections that take up excerpts of what has already been published and combine them with something new, and, at the same time, it is made recognizable as a fundamental moment of literature. What is reconstructed here on the basis of and from an exemplum is systematically relevant. The systematic connections that are of interest here, in turn, can only be made plausible by means of the text. This constellation is theoretically indissoluble.

This paper discusses this using both the notion of ›epitext‹ and incorporating the concept of ›mediation‹ unfolded by Bruno Latour. It brings the two together and opens the theoretical territory of ›literary mediation and promotion‹. It follows that mediation is defined as an operation that transforms, that is, not conserves and preserves, transferred into terms of literary mediation: not simply explains and comments, but transforms by inscribing and imprinting itself on what it mediates, is emphasized here. For the understanding of literary mediation, it follows that – instead of being in the service of a literary text conceived as an unchanging entity – it is always modifying and translating it in order to continually bring it forth as something new. While peritexts, however supplementary, constitute compact units, the epitextual perspective brings about their spatial and temporal dispersion. Literature is to be grasped epitextually not as a unity, but as an ensemble or network of different elements, references, and functions that project into a virtually expanded environment of a text. With such a reformulation of the concept of literature, it is stated that epitexts are not attributed to the mediation of literature, but to literature, and that the boundary between these areas is thought to be permeable.

The article examines how a text file becomes a printed text and how this shapes the understanding of ›digital literature‹. This also addresses the problem of big data, which requires distant reading procedures and to which Bot. Gespräch ohne Author reacts in a specific way, by capturing context-independent »word distributions« (Piper 2018, 43) to use them for new connectivities.

The article reveals the shifts between the possibilities of digitization, its literary adaptations, and a literature oriented to the categories of work, author, and book. It is not concerned with replacing texts designed according to traditional criteria with digital surfaces, but rather with pointing out the untranslatability of one system into the other. An untranslatability, however, that can only be demonstrated in the process of translation, the médiation. By taking up concepts of digital culture and incorporating them by quoting, reflecting, and parodying them, the book, consisting of printed paper bound between two covers, allows them to emerge in a disguise as mediators who participate in its shaping. On the one hand, it suggests that there can be no non-digital literature in a digital ecology, even if it ultimately presents itself in paper form; but, on the other hand, it also suggests that an artificial intelligence can only be described as text or code. It can show that and how literature subjects its mediations or the institutional and medial processes linked to literary mediation to (literary) scrutiny and thereby continually negotiates its own literariness. Where mediation meets the concept of literature, it is also challenged as a literary-theoretical category. With the help of the conceptual pair peri- and epitext, which corresponds to the distinction between literature and literary mediation, as well as with the inclusion of Bruno Latour’s concept of the ›médiateur‹, not only the category of the work in the sense of a stable entity distinguishable from its context is questioned, but also – directly related to this – the authorial function as a collectivity of technical operations was traced. A questioning that takes on a particular urgency under the auspices and with the instruments of digitality, bringing to light the traditional concepts of literature as (re)translations, which is exemplified by the transfer of a digital data set into a printed book.