From perspective to narrative, database and beyond, symbolic forms organize experience and shape epistemic horizons. If Lev Manovich’s key insight was to recognize the entanglement of symbolic and technical form, we may now ask how (post)digital culture and seemingly limitless data flows generate a new desire for form in critical theory and cultural production. Situated at the intersection of literary theory, media theory, and the poetics of knowledge, this reading group will explore a wide range of symbolic and literary forms and their epistemic and ideological affordances. We will ask how various new formalisms understand terms such as structure, organization/disorganization, and order/disorder, and how these concepts travel across discourses and scales.

In semester 1, our conversations will center on the thematic cluster Machine – Politics – Data - Language. Readings will include selections from:

-Yuk Hui, Machine and Sovereignty (2025) [September]

-Catherine Malabou, Stop Thief!: Anarchism and Philosophy (2023) [October]

-Leif Weatherby, Language Machines: Cultural AI and the End of Remainder Humanism (2025) [November]

-Maja Bak Herrie, Thinking Through Data: How Outliers, Aggregates, and Patterns Shape Perception (2025) [December]

In the second semester, our discussions will focus more explicitly on questions of literary and aesthetic form. Potential readings include:

-Timothy Bewes, Free Indirect: The Novel in a Postfictional Age (2022)

-Rizvana Bradley, Anteaesthetics: Black Aesthesis and the Critique of Form (2023)

-Jeremy Rosen, Genre Bending: The Plasticity of Form in Contemporary Literary Fiction (2025)

Please email Michael @ m.f.miller@uva.nl to receive the readings and meeting announcements.