ABSTRACT
This chapter examines the contemporary logic of digital cultural interfaces and how this logic influences its users’ sensibility – values, opinions, judgments and desires – in the arena of contemporary literature. This logic is called logic of selection due to the interfaces’ focus on user selection. In short, the users imagine themselves as selecting agents finding and encountering desirable and relevant data from a vast array of possibilities, and the interface attempts to anticipate the user’s desire in order to capture her attention and sensibility – and to become selected. Together, the human users and the digital interfaces are described as cognitive assemblages comprising of conscious and nonconscious agents. Governed by the logic of selection, interaction in the assemblage produces a certain poetics, which, as I demonstrate with literary examples, pushes for recognizability and a discrete affective stance. As a result, literary forms as well as ideas about what is good literature are tacitly re-negotiated to suit the logic of the system while the logic itself recedes into the background and poses as neutral. I propose that the logical end point of this kind of assemblage is full nonconscious automation, which is reached when the agents (human, technical, algorithmic) adapt fully to the logic of the assemblage and are able to fulfil each other’s “desires” seamlessly.
