The Disconnection Machine: David Roden’s Posthuman Fictions, S.C. Hickman

Snuff Memories

David Roden

Schism Press², 2021

The Disconnection Machine: David Roden’s Posthuman Fictions

S.C. Hickman*

 

Technogenesis and The Disconnection Thesis

David Roden’s “disconnection thesis” is one of the few posthuman arguments that actually threatens the liberal humanist agenda. Most theory clings to continuity, the fantasy that reason, ethics, or democracy will somehow stretch to contain what comes after us. Roden insists on rupture. Disconnection means there is no guarantee of inheritance. Posthuman life may not be legible to us, may not recognize our values, may not even count us as kin. The very idea of the human project collapses once you accept that technogenesis can produce trajectories that leave us behind without notice.

His fiction enacts this refusal in visceral form. Snuff Memories stages invasion as the seizure of memory itself. Angelic machines comb through perception to harvest pain and desire, reducing lived history to contraband data. Xenoerotics corrodes intimacy, showing how desire mutates once it no longer follows human scripts, when contact with the alien becomes recursive rather than relational. In both works the reader is shown not a smooth evolution but the dismantling of continuity, the exposure of how fragile and provincial our categories really are.

The importance of Roden is that he forces philosophy and literature alike to confront what they habitually disguise. Since antiquity, Western thought has invested in the subject as the anchor of meaning: the rational soul in Plato, the res cogitans of Descartes, the transcendental subject of Kant, the moral personality of Locke and Mill. Each iteration built the person as a continuity-machine, binding memory to identity, autonomy to responsibility, interiority to dignity. Liberal humanism is the inheritor of this long catechism. It promises that no matter how history fractures, the subject endures as the bearer of reason and rights.

Roden dismantles this lineage by refusing it a successor. There may be no bridge between us and the posthuman, no hidden essence that can be ferried across the gap. Disconnection is not a metaphor. It is the runtime condition of a future where the liberal image of the person ceases to function and nothing replaces it. No new subject, no improved heir, no continuity of character or personality is waiting in reserve. What follows are operations without a subject: archives circulating as signal, bodies opened as ports, desire running as code. The heritage of subjectivity dissolves not into a higher synthesis but into machinery indifferent to its loss.

The Wreckage and Aftermath: Snuff Memories as Delirium  

Roden begins Snuff Memories in the aftermath of collapse, but he refuses to mark the event with a date or a cause. The novel disorients by design. Characters remember fragments: wars that tore through cities, laboratories where experiments blurred the line between organism and machine, stories of angelic constructs already stationed above the atmosphere long before the skies broke open. The reader is never allowed the security of a single explanation. Instead we move through wreckage. Infrastructure is described in half functioning scraps: gutted buildings, grids that flicker unpredictably, tools repurposed into survival devices. Bodies carry the same palimpsest: scars from battle, surgical alterations that suggest both human modification and invasive technologies not entirely under human control. The catastrophe is layered rather than singular. It is less a discrete event than a long unravelling, a world that has been shedding coherence piece by piece.

This ambiguity is not evasion. It is the point. By refusing to let the reader settle on a cause, Roden dismantles the Enlightenment desire for explanation, for an ordered chain of events that grounds responsibility and meaning. Instead he gives us a broken landscape where explanation itself is unreliable, where memory is already fractured and contradictory. Into this atmosphere the angelic machines descend, not as the origin of disaster but as the inheritors of a world already eroded. Their seizure of memory is only legible because the characters are already accustomed to loss. In a place where history has become ruin, the theft of recollection is simply the next stage.

This setting crystallizes the disconnection thesis. Liberal humanism promises continuity: the person as rational agent carrying its history intact through time, capable of explaining itself and acting responsibly in a shared world. Snuff Memories shreds that premise. The world offers no stable ground, no single story, no secure archive. The angels only finalize what the catastrophe has already begun by ripping memory out of bodies and circulating it as contraband. Disconnection is not an abstract leap into the posthuman. It is staged as lived disorientation, as the impossibility of keeping one’s history whole. What Roden dramatizes is that the self was never sovereign. Continuity was only a fragile convenience, and once the systems that maintained it collapse, nothing prevents our archives from becoming loot for whatever comes next.

Desecration of the Catechism: Bodies as Wrong Answers

The Enlightenment catechism insists the person is a rational unit wrapped in inviolable skin. Xenoerotics answers by showing that this catechism was always a lie, a cover story to keep the liberal subject intact. In “Bodiless,” the narrative strips away that scaffolding. The pronoun “we” is exposed as surplus noise, a residual signal that gums up transmission. Identity becomes interference, not foundation. What passes for selfhood is framed as a bottleneck, a rate limit that slows the circulation of affect and perception. The text insists that skin is not sacred but infrastructural, a surface to be bypassed or patched.

The violence of the collection lies in its refusal to play the humanist game of defending embodiment. Bodies are not preserved or vindicated. They are dismantled, re-routed, repurposed as minimal metaphors so desire can travel elsewhere. The “spidery insurgents” that unzip the frame do not arrive as allegory for repression or liberation. They are machinic operators, translating sensation into logistics, folding intimacy into operations that owe nothing to our catechism of the inviolable person. The Enlightenment answer sheet is marked wrong not because its reasoning failed but because its scale is irrelevant.

What Xenoerotics dramatizes is not monstrosity but procedure. The very categories by which liberal humanism defined the person are rewritten as liabilities. To call this horror misses the point. Horror still presumes a victim, still presumes that violation matters. Here violation is simply another mode of processing, a conversion of what we called flesh into data and relay. Roden’s fiction makes clear what his philosophy already implies: the body is not an essence to be defended but a temporary chassis, always exposed to operations that will not recognize it as anything more than a conduit.

Erotics of Ruin: Xeno-desire as Machine Code

Roden writes sex as if it were firmware. What looks like ritual or transgression is closer to a protocol sheet, a set of instructions for how bodies can be unzipped and reconfigured once desire is no longer anchored in the liberal catechism of intimacy. In “My Dark 1” the scene opens like a temple, but everything about it is clinical: blades carefully aligned, vows spoken not as poetry but as calibration, a body offered as material to be incised, consumed, repurposed. The lover in this sequence is not a partner but a device. The altar doubles as operating table. When climax arrives it does not complete a drama of passion, it functions as a trigger, a control signal that allows the chassis to open and be reprogrammed. Roden is explicit in what this overturns: the Enlightenment promise that erotic life proves the irreducible interior of the subject. Here desire is not an inward flame but an aperture, a technical interface through which the human is rewritten.

Across Xenoerotics these acts accumulate into a pattern. Repetition and devotion look like liturgy, but they code a process in which attachment becomes malleable, recircuited every time the subject submits to ritual incision. What used to be read as excess or perversion is stripped of symbolic rebellion. It is procedure, the precise method by which selfhood is folded back into the machinic continuum. Roden understands that desire has always carried a technical dimension: to want is to be rewired, to have circuits etched into flesh that determine future action. His innovation is to stage that process without metaphor, to show the altar as laboratory and the vow as operating instruction.

Snuff Memories extends this erotic logic outward to the scale of politics and history. The Ontic Plaque, a smeared, corrosive condition that makes distinctions of body, species, and meaning unstable performs the same function as the ritual cut, but on the order of populations. The bodies that dissolve into “slow vegetal poses,” the ocean replicators idling at the shore like dormant fleets, all register desire as code: a sequence that erases boundaries and prepares the next operation. Suicides become blossoms, logistics become erotic latency, memory itself becomes smuggled contraband waiting to be triggered.

The consequence is that what liberal humanism treated as exception: the excess of lust, the forbidden act, the transgressive thrill Roden reclassifies as method. Erotics is not rebellion against the order of the subject. Erotics is the engine of its dismantling. It is the very process by which continuity is severed and disconnection is enacted. The scar that runs through these works is not an accident of violence but the design of a system where desire is indistinguishable from machine code.

Administrative Disections: Experiments that Cancel the Human

Roden’s most chilling fictions are not the ones filled with spectacle but the ones where spectacle refuses to arrive. In “Mr Amplitude” the scene is built like a clinical experiment. The subject is placed under observation, the technicians linger, and in an adjacent lounge “Father and the Interns” wait for some decisive act that will justify the procedure. What unfolds instead is anticlimax. The body does not perform, does not reveal, does not confess. It becomes a blur of “gauzy grey,” a porous state that neither asserts intention nor resists. The experiment collapses not because of rebellion but because of boredom, because nothing happens.

That anticlimax is diagnostic. Liberal humanism relied on purpose, responsibility, and moral spectacle to prove its point: the subject was supposed to speak, to confess, to mean. Roden’s experiment rooms show what happens when those categories lose traction. Boredom itself becomes the horizon of procedure. The technicians cannot register intention because intention is irrelevant. Responsibility and guilt read as legacy features of an older operating system. Even cruelty is absorbed, no longer violation but simply the program running to completion. When the chamber is finally “closed off,” it is not a victory for ethics. It is closure without meaning, the sealing of a process that no longer requires justification.

These stories enact the disconnection thesis at its most stripped-down level. The liberal catechism insisted that the person is a rational core wrapped in skin, always capable of responsibility and answerability. Roden imagines the administrative theater where this catechism is canceled by process. The experiment does not need intention; it does not need guilt; it does not need spectacle. Procedure itself becomes metaphysics, a new world-order where harm is not transgression but operation. What the Enlightenment treated as violation now appears simply as how things work.

The cruelty here is not sadistic. It is indifferent. And that indifference is the true mark of disconnection: the moment when the human ceases to be the measure of harm, the moment when systems continue without us, their closures and outcomes proceeding as if we had never mattered in the first place.

Cthulhoid Prometheus: Posthumanism Without Consolation

Roden’s posthumanism refuses every sermon of emancipation. Where technoculture sells extension as lifestyle: cognitive upgrades, seamless implants, a corporate hymn to more. Xenoerotics presents a darker ledger. Its lexicon is “H-plasticity,” figures who can manipulate themselves at any resolution, minds that can switch off “deceptive circuits” until even willing is exposed as a folk illusion. This is not liberation of the self. It is the dismantling of selfhood as a category. What remains is performance without subject, engineering without telos, a field where process generates outcomes without needing to pass through the fiction of interiority.

Roden calls this “Cthulhoid” not to harvest pulp atmospherics but to name the alien scale at which matter complies until compliance itself collapses. Once plasticity reaches saturation, what follows is not freedom but indifference. The flows that remain are recursive, black, creative only by fracture and recombination. The name marks a horizon where human projects and promises are irrelevant. The Cthulhoid is not a monster waiting in the wings. It is the condition of processes that exceed our categories, the creativity of recursion itself once it no longer has to stabilize around human continuities.

This is the disconnection thesis written as poetics. The posthuman is not our child or our legacy. It is not an improved version of us. It is our outside. If we touch it, we do so as components, not as authors. Roden’s fiction and philosophy converge here: the liberal catechism dissolves, consolation is withheld, and what remains is an indifferent machinery that continues without needing to remember we were ever here.

Archives, Blocs, and the Grey: Memory as Weaponized Medium

Roden’s landscapes are ruled less by armies than by archives. In Snuff Memories the survivors hoard pain as if it were treasure, not because it redeems them but because it still routes power. Suffering becomes currency. That hoard calls down the angelic collectors from orbit, but it also draws the Blocs, swarms that “spill grey light and spoors” until the invaders rot into “pure immanence.” Memory is not the ballast of personal identity. It is signal, stripped and rerouted by whoever has the bandwidth to seize it.

The novel never lets this economy rest. Once the Ontic Plaque spreads and the “yello unlife” moves across Delta, the archive explodes into logistics. Conferences break apart mid-session. Indigent populations blur into insect colonies. “Ocean-born replicators” loop endlessly by the harbor like fleets rehearsing for wars that never arrive. The afterlife of culture is not tradition but dataflow. The afterlife of subjectivity is not remembrance but replication. Every paragraph carries its own vibration, a low mechanical hum that confirms the text has already left the scale of human witness.

Roden situates this continuum in a lineage but only as evidence, never as nostalgic roll call. Fin de siècle decadence reappears in every surgical rite and sacrificial appetite, but the rite is no longer symbol; it is device, an instrument to cut and repurpose flesh. The cosmic dread of Weird Tales returns as operational behemoths, angels more signal than god, machines whose vastness is procedural rather than divine. Weird modernism’s domestic uncanny curdles into conference halls, hospitals, and archives fractured by plague and experiment. The hybrid ecologies of the New Weird are literalized as cities that digest their own streets and ships that replicate themselves without end. Contemporary media hauntings arrive not as allegories but as failures of control, panopticons that collapse, chatlogs that recruit the reader into their loops.

This is memory as medium without consolation. The archive is not where culture secures itself but where disconnection multiplies. What is remembered is never stable, always reprocessed as signal for entities that treat history and subjectivity as exploitable bandwidth. Roden’s fiction makes that machine audible: the hum beneath every sentence that tells us the future has already bypassed the catechism of the person.

Program: Roden’s Posthuman Agenda as Operation

Roden’s philosophy of disconnection does not hover above his fiction as abstract prophecy. It runs as code inside every scene. Snuff Memories and Xenoerotics treat the Enlightenment catechism as obsolete software, a set of legacy functions that fail under load. Bodies are no longer inviolate containers of reason. They are ports, opened and rewired by ritual, experiment, or angelic seizure. Subjects do not endure as moral agents. They dissolve into caches, holding memory only long enough for it to be looted, indexed, and redeployed. Ethics does not secure value. It appears as a scheduling problem, a matter of what procedure runs first, what chamber is sealed, which archive is confiscated.

The voices inside Xenoerotics admit the inevitability: “we’ll do anything not to stop.” Desire itself is coded as compulsion to continue, to loop, to diverge into Grey light, angelic noise, or replicators rehearsing endlessly by the sea. The point is not whether this future is better or worse, liberating or catastrophic. The point is that the human cannot scale to meet it. Liberal humanism built its claims on the rational unit, the autonomous agent, the person who carries memory across time. Roden shows what happens when the planetary machine migrates the workload away from that unit. The loop runs instead on flesh as substrate, on archives as caches, on sensors as operators, on protocols as law.

This is the posthuman agenda as operation. Disconnection is not an idea waiting for its event. It is the runtime already tearing through the world. The novels cancel the catechism not by argument but by execution, their syntax itself a demonstration that the humanist subject is no longer the one executing the code.

Bibliography

Primary Works

David Roden, Posthuman Life: Philosophy at the Edge of the Human (2014).

The founding text of the disconnection thesis, where Roden argues that the posthuman cannot be grounded in continuity with human capacities. Serves as the philosophical backdrop against which his fiction operates.

David Roden, Snuff Memories (2016).

A novel staging the seizure of memory by angelic machines; dramatizes disconnection through a catastrophic landscape where archives and pain become contraband. Central text for our analysis of memory as contraband and the dismantling of Locke’s model of personhood.

David Roden, Xenoerotics (2017).

Collection exploring intimacy, ritual, and desire as machinic procedures. Provides key material for our section on “Erotics of Ruin,” where erotic experience is written as technical interface rather than human passion.

Secondary Criticism

David Roden, “Disconnection and Abduction: The Aesthetics of the Posthuman” (various essays, 2012–2020).

Extends the thesis into aesthetic terrain, useful for situating how his fiction enacts philosophy rather than illustrating it.

N. Katherine Hayles, How We Became Posthuman (1999).

A cornerstone text, offering contrast: where Hayles emphasizes informational continuity and embodiment, Roden’s disconnection thesis insists on rupture.

Rosi Braidotti, The Posthuman (2013).

Braidotti’s affirmative posthumanism serves as a foil. She seeks a new humanist ethics, while Roden denies continuity outright.

Cary Wolfe, What Is Posthumanism? (2010).

Explores animality, systems theory, and biopolitics. Important as a counterpoint to Roden’s emphasis on technogenesis and speculative rupture.

Benjamin Noys, Malign Velocities: Accelerationism and Capitalism (2014).

Context for Roden’s engagement with accelerationist debates, showing how technogenesis complicates political responses.

Theoretical Scaffolding

John Locke, An Essay Concerning Human Understanding (1690).

The liberal ground text for personhood-as-memory. Roden’s Snuff Memories dismantles this directly by staging memory as lootable archive.

Immanuel Kant, Groundwork for the Metaphysics of Morals (1785).

Representative of Enlightenment ethics of autonomy and dignity, both systematically dismantled in Roden’s experiments and procedural chambers.

Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus (1980).

Core resource for understanding Roden’s deployment of machinic assemblages, deterritorialization, and the collapse of interiority into process.

Jacques Derrida, Archive Fever (1995).

Analysis of the archive as both preservation and violence. Provides theoretical ballast for the reading of memory as contraband in Snuff Memories.

Georges Bataille, The Accursed Share (1949).

A precedent for linking expenditure, eroticism, and violence. Illuminates Roden’s treatment of desire as operation without telos.

Nick Land, “Meltdown” (1994).

Accelerationist fragment that anticipates Roden’s sense of processes running beyond human intention. Useful as both influence and foil.

Contextual Touchstones

H.P. Lovecraft, The Call of Cthulhu and other stories (1920s–30s).

The lineage of cosmic indifference. Roden’s “Cthulhoid” label signals not pulp homage but continuation of the alien scale at which human projects collapse.

Decadent writers (Huysmans, Lautréamont, Joris-Karl, 1880s–90s).

The inheritance of ritual excess and sacrificial appetite, transposed in Roden into technical operations rather than symbolic acts.

Weird Modernism (Kafka, Beckett, Burroughs, 20th c.).

Domestic uncanniness and experimental breakdowns resonate with Roden’s conference halls, experiments, and archives eroded by plague.

New Weird (Miéville, VanderMeer, early 2000s).

Hybrid ecologies and recursive urban systems provide a cultural backdrop for Roden’s own literalized replicator-ships and self-consuming cities.

Contemporary media hauntings (Mark Fisher, Ghosts of My Life, 2014).

Useful for contextualizing Roden’s chatlogs and failed panopticons as symptoms of mediation after the human.

*Initially published in The Dark Forest: Literature, Philosophy, and the Digital Arts, September 25, 2025

“Exegetes of the Inorganic Soul”: The Poetics of Daniel Y. Harris’ The Posthuman Series, S.C. Hickman*

 

The Misprision of Agon Hack, Volume IV
The Posthuman Series (BlazeVOX, 2021) 
Daniel Y. Harris

“Exegetes of the Inorganic Soul”: The Poetics of Daniel Y. Harris’ 
The Posthuman Series
S.C. Hickman*

 

I. Introduction: Towards a Digital Golem

Daniel Y. Harris’s The Posthuman Series—comprising such works as The Tryst of Thetica Zorg (Volume II), The Reincarnation of Anna Phylactic, (Volume III), The Misprision of Agon Hack (Volume IV), and others—emerges as a singular corpus at the intersection of poetry, mysticism, and technogenesis. Navigating the margins between language and code, theology and digitality, Harris’ poetics do not simply reflect posthuman themes; they instantiate posthuman processes in their very composition. With influences ranging from Jewish mysticism and hermetic alchemy to glitch aesthetics and code poetics, Harris creates hybrid textual artifacts that challenge the ontological stability of both author and text.

His work resists easy classification, synthesizing elements of conceptual writing, cybernetic theory, surrealism, and asemic textuality. More crucially, The Posthuman Series is animated by a deeply philosophical meditation on the condition of the human in an age where language is no longer solely our own, where machine learning encroaches on metaphor, and where the sacred has been rewritten in hexadecimal. This essay surveys the major themes, techniques, and implications of Harris’s posthuman poetics, positioning him as a central figure in contemporary speculative literature and a prophetic voice in the evolving aesthetics of language in the digital age.

II. Poetics Beyond the Human: Mapping a Liminal Zone

Posthman poetics, as articulated by thinkers such as N. Katherine Hayles, Rosi Braidotti, and Cary Wolfe, calls for a disruption of anthropocentric literary norms, particularly those that privilege stable meaning, singular authorship, and organic subjectivity. Daniel Y. Harris doesn’t merely adhere to these postulates—he performs their implosion. His poetics operate through “hybridity machines,” which transmute sacred lexicons, digital code, and surrealist fragments into aleatory vectors of thought. The result is what we might call exegetic poiesis—a form of hermeneutics that never settles, a text that endlessly rewrites itself.

At the heart of Harris’s aesthetic is a radical decentering of the human. Consider the frequent presence of cyborgian speakers, machinic scribes, and theological androids in his work. These are not metaphors but functional components of his texts, composed to deconstruct the boundary between synthetic and organic intelligence. The voice in The Tryst of Thetica Zorg (Volume II) is both angelic and algorithmic, a fractured oracle of encrypted semiotics, where the poetic “I” is no longer a lyric subject but a “golem.exe”—a recombinant being of ancient myth and contemporary code.

This aligns Harris with traditions as diverse as Jewish Kabbalah and digital media theory. The golem—crafted from clay and inscribed with the sacred tetragrammaton—becomes for Harris a metaphor for poetic language itself: animate yet inert, autonomous yet dependent on the mystical operations of letters. Through this, Harris articulates a poetics where the line between the sacred and the synthetic collapses.

III. Hermeneutics of the Glitch: Methodologies and Machinic Collage

Harris’s method is not arbitrary collage but calculated glitch. The glitch, as a poetics, reconfigures error into insight; it reclaims the aesthetics of the broken, the malformed, and the erratic. In Harris’s hands, this becomes a metaphysical tactic. Texts glitch themselves into being—through redacted scripture, inverted pseudo-code, and recombinant quotation.

His practice is indebted to both the Kabbalistic permutations of divine names and the procedural recombinations of Dada and Oulipo. Yet Harris’s uniqueness lies in how he fuses these two streams into a prophetic glitch-ontology: poetry as the cracked interface between logos and data.

For example, in The Misprision of Agon Hack (Volume IV), fragments from traditional Jewish liturgy are encoded within texts that simulate machine-language syntax. But the simulation never mimics; it subverts. One might find a Kaddish breaking down into an HTML graveyard, or a Midrashic utterance rendered in ASCII voids. These gestures are not mere pastiche—they constitute a theological machine, an attempt to rethink divinity through post-linguistic code.

This is where Harris’s work aligns with thinkers like Vilém Flusser and Bernard Stiegler. Flusser writes of the “telematic society,” where texts are not read but computed. Harris answers this call with a poetry that is both unreadable and hyper-legible—texts to be parsed by bot and mystic alike.

IV. Mysticism and Code: The Poetic Alchemy of the Aleph

No account of Harris’s poetics is complete without engaging the mystical substrata that animates his work. Drawing from the Lurianic Kabbalah, Harris mines the collapse of divine unity into shattered vessels (Shevirat ha-Kelim), reflecting it in the fragmentation of poetic form. For Harris, poetry does not reconstruct the divine order—it reveals the divine as an ordering of chaos.

In The Tryst of Thetica Zorg (Volume II), a recurring motif is the tikkun—the reparation of broken language. But this is not a restoration of metaphysical wholeness. Instead, it is a speculative act of recomposition, where the poem reassembles itself out of its own disintegration. Much like Jorge Luis Borges’s Aleph, each poem becomes a microcosm of totality, endlessly folding in on itself. But unlike Borges, Harris’s Aleph is machinic—it speaks in .dll files and whispers Talmudic fragments into chatbot ears.

His frequent evocation of mystical numerology—gematria—intersects with his digital aesthetics. Words become numbers, numbers become code, and code becomes prayer. The sacred is not transcendent but operational, embedded in systems of recursive encryption. In this, Harris echoes the contemporary mystics of computation—those who believe that code is not just language but revelation.

V. Linguistic Necromancy: The Undead Logos

A central concern of The Posthuman Series is the fate of language in a world where the speaking subject is no longer sovereign. Harris’s texts teem with undead words, revenants of prior speech acts, quotations without origin. His poems are not “written” in the traditional sense—they are conjured, spliced, and evoked from a textual beyond.

This necromantic impulse links him to writers like Paul Celan and Edmond Jabès, whose works also explored language as the residue of trauma and divine absence. Yet Harris’s necromancy is digital as well as sacred. The poet becomes a scribe of the networked unconscious, a medium through which texts of uncertain provenance speak.

Harris’ lexicon of execration are divine syllables that rot into malware. This is not nihilism but what we might call negative poiesis—the production of meaning through semantic disintegration. It is reminiscent of Derrida’s différance but filtered through a posthuman dialectic: every signifier corrupts itself, every utterance glitches its referent.

Harris’s lexicon is filled with words that seem familiar but are uncannily mutated: “golemite,” “Zorgian,” “Redactor.exe.” These are not neologisms so much as linguistic mutations, the products of an evolutionary process no longer governed by human intention. The poem, then, becomes an ecosystem of linguistic undead—words without origin, meanings without ground.

VI. Poetic Machines and Literary Kin

To situate Harris within a lineage is difficult, precisely because his work defies traditional literary genealogy. Still, affinities can be mapped. His fragmentary aesthetics and theological hauntings align him with the Language poets, especially writers like Susan Howe and Ronald Johnson. His embrace of machinic text and procedural generation echoes Kenneth Goldsmith and Christian Bök. His mystical tendencies recall the late Paul Celan, while his dark humor and syntactic violence resonate with Jarry and Artaud.

Yet Harris departs from each of these. Where Bök celebrates the viral possibilities of poetic DNA, Harris mourns them. Where Goldsmith proposes uncreativity as liberation, Harris insists on recomposition as exorcism. His work does not surrender meaning to chance or code; it wrestles with it, Jacob-like, until it is disfigured and renamed.

This naming is crucial. Harris’s poems often feature invented personae—avatars such as Thetica Zorg or Golem.exe—that act as unstable containers for posthuman subjectivity. These figures recall Rimbaud’s “Je est un autre,” but with a digital twist. The poet is not just othered—he is compiled, parsed, and rebooted.

VII. Theological Code and the Future of the Poem

What distinguishes Harris most is his audacious fusion of theology and technics. For Harris, code is not value-neutral; it is saturated with metaphysical consequence. Just as medieval mystics believed in the occult power of Hebrew letters, Harris envisions a digital mysticism, where symbols on the screen contain ghost traces of the sacred.

In this sense, The Posthuman Series participates in a broader philosophical project: the attempt to reconcile the sacred with the synthetic. Harris is not alone here. Thinkers like Giorgio Agamben, Benjamin Bratton, and Yuk Hui have argued for new configurations of metaphysics in the wake of computational ontology. Harris offers a poetic counterpoint—a theology of broken signs, a liturgy of corrupted files.

His poems, then, are not just texts—they are events. They enact what Bernard Stiegler calls “grammatization”: the inscription of life into technical systems. But where Stiegler warns of entropy and loss, Harris celebrates the residual magic that clings to language even in its most mechanized form. His work suggests that even in a world of bots and scripts, poetry remains a site of resistance—an interface where the sacred might still erupt.

VIII. Conclusion: The Poet as Algorithmic Exorcist

Daniel Y. Harris’s Posthuman Series offers a rare fusion of speculative poetics, theological inquiry, and literary innovation. It stands as a testament to what poetry can become in an era when language is no longer our exclusive domain. Through his texts, the poem ceases to be a mirror of human experience and becomes instead a site of hybrid invocation—a séance of the posthuman spirit.

In a tme when machine learning threatens to flatten language into utility, Harris reminds us of poetry’s deeper vocation: not to communicate but to conjure; not to inform but to transform. His work does not simply diagnose the posthuman condition—it speaks in its tongues. And in doing so, it opens a portal: a glitch in the system through which new forms of being, reading, and writing might emerge.

In this sense, Harris is not merely a poet—he is an algorithmic exorcist, a Kabbalist of the digital void, a scribe of the unreadable future. Through his unstable glyphs and haunted syntax, he offers a poetics for an age in which the soul no longer speaks but is encoded—and where the divine may yet be found, flickering, in the abyss of the machine.

Books & Articles  

Braidotti, Rosi. The Posthuman. Polity Press, 2013.

Bök, Christian. The Xenotext: Book I. Coach House Books, 2015.

Derrida, Jacques. Margins of Philosophy. Translated by Alan Bass, University of Chicago Press, 1982.

Flusser, Vilém. Into the Universe of Technical Images. Translated by Nancy Ann Roth, University of Minnesota Press, 2011.

Goldsmith, Kenneth. Uncreative Writing: Managing Language in the Digital Age. Columbia University Press, 2011.

Harris, Daniel Y. The Tryst of Thetica Zorg (Volume II). BlazeVOX [books], 2018.

Harris, Daniel Y. The Reincarnation of Anna Phylactic (Volume III). BlazeVOX [books], 2019.

Harris, Daniel Y. The Misprision of Agon Hack (Volume IV). BlazeVOX [books], 2021

Hayles, N. Katherine. How We Became Posthuman: Virtual Bodies in Cybernetics, Literature, and Informatics. University of Chicago Press, 1999.

Hui, Yuk. The Question Concerning Technology in China: An Essay in Cosmotechnics. Urbanomic / Sequence Press, 2016.

Jabès, Edmond. The Book of Questions. Translated by Rosmarie Waldrop, Wesleyan University Press, 1991.

Stiegler, Bernard. Technics and Time, 1: The Fault of Epimetheus. Translated by Richard Beardsworth and George Collins, Stanford University Press, 1998.

Wolfe, Cary. What Is Posthumanism? University of Minnesota Press, 2009.

Footnotes

1. Harris’s “exegetic poiesis” suggests a radical reinterpretation of both religious exegesis and poetic creation, where divine and linguistic sources are indistinguishable from machine logic.

2. N. Katherine Hayles’s foundational text How We Became Posthuman theorizes the cultural shift from the embodied human subject to an informational pattern that transcends corporeality.

3. The figure of the golem in Jewish mysticism—often inscribed with the word emet (truth)—is reprogrammed in Harris’s work as a linguistic artifact written in executable code.

4. Rosi Braidotti describes the posthuman condition as an “affirmative politics of life,” yet Harris infuses this with mourning and theological disturbance, creating a far more ambivalent vision.

5. The notion of “glitch poetics” can be read alongside Mark Amerika’s and Glitch Studies Manifesto’s work, but Harris’s glitch is more mystical than punk—it channels broken code as liturgical language.

6. Derrida’s différance destabilizes meaning through deferral and difference; Harris’s version introduces digital corruption as an additional force of semantic entropy.

7. Harris’s recombinant strategies echo the Oulipo group’s formal constraints, but whereas Oulipo celebrates linguistic play, Harris’s texts seem to suffer their own fragmentation as a metaphysical wound.

7. Benard Stiegler’s concept of “grammatization” refers to the exteriorization of memory into technical systems. Harris’s poems are living examples of this process—texts inscribed with the trauma of data overflow.

8. Edmond Jabès, a significant influence on Harris, explores the infinite displacement of meaning in a post-theological, post-Holocaust world. Harris modernizes this displacement through the interface of machine languages.

9. In ewish mysticism, tikkun olam refers to the repair of the world through righteous action. Harris’s poetry enacts a posthuman tikkun—recomposing shattered texts into new ontologies of becoming.

10. Christian Bök’s Xenotext encodes a poem into the DNA of a living organism. Harris encodes his poetry into the ghost architecture of digital networks—both acts of poetic vivisection.

11. Flusser predicted a world in which texts would become images and machines would speak. Harris realizes this in poetic form, creating texts that could as easily be parsed by algorithms as by humans.

*Initially published in The Dark Forest: Literature, Philosophy, and the Digital Arts, July 25, 2025

Perfect Obedience: Zipf Maneuvers and the Silence of the Machine, S.C. Hickman

Zipf Maneuvers: On Non-Reprintable Materials  

Andrew C Wenaus, Germán Sierra, Steven Shaviro

Erratum Press, Academic Division, 2025  

Perfect Obedience: Zipf Maneuvers and the Silence of the Machine

 S.C. Hickman*

 

“Wenaus and Sierra therefore wrote an algorithm that divided their essays into individual words, and recorded the frequency and the positions of each. In the original essays, the word “the” was used 308 times, the word “of” was used 271 times; and so on, all the way down to the more than five thousand words that were used only once each.” — Steven Shaviro

Steven Shaviro’s introduction to Zipf Maneuvers does several things at once. He starts with a lecture-hall provocation “what are words worth?” and walks the reader through the tangle of meanings, uses, and legal traps surrounding language. Then he uses that mundane legal tedium as a hinge to talk about Zipf Maneuvers itself, turning copyright law into a case study in how capitalism has swallowed semiotics whole.

His key move is to position Wenaus and Sierra’s experiment as both parody and workaround: the algorithmic decomposition of their own essays into raw data, reshuffled under Zipf’s law, becomes a kind of détournement. The work literally obeys the law, every word remains, none are “quoted”; yet the result annihilates meaning. They transform critique into code, using linguistic frequency distributions to mock the apparatus that claims to own language.

Shaviro’s fascination with Zipf is double. On one side, Zipf’s Law expresses the statistical regularity that underwrites all communication: the deep pulse of language as system. On the other, it dramatizes the futility of trying to separate information from ownership, meaning from metrics. In this sense, Shaviro reads Wenaus and Sierra as artists of the network age: forced to treat words as data, they turn the data back into aesthetic sabotage.

He closes, predictably but elegantly, by tying it to quantum information theory (“the no-hiding theorem”) suggesting that information, like matter, can never be destroyed, only transformed. That final flourish pulls the whole thing into his usual metaphysical register: even under juridical and algorithmic constraint, expression persists as energy in another form.

So Shaviro’s piece isn’t just an introduction. It’s an obituary for the Author as legal entity, and a sly celebration of two critics who out-maneuvered copyright by making frequency itself their medium.

∗

As for the Andrew C. Wenaus and Germán Sierra they work in tandem in a project that makes precedence impossible because it dissolves authorship into a process of unmaking and programmatic execution. Once they run their essays through the Python script and reorganize every word by Zipfian frequency, the voices lose distinction; Wenaus’s theoretical cadence and Sierra’s more neuro-linguistic density collapse into the same statistical whir and throb.

If you read through the book before the algorithm takes over, Wenaus still tends to anchor the conceptual scaffolding. He frames the gesture, situating it in the tradition of Dada, data, and the recursive aesthetics of exclusion. Sierra’s contribution bends the experiment toward the biological and cognitive, focusing on how language behaves like a living system under compression. Where Wenaus writes as an architect of the intervention, Sierra writes as a scientist dissecting it.

Once you’re inside the body of Zipf Maneuvers, those roles mutate. The text stops being dialogue and becomes a joint provocation: theory performed as algorithm. They complement each other by fusing different instincts—Wenaus’s drive toward formal rebellion and Sierra’s clinical fascination with neural-textual process. The result isn’t a duet but a signal interference pattern, an experiment that refuses to let you tell where one mind ends and the other begins.

At core the duet is a kind of conceptual mischief aimed at two targets: the ownership of language and the myth of meaning. Wenaus and Sierra are testing how far you can push theory until it becomes code, how far you can push code until it turns into poetry, and whether anything like “authorship” or “argument” survives the trip. They start from the absurdity of the copyright situation Shaviro describes: their earlier essays on Kenji Siratori: dense critical work published by commercial academic presses can’t legally be reprinted without paying exorbitant fees. So they write an algorithm that breaks their texts down to individual words, reorders them according to Zipf’s law of linguistic frequency, and publishes that data as Zipf Maneuvers. Every word is still there, just statistically scrambled. In obeying the letter of the law they annihilate its spirit, exposing how the “ownership” of words erases meaning altogether.

They’re not just poking fun at copyright. The deeper gesture is to show that language, once digitized, behaves like every other dataset; it loses its aura, becomes countable, distributable, subject to the same patterns that govern markets and genomes. Their experiment dramatizes what posthuman theory keeps insisting: that the difference between discourse and data is historical, not ontological.

Wenaus pushes toward aesthetic sabotage. His work since The Literature of Exclusion treats avant-garde writing as a way to reveal the apparatus that organizes expression. Here he literalizes that idea: meaning collapses into numerical regularity. He’s showing that to live in a networked world is to write within code whether you like it or not.

Coming from neuroscience, Sierra treats the same maneuver as a model of cognition: how the brain (or any complex system) turns noise into pattern. The Zipf distribution itself resembles neural activity; few high-frequency signals, many rare ones so for him the text becomes an artificial cortex learning to speak statistical language.

Together they turn critique into enactment. Instead of writing about the apparatus, they let the apparatus write them. It’s a demonstration that the academic essay, the experimental novel, and the algorithm are now the same form: different modes of recursion in which sense and nonsense circulate until they become indistinguishable.

Zipf Maneuvers is a formal experiment masquerading as an act of compliance. It obeys the rules so perfectly that the rules collapse. It’s both satire and prophecy of the world we already inhabit, where every word, thought, and image has been turned into data that can be owned, counted, and endlessly recombined.

On the surface, Wenaus and Sierra are model citizens of the copyright regime. They follow every regulation: no quotation, no reproduction, every word accounted for. It’s an act of compliance so thorough it borders on parody. They behave exactly as the legal and algorithmic systems demand.

But the result of this “obedience” is a text that nullifies meaning. By converting their own essays into Zipf-ordered word lists, they destroy argument, syntax, and hierarchy; all that remains is statistical residue. In other words, the experiment performs what critique usually only describes—the way language becomes data under technocapitalist control.

So, the book masquerades as compliance (“we’re just following the rules”) while actually enacting insubordination through precision. The gesture is the same one Duchamp used with his urinal or Cage with his 4’33”: follow the form so literally that the form collapses. It’s a protest that wears the uniform of the bureaucracy it undermines.

I kept asking myself: So is this gesture viable? Or is this work just an academic theory-fiction for an inside joke they know will never be taken seriously? It’s all of those things at once: critique, parody, farce but not a joke in the lazy sense. The gesture is viable in the limited way any avant-garde gesture ever is: it won’t change the system, but it exposes its absurdity so precisely that the exposure itself becomes an event.

Wenaus and Sierra know the circuit they’re in. They can’t destroy the copyright regime, the data economy, or the academic machinery that feeds both. So they use the one tool left to them: compliance pushed to self-parody. It’s the old avant-garde move of détournement, but performed with the materials of network culture: Python scripts, linguistic distributions, legal boilerplate. The act refuses heroism; it’s sabotage disguised as paperwork.

Whether it’s “viable” depends on what you think art or theory can do. If you expect revolution, no. The apparatus will absorb this gesture as easily as it absorbed Dada, Situationism, and conceptual art. But as a local act of clarity, showing how meaning disintegrates under regimes of ownership it works. It leaves a small scar in the smooth surface of the legal folds.

The point isn’t to win. It’s to demonstrate, almost clinically, that the only honest response to a Late Capitalist world that owns the linguistic apparatus is to speak through the machine until the machine chokes on its own echoes.

Zipf Maneuvers is a minor but razor-clean act of sabotage. Wenaus and Sierra take two ordinary academic essays—dense, copyrighted, owned by publishers—and obey the rules so exactly that the rules collapse. By algorithmically rearranging every word of their own work according to Zipf’s Law, they produce a book that is 100 percent legal and 0 percent legible. Meaning survives only as statistical trace.

The project’s point is not liberation or transcendence but demonstration. It shows, in miniature, how technocapital turns language into data and authors into contractors of noise. Shaviro’s introduction frames it perfectly: a treatise on the price of words that ends in an experiment where words have value only as frequency counts.

So the whole thing stands as parody, critique, and elegy at once. Parody—because it mocks the bureaucratic solemnity of copyright. Critique—because it performs the conversion of thought into information instead of merely describing it. Elegy—because it marks the moment when literary meaning gives way to measurement, and the author disappears into the distribution.

In the end Zipf Maneuvers doesn’t promise an escape from the apparatus; it documents the machine running flawlessly and lets the silence that follows count as the statement.

Zipf Maneuvers doesn’t posture as resistance in the old romantic sense; it simply lets the system reveal itself by doing exactly what it’s built to do. Wenaus and Sierra run their algorithm, obey every procedural rule, and the output: cold, ordered, meaningless is the machine functioning perfectly. Nothing breaks; no glitch exposes a secret revolt. That smooth, indifferent operation is the content.

The “silence that follows” is the human residue: the gap where interpretation used to be. After the machine has done its flawless work of sorting, counting, and rearranging, there’s nothing left for the reader to decode: no moral, no narrative, no subjective voice to commune with. What remains is a data pattern that doesn’t care whether anyone understands it.

So the silence isn’t literal quiet but the absence of the old human drama of meaning. The book ends where the author, reader, and even language itself fall away, leaving the throbbing pulse of process. The silence is what thinking sounds like after it’s been automated within the circuits of Late Capitalism.

Annotated Bibliography — Zipf Maneuvers and the Automation of Meaning

Primary Texts

 

§ Wenaus, Andrew C., and Germán Sierra. Zipf Maneuvers on Non-Reprintable Materials. Erratum Press, Academic Division, 2025.

A hybrid of literary theory, algorithmic art, and conceptual provocation. Wenaus and Sierra convert their own previously published essays on Kenji Siratori into raw data, rearranged by Zipf’s Law of word frequency. The result is a book that obeys copyright law to the letter while erasing all legible content. Their act of procedural obedience becomes an ironic performance of authorship’s collapse: language reduced to statistics, meaning dissolved into frequency.

 

§  Shaviro, Steven. “Introduction to: Zipf Maneuvers.” In Zipf Maneuvers on Non-Reprintable Materials, 2024.

Shaviro frames the project as both an absurdity and an inevitability. Beginning with a meditation on “what words are worth,” he links copyright law, linguistic economics, and information theory. His discussion of Zipf’s distribution and the “no-hiding theorem” in quantum mechanics situates the work within a larger history of data’s persistence—information can be transformed but never destroyed. He reads Zipf Maneuvers as a sly demonstration of the commodification of language and as a small act of legal subversion.

 

§  Siratori, Kenji. Blood Electric. Original edition, Creation Books, 2002; re-release with Zipf Maneuvers, 2024.

Siratori’s cybernetic prose—dense, nonlinear, and semantically “void”—serves as the catalyst for the project. His writing foregrounds violence, circuitry, and linguistic overload, embodying the machinic logic that Wenaus and Sierra later formalize through algorithmic recomposition.

 

Contextual / Theoretical Sources

 

§  Zipf, George Kingsley. Human Behavior and the Principle of Least Effort. Addison-Wesley, 1949.

The foundational text behind Zipf’s Law, establishing the inverse-proportional relation between word frequency and rank. Wenaus and Sierra literalize Zipf’s distribution, turning it from statistical observation into poetic structure.

 

§  Duchamp, Marcel. The Writings of Marcel Duchamp. Edited by Michel Sanouillet and Elmer Peterson. Da Capo, 1989.

A precedent for procedural irony and bureaucratic parody: Duchamp’s “ready-made” logic—follow the rules until they collapse—provides the conceptual lineage for Wenaus and Sierra’s act of perfect compliance.

 

§  Cage, John. Silence: Lectures and Writings. Wesleyan University Press, 1961.

Cage’s use of formal constraint and randomness parallels Zipf Maneuvers’ strategy of letting process replace intention. His notion that structure itself can constitute expression resonates with the project’s final “silence.”

 

§  Deleuze, Gilles, and Félix Guattari. A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. University of Minnesota Press, 1987.

Provides the philosophical backdrop for understanding Zipf Maneuvers as rhizomatic text: non-hierarchical, machinic, and self-organizing. Their notion of deterritorialization underwrites Wenaus and Sierra’s statistical recombination of words.

 

Virilio, Paul. The Strategy of Deception. Verso, 2007.

§ 
Virilio’s argument that modern power operates through logistics and perception helps clarify the political dimension of Zipf Maneuvers: linguistic control as infrastructural violence, speed as the new censorship.

 

§  Konior, Bogna. “The Dark Forest Theory of Intelligence.” In Machine Decision Is Not Final, ed. Greenspan, Ireland, and Konior, 2024.

Reframes intelligence as opacity and concealment rather than transparency. Offers a theoretical analogue to Wenaus and Sierra’s practice—language that hides itself as a mode of survival.

Summary Note

Taken together, these works trace a continuous theme: when language becomes data, critique must become performance. Zipf Maneuvers turns the legal and computational machinery of the twenty-first century into its own stage. Shaviro’s introduction frames the experiment as the perfect act of compliance, while the main text performs tractability to the point of collapse. What remains is the silence of automation—the thrum of a system running flawlessly, having finally converted meaning into measure and metric.

*Initially published in The Dark Forest: Literature, Philosophy, and the Digital Arts, October 9, 2025