Playful Intelligence: Digitizing Tradition

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This is a guide, in theory and in practice, to how current technological changes have impacted our interaction with texts and with each other. Henry Sussman rereads pivotal moments in literary, philosophical and cultural modernity as anticipating the cybernetic discourse that has increasingly defined theory since the computer revolution. Cognitive science, psychoanalysis and systems theory are paralleled to current trends in literary and philosophical theory. Chapters alternate between theory and readings of literary texts, resulting in a broad but rigorously grounded framework for the relation between literature and computer science. This book is a refreshing perspective on the analog-orientated tradition of theory in the humanities and offers the first literary-textual genealogy of the digital.

Reviews

There is, I think, nothing out there truly comparable to Playful Intelligence in terms of focus, insight, scope, cross-disciplinary applicability, theoretical urgency, and learning. -- Christian Moraru, University of North Carolina, USA * American Book Review *
From Kandinsky to Kafka to systems theory to psychoanalysis to digital feedback loops to Roberto Bolao to Zen... A sprawling, maddening, jet-lagged, and eminently stunning trip through the ruinous Arcades of the 21st century. * Justin Read, University at Buffalo (SUNY), USA *
Sussman rises to the task with a book that is as breathtaking in its scope as it is trenchant in its insights. From cybernetics to literature to philosophy and back again, Sussman's ignition of his inexhaustible erudition with a promethean spark of creativity powers a riveting and relentless interrogation of intelligence, a notion that engulfs those of us in the academic domain so closely that it seldom occurs to ask ourselves what, exactly, it is, how its conceptualization affects us, and how we came to think of it the way we do today. * William Egginton, The Johns Hopkins University, USA *
Who knew high theory could still be this much fun Sussman's Playful Intelligence stages a mass wedding (or is it a group grope) in which Dostoevsky, Kafka, Derrida, and Lacan pair off with the unexpected likes of Douglas Hofstadter, Anthony Wilden, Gregory Bateson, and D. W. Winnicott. His delightful critical dances are enlivened with rhetorical flights of uninhibited and erudite wordplay. Swinging cybernetics across literary landscapes, Sussman takes systems discourses on joyrides that both disrupt their scientific pretensions and refresh their relevance to the philosophical humanities. Never dull, utterly sincere, sublimely good-natured, and blithely beyond mundane academic cares, Playful Intelligence performs its theme to perfection. * Bruce Clarke, Texas Tech University, USA *
Playful Intelligence exemplifies the encouragement that interdisciplinary thinking can provide to critics who still believe in the salutary potential of humanistic endeavors. * Journal of Modern Literature *

Author Bio

Henry Sussman is Visiting Professor of Germanic Languages and Literatures at Yale University, USA.