Digitalization and Disconnectivity in Book Poetry

It was only through digitalization that the book became an “analog medium.” However, as more and more areas of life are being represented in data and the use of information technology becomes ubiquitous, the lines between categories such as online/offline and digital/analog are blurring, which is captured in the notion of the post-digital.

Poets today often consciously opt for a printed work instead of (or in addition to) digital or stage-based presentation. This study focuses on current German-language “book poetry,” encompassing two basic types defined by Bajohr/Gilbert. These are, first, the “digital content paradigm,” i.e., the strategic incorporation of discourses or realities from the digital world into poetry as “realizations of the present” (Schumacher). This can include reflections on the communicative mediality and materiality of poetic language, like when book poetry adapts to the style of “platform poetry” or – at the other extreme – reveals the hardware, technology, and cryptic knowledge systems inherent to digital infrastructures.

Second, the “digital ontological paradigm” comes into view with poems that have been written by means of computers, algorithms, or the automated processing of text corpora being printed in books. An apt example of this secondary “analogization” (Stäheli) are the books Poetisch denken I–IV by the text collective 0x0a, which contain poetry generated by an AI that was trained on a corpus of poems written by four well-known contemporary poets. Such conceptual literature is interesting to poetry research because it not only questions authorship but also showcases complex interconnectivity, as its automated composition is based on “connectionist generative models” (Bajohr), i.e., calculated frequencies, proximity relationships, etc.

While the habitus of networking was viewed positively in the early phase of Web 2.0, today’s intensified “hyperconnectivity” – the ability to connect anytime, anywhere – is considered problematic due to consequences such as net fatigue and digital burnout. Thus, the notion of disconnectivity has been established as a counter-concept in social scientific discourse. According to Stäheli, disconnectivity discourses include the nostalgic impulse to idealize the world before hyperconnectivity, the “longing for ‘islands’ of disconnectivity,” and the “hope for the re-establishment of genuine social relationships.”

The question is therefore to what extent contemporary poems participate in such analog promises, for example, by establishing communicative structures of proximity. However, they can also imitate network structures by means of poetic techniques – as a rhizomatic flow of language across verses and stanzas – in order to practice “digitalization critique” (Stubenrauch).

At this point, the theory of poetry comes into play, for instance, by updating the concept of poetic “excess structuring” (Link), which defines poems as “complex, vertically-horizontally nested, polymorphous structures of relationships” (Stahl). As such, they are hyperconnective networks that attempt to disconnect from the digital world through self-referentiality. However, other contemporary poems consciously create links to the digital world through their writing style, compelling readers to research the (digital) intertexts and knowledge bases that these poems allude to.