It’s because this domesticating cultural space is already with us and irreversibly expanding at a vertiginous pace that the need for a critical avant-garde is of paramount importance. I want, in part, to revisit the classic avant-garde of Dadaism, a formative force in my own development as a sound poet through the 1970s, and reconsider its negative poetics of rejection and reflect on a crucial illiteracy at the heart of literate culture, an illiteracy that recent philosophical discourse terms infancy.

We’re told that the current urgent literacy is the literacy of the interface in which the loop replaces the line as the dominant modality. Lev Manovich names our present culture an “information” culture. However, the neo-liberalized West’s need for collective connectedness precipitates literate labour beyond information into a data-vortex that Donna Haraway aptly christened informatics. I think information technology’s a nightmare into which we’re trying not to fall asleep. Around the world there are one billion e-mail messages sent each day. Like dream-shit, information passes through an alimentary tract of rapid metabolism, in which living literacy maintains a symbiotic relationship with dead letters. Sven Birkets is one of several conservative liberal thinkers who have advanced severe concerns about the information age. His fear is “that we are giving up on wisdom [and] pledging instead a faith in the web” (228).

The Web, in which a part of me participates, has been recently consecrated and celebrated as the triumph of potlatch, the birth of a hyperspatial gift economy of vertiginous excess and circulation. Architect Marcos Novak considers the web the realization of Constant’s prophetic New Babylon of the 1950s. Notwithstanding this optimism I would mention Lev Manovich’s likening of the internet to a Stalinist apartment. The conspiratorial relationship of literacy and surveillance is a well-established fact. So the dilemma is obvious: To enter literacy is to enter a complex of rules, restraints, and vulnerabilities. But not to enter it is to remain in another complex of rules and restraints. While having reservations about Bikerts’ claim, I agree with him on a different point: There is a critical distinction between instrumental communication and affective communication. The loss of affect in a regime of mediatization seems a crucial issue today and one that this paper will address.